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Rav has seen WHERE IN THE WORLD IS OSAMA BIN LADEN and...

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Rav got to see the premiere of the movie tonight and he's spent rest of the night telling me I need to avoid seeing this movie tomorrow at the press screening... yeah, he's a fan. Read his incredibly pissed off review below! Beware of spoilers!

I just came from the World Premiere of the Spurlock Osama movie…SPOILERS ALERT…HE DOESN’T EVEN TRY HARD TO LOOK FOR BIN LADEN! Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden – Written, Directed, Produced, and Starring Morgan Spurlock and his girlfriend. I’ll just go ahead and get it over with. This movie is fucking retarded. Maybe it would feel less retarded if it wasn’t for all those rumors of him actually finding and interviewing Bin Laden. Or maybe it would come off less stupid if he had just titled it “Super Size Me 2: Middle East Vacation” cause that is more accurate as to what it really is. This is not a film about finding Osama Bin Laden or at the very least debunking the rumors of where he isn’t. The films premise is that Morgan Spurlocks girlfriend is about to have a baby so he talks to camera about how he has been inspired by action movies and wants to make the world a better place for his kid by finding Osama Bin Laden. So of course the next person he goes to visit is that same general practitioner who gives him some shots and totally makes a big deal about the side effects for every one. Next he goes to a survival guy to teach him how to survive in the middle east, but really is a montage for Spurlock to exercise a lot and do goofy shit with a plastic gun. Then the rest of the movie is Spurlock going to Pakistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Afghanistan, there he just finds random local people off the street and asks them “What do you think about America?” and “Do you know where Osama Bin Laden is?” Of course this is interspersed with Morgan giving us an elementary school lesson on each of the cultures in the respective countries as well as baby updates from his girlfriend in the USA. He gives up the whole thing after seeing a sign that says “Foreigners are not allowed in this area.” (I wish I was kidding) That’s it. That’s the whole movie, well except for gratuitous ego animation and a sequence where Spurlock visits a Mcdonalds in Saudi Arabia. Oh and at the end he decides to show us a very graphic clip of his girlfriend giving birth to their baby. None of the interviews Spurlock conducts ever feel like he’s actually looking for Bin Laden or that he even cares about finding him, they are more or less opportunities for him to sneak in stupid jokes. Which may have been fine if the jokes were ever actually entertaining or felt appropriate. In the Q&A after the film he made mention of being followed by several government agencies during the making of the film, but none of that is included in the film, which is a shame because it may have had a chance at being more interesting than 99% of the stuff included in the actual film. At one point during the film he tries to pull a Michael Moore by showing up at one of the Bin Laden family companies asking for an interview, but it is so shoddily filmed as its mostly just Spurlock walking up to a building and talking about asking the guard if he knew where Bin Laden was (Yes, its that lazy). Basically everything that’s been written about the movie in the past month from the /film piece to the sneak review the other day is completely true. The video game sequence where spurlock compares himself to Orson Welles and Woody Allen is very much in there and goes on for about 10 minutes too long. He even begins it with a tasteless rap montage of many cartoon Bin Ladens break dancing. All in all I can’t see any reason for anyone to ever want to watch this movie. It’s just one big 98 minute Morgan Spurlock ego-fart. That said the material is ripe for an actual documentary filmmaker to take it on, I’d love to see someone elses take on this that actually wanted to make a film about finding Osama Bin Laden. This film is very much in the running for worst of the festival. Rav Ravkill@msn.com


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