POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

By Suzannah Showler

Morgan Spurlock (USA, Special Presentations)

Screenings:
Thursday, April 28, 6:30 p.m.
Winter Garden Theatre (189 Yonge Street)
Friday, April 29, 4:15 p.m.
Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles Street West)

The equation for a Morgan Spurlock film: some sort of cultural mega-target plus one gimmicky approach. It’s usually the sort of thing you probably could have come up with yourself (and thought was a really, really good idea) if you were stoned. In POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Spurlock’s big fish is the heavy hand of advertising in the movie-making industry. The shtick: in order to fund the making of a movie about the corporate funding of movies, he’s is going to sell off his film to corporate sponsors.
The movie’s main action is Spurlock calling up corporations and pitching them ideas about how theirs could be the official [insert product here] of the Greatest Movie Ever Sold. It takes a while before he gets a bite, but after a while he’s swiping his underarms with official deodorant (Ban), making tracks in his official shoes (Merrell’s), filling up his official car (Mini) with official gas (Sheetz), chowing down on his official pizza (Amy’s), and, of course, chugging his official beverage (POM Wonderful). (Call it a testament to the power of advertising: remembering those sponsors without notes was a breeze.) As the film rolls on, the very ads spots we’ve seen him pitch start to appear in the film itself, and the products we’ve seen him offer to hock start conspicuously peppering the screen.
If a send-up of advertising has you thinking ‘what is this, 1999?’ we’d understand. We’ll admit, though, that this film did remind us that just because we’ve grown inured to something doesn’t mean the issue isn’t still around. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold offers its audience the undeniable pleasure of feeling in on a joke—even if it’s not always clear that the joke has a clear political point to make or is really at anyone’s expense. The truth is that Spurlock’s sponsors come across as pretty decent types. After all, these are the corporations who are able to make fun of themselves enough to get involved with Morgan Spurlock and his exercise in irony to begin with.
This very meta documentary will hardly be remembered as a shocking exposé, but it’s often truly funny and always easy to watch.