This is my second in a 2020 bi-monthly series of finishing movies I had to abort watching on my first attempt. (I still like the original usage of the word "abort," but this particular instance is, er, not ideal.)There are discontinued viewings that you stop by choice, and then there are those that are just out of your hands.
My attempt to watch That Sugar Film in December of 2015, as discussed here, was the latter.
By waiting all the way until the end of my 30-day rental period on iTunes before starting to watch it, I had no time to recover when the viewing started glitching and buffering, and then just wouldn't play at all. It was a prelude to the end of my previous laptop -- actually, two laptops ago now -- which succumbed to a faulty hard drive (and was too old to be worth replacing), but I didn't know it at the time I wrote the post linked above.
The circumstances were rather unusual. I was watching the movie in a Starbucks prior to my midnight screening of The Force Awakens. That doesn't happen to be all that relevant to the story, I just thought it was worth sharing.
When my laptop did ultimately die, I was still able to get back the other rentals I had downloaded but not yet watched by just setting up iTunes on my new computer and downloading them again. Obviously there was no such option with That Sugar Film, as I had already kicked off my (then 24-hour) viewing window. It's not Apple's fault my laptop gave up the ghost.
I had only been liking the movie at a mid-range level before then, so I have not prioritized getting back to it before now. I should probably explain a little bit what this is, if you don't know. It's basically Australia's answer to Supersize Me, with director-star Damon Gameau in the Morgan Spurlock role. Instead of 30 days of only McDonald's, though, the experiment is 60 days on a high sugar diet, the kind Gameau had previously forsaken. That "high sugar" diet being, of course, a fairly average diet for most people in the world. Gameau made the experiment one step more difficult -- he would only eat foods that are considered to be "healthy," like non-sugar cereals, yogurt, fruit and smoothies. He quickly discovered he would have no difficulty getting to 40 teaspoons of sugar a day -- the average intake for an adult in the western (?) world -- even without a single bit of what's considered "junk food," and in fact might even have to "diet" for a part of each day not to exceed those 40 teaspoons. It's all in the interest of preparing for the arrival of his new daughter, who is in the belly of his pregnant girlfriend for the entirety of the narrative. (That last detail feels very Spurlock-ian.)
Interesting experiment. At the time I thought "The world already has one Morgan Spurlock -- does it need another?" Since then, though, I've softened on Gameau, who also released a documentary last year called 2040, which looks at where the environment will be 20 years from now if we do nothing about it, and what we can do. Again, not all that original, but it gives him a little more credibility than if he were trying to be "just another Morgan Spurlock."
The good news is, Gameau comes across positively, as Spurlock did in is early efforts, and not kind of self-indulgently, like later career Spurlock. I was fully with That Sugar Film this time around. It has a really lively presentation. There's a lot of use of fun and reasonably sophisticated graphics, like Gameau riding around on a fat cell travelling through the body. My favorite recurring technique that felt distinct was the way Gameau handles normal talking head interviews. Instead of just appearing in whatever environment in which they were interviewed, they appear on the side of a cereal box or in the ingredients section of a bag of candy, with their faces often color-adjusted to match the packaging. It's a small detail, but small details in a form as frequently tired as the documentary can make a big difference.
There is, of course, quite a lot of eye-opening information here, if it is all to be taken at face value. We know that there is some disagreement among experts whether sugar or fat is more harmful to humans, though maybe less so than there once was. But Gameau is quite clearly on the side of sugar = bad, and a lot of the information he provides compellingly makes that case. (Among them -- the one expert he talks to who seems to disagree with these findings is someone who openly admits receiving funding from Coca Cola.)
The one hesitation I had with the film, because I just did not believe it, despite the physical evidence presented, was the transformation to Gameau's body over the course of the 60 days. He gained something like 20 pounds, his bloodwork was terrible and the doctors were telling him he was on the way to getting a fatty liver. As this is a healthy early 30s guy, it just didn't really ring true, even with before and after video/pictures of how he looked. There just seemed something too far-fetched about the radical changes given only a change to drinking more juices, while maintaining the same level of exercise.
Then the fact that there's a lot that just seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. He'd say he felt a lot less energy and had wild mood swings, then there's footage of him just being sacked out on the couch in a half-coma of exhaustion. I'm not saying Gameau would fake this to sell his case more convincingly, I'm just saying he could.
Overall, though, it's a really compelling and alarming documentary, while remaining very fun. Probably the best of all worlds when it comes to the aims of the types of documentary I tend to enjoy the most.
Full disclosure: I ate the remnants of a bag of chocolate chips while watching. Ha.
Okay, I'm whittling down my choices. I'll probably watch the original Paddington in June -- or finish watching it, I should say.
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