Philadelphia Weekly

Directed by Morgan Spurlock
F

Reviewed by Sean Burns Opens Fri., April 18

It's not often I have anything nice to say about a certain portly gadfly documentarian, but as far as integrity in nonfiction filmmaking goes, Morgan Spurlock makes Michael Moore look like Fredrick Weisman.

Spurlock's a hustler who got his start humiliating poor people for cash prizes on an MTV reality show called I Bet You Will. Now a cinematic master of stating the screamingly obvious, his obscenely overpraised doc Super Size Me was dedicated to the shocking notion that if you stop exercising and spend a month stuffing your face with nothing but junk food until you vomit, you might get sick.

But nothing can compare to Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? A monumentally epic waste of time and an exercise in narcissism run amok, the film uses a tasteless 9/11 joke as a launching pad for our so-called hero's panic over his wife's pregnancy. As any caring and supportive husband would, Spurlock reacts to the news by grabbing a camera crew and booking flights to the Middle East, announcing that in the interest of providing a safer world for his unborn child, he's going to single-handedly hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.

A huge chunk of the movie is devoted to infantile computer graphics meant to mimic a Mortal Kombat-style video game, with our hero battling Osama. (These aren't funny the first time.) Wandering cluelessly around Egypt, Israel and Pakistan, Spurlock asks dumb questions of the locals, trivializes their histories with silly cartoons and mugs shamelessly for the camera. He also has a silly handlebar mustache and laughs extra-loud at his own jokes.

But then every 10 minutes or so he stops, stares soulfully into the camera and explains to the audience how surprising it is that Arabs aren't all crazy terrorists who want to kill us. Some of them have families and jobs and stuff, just like you and me!

It's impossible to imagine what audience this film was intended for. Even the most cursory knowledge of the world and current affairs renders the movie insultingly simple and wildly unnecessary. (Indeed, if Morgan Spurlock is truly as ill-informed and easily shocked as the character he portrays on-screen here, then maybe Osama isn't the only one who's been hiding in a cave for the past seven years.) Is there any reason to watch Spurlock bumbling along the Gaza Strip, shaking his head and offering brilliant insights like: "There sure are a lot of walls here!"

No shit, Spurlock.

The Unforeseen

Directed by Laura Dunn

B

Reviewed by Matt Prigge Opens Fri., April 18

How many environmentalist tracts develop sympathy for the devil? Laura Dunn's eco-doc literally descends upon the area in and around Austin, Texas, to uncover an elemental tale of man vs. nature--or rather real estate development against the mythical intelligent designer itself.

Living in an oasis of liberalism in one of the reddest states in the union, Austin tree-huggers found themselves holding off flag-wavers over the area's Barton Springs--an actual oasis whose once clean waters had become contaminated by suburban sprawl. Residents successfully passed ordinances forbidding new developments in the 1990s, but all they did was slow the elemental force of suburbanization.

The baddies--among them hissable lobbyist Dick Brown, whose only body part filmed is his hands, which pointedly assemble model warplanes--eventually won, only to face another elemental force: the whims of fate.

Director Laura Dunn doesn't entirely avoid joining An Inconvenient Truth, Manufactured Landscapes and The 11th Hour in harrumphing over the blithe destruction of natural resources. She's particularly fond of cueing up either Sigur R�s or the way overplayed Estonian minimalist composer Arvo Part as shortcuts to conveying forlorn contemplation.

But while The Unforeseen's allegiance is never in doubt--and features the likes of Robert Redford and Willie Nelson to underline it--the real pull is one of drama, not polemic. Dunn tethers her observations to a tale of purest hubris, namely the saga of Gary Bradley, a West Texas refugee who struck pay dirt through development deals in the 1980s only to wind up, through a series of unforeseeable (heh) events, bankrupt.

Dunn doesn't delight in Bradley's fall, though it's too delicious a sight to be ignored that he dwells, alone and destroyed, in an honest-to-God castle. Instead she links his need for digging up the land to the manifest destiny rooted so deep in the American subconscious.