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Review: “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?”
By Kyle | April 20, 2008
Where in the World is Morgan Spurlock’s Brain?
Kyle Smith review of “Where In the World Is Osama Bin Laden?”
93 minutes/Rated PG-13
In the tech world, Moore’s Law says that more computing power will continue to be squeezed into a smaller space. At the cinema, Moore’s Law says that Michael Moore’s success will cause ambitious lefty filmmakers to squeeze more and more tendentious arguments, straw-man attacks, and tasteless jokes into each political documentary. In striving to be even more outrageous than his idol, Morgan Spurlock begins his inane documentary Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? by making light of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
The film begins with queasy airplane footage in which the clouds largely obscure the city below. Knowing this is a documentary about the Age of Terror going into the film makes you nervous about where Spurlock is heading, but his narration seals the point. Spurlock talks about waking up on a perfect morning, glad to know you’re alive, when suddenly, out of a clear blue sky, everything changes.
Cut. Now we’re in Spurlock’s home, where his wife is telling him (in an obviously staged scene) that she is pregnant.
This opening is not just childish, smug and unfunny; it’s a hideous affront to people who lost loved ones on those flights to compare their suffering to Spurlock’s supposed shock at finding out he was going to be a daddy. The difference is as stark as death and life, and Spurlock owes the 9/11 families an abject apology.
Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, a supposed comedy that also features the Statue of Liberty pictured as a whore, finds Spurlock touring various places in the Arab world and Israel (Morocco, Egypt, the West Bank, Tel Aviv, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and finally Afghanistan and Pakistan) while trying to convince you that Bin Laden, and Bin Ladenism, are no big deal, that our fears of terrorism are slightly ridiculous, and that if only we gave the Islamist world more health care, more education, and maybe a copy of It Takes a Village for every jihadist, we wouldn’t have to worry.
How does Spurlock make this point? By traveling around the Arab world to find scholars, journalists, and activists who believe this. In other words, in intellectual terms he travels the world and magically finds Brooklyn (where he lives). Every so often the film breaks for a little monologue by Spurlock about U.S. evils in which Bin Laden and his henchmen are portrayed as wacky cartoon characters. The film amounts to Al-Qaeda: the Cartoon.
The film, which is padded at the beginning with a silly training montage set to thumping action-movie music of Spurlock learning how to dodge grenades and survive being taken hostage, leads up to a conclusion in which, (again, Spurlock himself is the one who simply delivers the message) we are told, that the Arab people are just like us. There is a montage of smiling Muslims at the end. Surely anyone who smiles isn’t scary.
But the film itself contradicts this notion. Virtually all of Spurlock’s interview subjects veer between chatting about how much they like Americans to ugly and lunatic theories. Two cute, smiley girls Spurlock meets on an Egyptian street seem nice enough until they blurt out, “You want to occupy Egypt. It’s what we hear on TV and stuff.” Another Egyptian says, “We pray to God to destroy you.” A French-speaking woman activist tells Spurlock (emphasis mine), “If it really was Osama who did 9/11, he dealt us a bad hand.” (Translation: the CIA or the Jews probably did it).
In Saudi Arabia, when Spurlock gains access to a school, he is given permission to talk to exactly two students. When he asks them what they’ve been taught about Israel, the authorities order him to stop filming.
A relative of one of the 9/11 hijackers interviewed by Spurlock doesn’t believe the official story because “America wins all the Oscar awards” and presumably faked the whole thing.
And these are the people cherry-picked for their reasonableness.
In Israel and the West Bank, Spurlock affects befuddlement that people would choose to build barricades to keep out suicide bombers (”Everywhere you go there’s a wall, there’s a fence, there’s barbed wire”). In Morocco, Spurlock talks about a 2003 bombing and takes us to the shantytown from which the bombers sprang, finding a local intellectual to say that the most important ingredients in breeding terrorism are poverty and lack of education. Spurlock does not mention the obvious retort — that the 9/11 bombers were educated upper-middle class men– but makes it clear that if only the United States would eliminate all poverty from the world, terrorism would evaporate. And the Iraq invasion was too ambitious?
Like most liberals, Spurlock can’t figure out a way to maneuver in the Arab world without soiling the pure, unspoiled ideals of which he never tires of reminding us. In a particularly smug animated sequence in which the Statue of Liberty is portrayed as a stripper/whore and Spurlock says the US has been “pimping out liberty,” he accuses the country of routinely propping up dictatorial regimes in the name of stability. That position puts him on both sides of the Iraq debate. He is against America’s decades-long bipartisan policy of supporting the relatively nonthreatening Mubarak regime in Egypt while trying to gently nudge it along to democracy, but in opposing the current war he implicitly says that that should have been our policy in Iraq. So Hosni Mubarak is evil, but Saddam Hussein was okay.
For a movie with nearly a dozen credited writers, Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? offers surprisingly strained attempts at humor. When it isn’t in bad taste, it is simply weak. For instance, Spurlock sits down with a phone book in Riyadh and starts randomly calling Bin Ladens, walks through a shopping mall in Saudi Arabia asking people whether they’ve seen Osama and, in Tora Bora, walks around shouting “Yoo-hoo! Osama!” into caves. Spurlock, who back in New York City lives in the crosshairs of radical Islam, has unintentionally proven that there is nothing particularly funny about the terrorist threat.
