SUPER S I Z E M E !
2004 - Directed by Morgan Spurlock - Sundance Award Winner -  http://supersizeme.com/

America is the fattest country in the world with 100 million overweight people and 400,000 individuals dying each year from obesity related ailments. Now even children are eating too much and exercising too little. Eric Schlosser first brought our attention to this matter with his bestselling muckracker Fast Food Nation. He identified McDonald's as the chief villain with its cradle-to-grave marketing strategy that starts off manipulating children through playgrounds, toys, and the Ronald McDonald clown. The nightmare of brainwashed toddlers eating junk food and drinking sodas on a regular basis is enough to make anyone sick.

The fast food mania in America just made Morgan Spurlock mad, and so he decided to make a documentary using himself as a guinea pig. He ate three meals a day only at McDonald's for 30 days. He also geot all of his desserts and snacks from the Golden Arches. He didn't eat or drink anything that didn't come from McDonalds. He even bought all of his water from McDonalds. He also changed other aspects of his lifestyle. He used a pedometer to reduce his activity level to one that is closer to the average American. Thus, he took cabs and drove a car when he usually would have walked. He also stopped taking vitamins. He ate everything available on the menu at least once. So he didn't just eat Double Quarter Pounders. He also only supersized when he was asked if he wanted to do so.

He hired a team of doctors to monitor the impact of this experiment on his body. The result is catastrophic: he gains over 25 pounds eating 5,000 calories a day and trashed his liver to the point of seriously jeopardizing his future health and well-being. Other side-effects of the junk food binge include chest pains, depression, headaches, sugar/caffeine crashes, heart palpitations and sexual dysfunction. His cholesterol, weight, triglycerides, blood sugar, blood pressure all went up. But what was really scary was that he seemed to be becoming addicted to the food. He claimed he had headaches that didn't stop until he ate at McDonalds again (probably due to caffeine

Spurlock presents interviews with the U.S Surgeon General; a professor of law at George Washington University involved in a law suit brought against McDonald's by two overweight women; John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America; Don Gorske, a Big Mac enthusiast who eats 700 of them a year; and Bruce Howlett who undergoes gastric-bypass surgery. Spurlock also looks at the connections between the junk food industry and high school lunch programs, food addictions, and the low priority given to physical education programs at a time when so many children are overweight. Although not as expansive or as hard-hitting as Schlosser's book, this feisty documentary makes its points very effectively. It could serve as aversion therapy for many who have chosen to make junk food their choice when they eat out.


MCLIBEL - TWO WORLDS COLLIDE
- 1997 53min - One Off Productions (Spanner Films)  http://www.spannerfilms.net/?lid=161

The inside story of the postman and the gardener who took on the McDonald's Corporation
Filmed over three years, McLibel: Two Worlds Collide follows Helen Steel and Dave Morris as the anonymous campaigners turn into unlikely global heroes. Struggling to defend themselbes in the longest trial in English history, they face infiltration by spies, secret meetings with corporate executives, 40,000 pages of background reading and a visit from Ronald McDonald.

Using interviews with witnesses and reconstructions of key moment in court, the film examines the main issues in the trial - nutrition, animals, advertising, employment, the environment - and the implications for freedom of speech. McLibel is not about hamburgers. It is about the remorseless power of multinational corporations.


THE MCSPOTLIGHT VIDEO
- 1997 9 mins -  http://www.mcspotlight.org
First off, if you don't know what McSpotlight is, it's a very very big website. Most of it's content (20,000 plus pages) were hand coded by amatures during the McLibel Trial. This film is a 9 minute romp through the issues, highlights, making-of, and possible consequences for what was at the time, the Internet's most contentious activist website. Volunteers who helped to construct the massive library of information about McDonald's and their ilk explain; how it was made (for no money), why they (accidentally) gave up their lives to the undertaking, the precautions taken to ensure that it will never be stopped, how it can compliment traditional campaigning tactics and precisely why it is 'The Final Nail in McDonald's Global Censorship Strategy'. Fast, furious, famous, (occasionally) funny, a Moby soundtrack and hardly any incomprehensible nerdy-computer-geek words. Apparently.