Morgan Spurlock, who nearly killed his liver in aid of his acclaimed documentary Super Size Me, sets his sights on product placement, or embedded marketing as it is sometimes known. He suspects, with some justification, that most of us do not realise how much of it washes over us through TV and film (though a quick sequence of clips from I, Robot through 90210 and American Idol quickly demonstrate how blatant and prevalent it is) and so sets out to make a documentary film entirely funded by companies placing products in it.

*****

Spurlock is an affable, straight-forward chap and his personable nature comes across really strongly here, as it did for Super Size Me. We get none of the confrontational, baiting approach taken by Michael Moore; such is not Spurlock’s style. Instead, he shows us how much product placement there is out there, speaks candidly but respectfully with advertisers, corporations and film-makers (JJ Abrams, Brett Ratner and Peter Berg all feature) about the compromising of artistic purity and story-telling and the place of commercial realism and then lets us see the fruit of his labours. What Spurlock hasn’t done is given us a documentary about trying to make the film and then the film itself, instead we get a mish-mash of scenes involving him sounding out film-makers, marketing consultants, lawyers and corporate heads, which eventually segues into mini-adverts for those company’s who agree to pay to come on board, before it all then sort of finishes.

There is undoubtedly a lot of interesting content here, but it unfortunately tends not to hang together into a cohesive whole. The theory here is that at the same time as Spurlock rounds up funding for his documentary, he is making that documentary and so gradually product placement creeps in and takes over. It is a very self-reflexive documentary, as Spurlock effectively sits down with the board of Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice to ask them to fund the scenes he is filming with them at that moment. Whereas Super Size Me was clear, lean and crucially, had the propulsion of its self-imposed 30-day trial to keep it tight, TGMES feels a little meandering at times. He wants to make and does make good points about advertising, however it is not clear that trying to fund the very documentary he is making as he goes along is a particularly clear or effective way of going about it. The majority of the companies come across pretty well, proving happy to be candid about the need to secure advertising space and promote their brands, while also wanting to make sure that they are not presented as the butt of a joke, or the punchline to a ferocious polemic about all that is wrong with the world today.

Perhaps a better, clearer path might have been to make a short film entirely funded by product placement and then give us the documentary as a making of special feature. As it is, the format feels forced and unnatural, boiling down to essentially asking companies to pay for a documentary showing Spurlock talking to them about them paying to be in his documentary. Not a failure by any means, just a bit of a case of a square peg into a round hole, though the observations regarding and the examples of gratuitous product placement still hit home.

As a bit of a post-script, Spurlock’s film may already be out of date, with the prospect of a remake of The Cannonball Run being co-funded by General Motors, who will ensure in return that the film serves as one big long advert for their latest cars. It is perhaps the end result of many of the points that Spurlock rightly makes here and shows just how far this phenomenon can stretch.

You can catch Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold on DVD from 27th February, though apparently the Bluray won’t hit shelves until 2060, which seems like quite a long time to wait.

[Rating:3/5]

Extras: A few deleted scenes, the various advert inserts all strung together and a mini-featurette about the shooting of the main Pom Wonderful advert. Not much.

[Rating:1.5/5]

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