Movie: Super Size Me

After a crappy day of football leading in to a bit of drinking Steph called and said she wanted to watch a movie, as has been chronicled here.

So what movie should we get? Well, we had both wanted to see Super Size Me ever since we heard about it though we didn't see it in the theaters. So we decided that would be the one to get. Even my roommate Eric, who has seen approximately 6 movie in his life, was excited to see this one. For those of you who don't know it is a look at obesity in America highlighted by an experiment by the producer/director/star who goes on the McDonald's Diet. He eats nothing but McDonald's food morning, noon, and night for 30 days straight.

We headed to Hastings and bee-lined it for the 'S' section of new releases. Only to be shot down. There were no copies left. It was heartening to see that so many people would be interested in a movie with such a good message, but then again Hastings had picked some other crappy movie (I don't remember which) to be their "Guaranteed to Be In" movie. Dejected we looked for some other movie we were interested in seeing, only to find that was not in either. That's what we get to go try and rent a movie on a chill Saturday evening. As a last ditch effort Steph went up to the return desk to see if any copies had been returned recently. Many of you may have tried this before, and it never works. But as I walked toward the desk to meet Steph and discuss what other movie we could watch I spotted her with a big smile on her face holding a DVD case! What luck, we pretty much had the last copy. So we went through the line and headed for home.

On our way to Hastings though we made a detour. I hadn't eaten much that day (except for a few barley sandwiches--that's code for "beer") and was a little hungry. I knew we'd eat some popcorn during the movie, but I needed a pre show snack. To that end I used a coupon that Steph had received for giving blood not too long ago. Let's go through that one more time. Steph went to the Blood Drive and gave a pint of her blood, hopefully blood that would go on to save someone's life, a very noble and healthy thing to do. And what should her reward be? A coupon for a free sandwich...AT MCDONALDS! What in the world is going on with that? That kind of thing makes me mad, especially after watching the movie.

So on our way back to watch the movie about how horrible McDonald's is we stopped so I could get myself a free Quarter Pounder with Cheese (that's a Royal with Cheese for any of my living-in-non-imperial-unit-using-country friends). How hilarious (a stretch of the word) is that? I felt very proud. Oh, and I was also proud that I went for the normal Quarter Pounder, not the double. The disappointing thing was that it didn't actually taste all that great. That may be self-evident to some of you, but as the movie says, their food is specifically engineered and designed to taste good. And I've always enjoyed McD's in the past, though I hadn't had it for quite some time.

Anyway, we head home, I eat my semi-tasty burger, and Eric starts popping some corn. He has a big bag of kernels and we just popped them in some oil on the stove. It is so tasty that way, much better than microwave. Though I must be honest, it isn't as good as Steve used to make when we were living together a number of years ago.

Two pots of popcorn and three bowls filled later we were downstairs in the theater with the DVD in and the movie started.

The short review is that I really liked the movie. It doesn't really say anything that most reasonable people didn't know already: fast food is not good for you, don't eat it very often, if ever. But it puts it forth in a manner that makes the point visibly obvious. The guy on the diet has three doctors watching him and monitoring him throughout the whole month he's doing the project. All three of them are shocked at what happens to his body and multiple times tell him to stop what he's doing before anything really serious or permanent happens to his body. The movie takes shots (to me, warrented shots) at school lunch and physical education programs. It talks about the lawsuits that were brought against the fast food companies and seems to say that maybe they had more to them than people though. I still think that they were rediculous and that people should take more responsibility for their actions. But the movie does show a pretty good picture that the companies really don't care about the people they serve at all and there's certainly more they could do, and maybe should do.

I would encourage anyone, especially anyone who eats a lot of fast food, to check the movie out, just to hear what it says. It has a message but manages to be entertaining at the same time.

One of the bonus features on the DVD was called "The Smoking Fry". They put a number of sandwiches and some fries from McDonald's in separate glass jars along with a burger and fries from a restaurant where they prepare everything right there. Then they just left each item to sit there and watch what happened. Each of the sandwiches started to grow mold and decompose after not too long, some more quickly than others, along with the "fresh made" fries. The one item that took a little longer to start were the fries from McDonald's. And when I say "took a little longer to start" I mean "never started decomposing". All of the sandwiches started to turn into piles of goo but the McD's fries looked brand new. Even after 10 weeks the fries still looked like they just came out of the frier. It was a little disturbing and made me wonder about eating them again, even if they do taste really good.

So that was the movie night this weekend. It was really fun and cheered me up a lot from how bummed I had been from football.