Over on Twitter, documentary filmmaker Morgan Spulock has started a Tweet war with your humble critic over remarks I made earlier on this blog about his lack of talent. Keep track of us both at www.twitter.com/morganspurlock and www.twitter.com/rkylesmith.
Spurlock (sample Tweet: “Oh, Kyle, we all know that you’re not intelligent.” Zing!) is the guy who inexplicably garnered acclaim for proving that you could gain weight by pigging out on high-calorie meals a few years ago, then bustled onward to explicably garner non-acclaim with such dreary efforts as “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?” and “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.” (Combined gross: $1 million, which wouldn’t even cover the cost of putting them in theaters in the first place).
Spurlock, who put out a poster of himself buck-nude and covered in corporate logos for “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” though I think we all wish he hadn’t, also did The Simpsons’ 20th anniversary special, which in his hands somehow became a whimsical story about a guy named Morgan Spurlock and his personal reflections on this whole Simpsons thing, and an embarrassing chapter of the documentary “Freakonomics.”
Spurlock’s self-regard actually extends to the belief that his woeful Bin Laden movie was some sort of undiscovered gem, and a couple of years ago at an Atlantic magazine party in Manhattan hosted by that magazine’s princely president Justin Smith Spurlock rose before the entire room to give a long, strange spiel about how Harvey Weinstein, who distributed the film, had intentionally buried it for reasons unknown. Because Harvey is shy about promoting his films and loves to lose money, I guess. The Weinstein Company, asked for comment, firmly and convincingly denied any such thing had occurred. I would love to hear Morgan explain exactly what he thinks the motive for the TWC burial might have been.
Spurlock’s new movie is “Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope.” I haven’t seen it, but I hear the ever-irritating documentarian isn’t actually the star of this one, which in my book automatically makes it his finest work to date.