Topics: Iraq, Movies, News, Politics |
April 18th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Bet you can’t wait for Bill Maher’s anti-religious film to come out this June; wonder if he’ll trash/slander the Pope in this one, as he did last week…
April 18th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Bill Maher is a jack-off. He takes any opportunity to bash Catholics. Not any other religion. He hates religion - who cares!
April 18th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Any excuse to bash religion is fine by me. Personally, if I had an invisible friend I felt the need to talk to from time to time I’d keep it to myself.
April 18th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Hunter, can you at least pretend you’re not trolling?
April 19th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Trolling? hardly. I refer you to Christopher Hitchen’s “God is Not Great: How Religion Ruins Everything” for an echo of my views on this matter.
April 19th, 2008 at 1:06 am
How, exactly, does a Mark Knopfler or a Billy Joel write what are, basically, highly condensed versions of all the thoughts that make up Spurlock’s thinking without pissing me off, turning me into one of those embittered Americans?
Twelve writers, eh? Twelve writers working on this project, and this bona fide hack cannot create a documentary that is even worth consideration. It isn’t the anti-Americanism. It isn’t the “what we’re doing is wrong” attitude. These things don’t turn me off. There are valid questions out there - about the war, about how we’re prosecuting the war, et cetera ad infinitum.
I think this used to be called tact. In Spurlock’s and his gang of writer’s case, it’s likely also a matter of talent. But they still get paid. And, yeah, pay does seem to matter even to self-described Artists - no reason to strike otherwise.
Oh, right, got it. It’s actually a matter of the NY Post’s writers lack of appreciation for Art (or PJM’s, as the case may be). Perhaps it’s a matter of a small group of discerning critics not finding much to celebrate even though there’s a plethora of self-described artists offering their emotes for public viewing.
Tact and talent. You’d think the short supply would garner higher pay. What does a da Vinci go for these days anyway?
April 20th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Kyle is a Transvestite?
April 20th, 2008 at 4:08 am
Wow, it was really that bad?
April 20th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
*If anyone owes an apology to the families of the 9/11 victims, it is the Bush administration.
Kyle Smith’s review isn’t really a review at all: it’s just another right-wing, slanderous personal attack on someone who speaks out on the seemingly endless hypocracy, arrogance and misdirection of the current administration.
From reading Smith’s review, it is quite obvious that Spurlock’s film has struck a deep nerve, and rather than a rational, intelligent review, we get the typical self-righteousness of someone with a superiority complex. “Tendentious arguments, straw-man attacks, and tasteless jokes”: Kyle, have you read any of your own reviews?
Like most ‘conseravtives’, Smith went into this film very biased with the intent of giving it a negative review and using it to smear Spurlock as an unpatriotic, terrorist lover who hates America. How original. I also suspect Smith is also being paid by a tabloid (hint: NY Post) that has a long history of publishing distortions, disinformation, gossip and rumors.
The very few scenes Smith talks about have been taken out of context, and there are many more scenes he obviously doesn’t want to talk about. I wonder why? Did Smith actually see this movie? Because he only describes what is shown in the movie’s trailer. Hmm.
The major flaw with Smith’s review (other than not seeing the movie?) is in his arrogance of thinking he has the ability to know what Spurlock is thinking. Of course this is impossible, unless Smith has real mind reading powers we don’t know about. Only Spurlock knows what he thinks. Kyle, stop making absurd assumptions and claims that you can’t back up.
And maybe go see the movie.
April 21st, 2008 at 4:32 pm
“Spurlock talks about waking up on a perfect morning, glad to know you’re alive, when suddenly, out of a clear blue sky, everything changes.
Cut. Now we’re in Spurlock’s home, where his wife is telling him (in an obviously staged scene) that she’s pregnant.”
You’ve got to be KIDDING me! This is way beyond tasteless. Hope the movie tanks…
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:25 pm
Oh, what a slanted and didactic diatribe.
Hard to read, even though the author is intelligent and talented, if misguided.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:35 pm
What was didactic about it?
April 28th, 2008 at 1:59 am
I should have said “incorrectly” didactic.
Slanted moral observations in a misguided attempt to teach a mis-truth that the author believes to be the “actual” truth.
April 29th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Many Muslims don’t hate us?!! No s**t Spurlock. This guy possesses the wit and persuasive skills of a fourth grader. That he can so obviously cherry-pick sound bytes documentary after documentary and still have a career in film is as scary to me as it is encouraging to every non-professional dogmatist looking to film their own s***ty documentary.
BTW, Great review!
June 20th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
This is a shame because one of the things that made Supersize Me good was that, unlike Moore, Spurlock let the audience know that there was ground rules to what was happening on screen. Another thing was that he used the good part of Moore, using humor and a straght forward appoach to look at a issue without going overbroad and a million other placdes.