The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (***)

If you know someone’s trying to exploit you, are you still being exploited? That’s the question Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) asks of both himself and the audience in this, his third documentary feature. Spurlock’s thing is to make movies that are about both a serious topic and himself. Or, to explore what one marketing consultant describes as his “mindful” side and his “playful” side, both at once. This worked best in Super Size Me, which told us, or reminded us, how bad fast food was for you while depicting what would happen to someone—himself—who ate nothing else for a month. Applied to a weightier subject, like terrorism and world piece, the approach made for the amusing but shallow Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?

Here, Spurlock has found a subject—product placement—that’s explored in the very process of making the movie. Essentially, the movie is the director going around seeking sponsors for the movie, right up to the one million dollars for the above-the-title sponsor, whose name I haven’t included in my review, but the clever conceit of naming rights, as so many sports teams have discovered, is that it makes even the unpaid media, even the general public, participants in the marketing process. Very clever, just like the way Spurlock works in references to and examples of his sponsor’s products even as he interviews people like Ralph Nader delivering a counter message. We the audience are in on the joke, and it’s funny, but does this excuse the fact that Spurlock is nonetheless delivering a corporate message to a captive audience?

Besides Nader, Spurlock has a few other experts and celebrities, even Noam Chomsky, to offer their takes on the ethics of product placement. He indulges his playful side by making a running gag of a shampoo whose gimmick is that it’s intended to be used on both horses and humans. My preference would have been for a little more on the “mindful” side of the equation. Surely there must be some actual research into the efficacy of product placement versus other forms of advertising, or the effects of advertising on our product choices generally.

Spurlock does tell us that $412 billion gets spent in the United States on ads and marketing each year, and it’s fair to wonder what we as a society get for it, and how it changes our preferences. I think we’d be much better off without most advertising, and at least one metropolis has made a small experiment in that direction. Peripheral to the theme of product placement as it may be, perhaps the most fascinating part of the film for me was the side trip to São Paulo, a city of ten million where all outdoor ads have been banned. Does anyone really miss them?

IMDB link

viewed 4/20/11 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/20 and 4/21/11 and 4/24/11