Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?

Whaddya do when your last pic made $11 mil at the box office (not bad for a $300, 000 investment) and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary?

Well, if you are Morgan Spurlock, writer and director of Supersize Me!, you put down your burger, get your shots and head to the Middle East to shoot a documentary about your mock serious search for the world's most wanted terrorist.

After all, with his wife expecting the couple's first child the future father figures he's gotta do something: "If the CIA and FBI can't find him and I'm going to make the world safe for my kid it's time for a new plan. If I've learned anything from big budget action movies it's that complicated global problems are best solved by one lonely guy crazy enough to think he can fix everything before the credits roll."

Spurlock begins his quest for OBL (as he calls him) with his tongue firmly in his cheek but as he travels through Egypt, Israel, Afghanistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian West Bank and realizes the depth of anti-American feeling the tone of the film becomes sombre and introspective. ("It's hard for me to see how damaged the image of the country that I love and care about has become.")

Don't expect any startling insights into the Middle East conflict. Spurlock films the trip from the viewpoint of an average American coping with culture shock and trying to make sense out of a complex situation. Whether he is thinking out loud on a voice-over or addressing the audience straight to camera Spurlock invites us along to share his discoveries. And who better for a tour guide? Riding with a Jerusalem bomb squad to check out a suspicious-looking package, heading into "hard core Taliban country" with a US military patrol or approaching total strangers in a crowded Arab marketplace and asking them if they can put him in touch with Osama bin Laden Spurlock is witty, smart, observant and unflappable.

The majority of soundbites are from everyday men and women interviewed on the street, around the dinner table or in a desert village. (A young man in Tel Aviv compares the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate to a game of musical chairs. "Somebody is left without a chair ... but everybody needs to sit somewhere.")

In the end Spurlock does not find OBL. What he does discover, however, is that whether they live in big cities or small mountain villages "there are a lot more people out there who are just like us then there are who are just like him."

I got another copy of the Christofascist propaganda film Obsession in the mail yesterday. It is appropriate that I sit down to watch this film after the attempts to scare me.

Morgan Spurlock is a genius. He made a highly entertaining film that has a real message that needs to be seen and heard by everyone.

No matter where he went - Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Morocco - you name it, the people were dismissive of Osama bin Laden and felt that he was responsible for their lives being so bad. he was not a hero, but a villain to Muslims everywhere.

What was equally impressive was the fact that everyone hates our government. Not us, but out government. Guess what? We hate it too, but will we have the guts to change it? I don't mean just change parties, I mean change our government to one that doesn't sponsor dictators and terrorism throughout the world as long as it benefits us.

The bottom line in this film was that most people in the world are just like us. We want to earn some money, take care of our families, and live in peace. What a novel concept! Check this one out.

I just saw this film at the Melbourne Internatinal Film Festival. I, along with everyone else in the audience (or at least, form what I could tell from audience reaction) found it very entertaining. The film begins with Spurlock deciding to seek out Osama bin Laden in order to make the world safer for his unborn child. As you would expect from this type of documentary, you have humorous animation sequences, songs and interviews. This humour often derives from Spurlocks apparent aim to find bin Laden, however this is not really what the doco is about. More than anything, I found the aim of this doco to be to say 'everyday Muslims are just like you and me' and in telling people that not all Muslims are terrorists. This is most definitely a very good and important message for the people of today. However, I don't feel that this doco really covers any new ground. This message has been covered by many people before in many different ways and will be again. No new light is shed on the topic, or, for that matter, on any topic.

That said, if you were to go in to this film with a complete ignorance toward Muslim society then it may be a different story. If that were the case you would be supplied a highly entertaining lessen in tolerance. Unfortunately, in my experience people of that type of ignorance are not necessarily the type who would sit down and watch a documentary. I suppose the all we can hope is that the cheesiness of the title will draw them in! Overall I would rate it 6/10 for being entertaining, if not groundbreaking.

My biggest complaint with Morgan Spurlock's last film SUPER SIZE ME was the inevitable feeling that you always got when a director narrates/stars in his own work: the risk that what he says and does can intentionally or unintentionally come off as really presumptuous, sometimes resulting talking down to an audience rather than educating or inspiring. This is even harder when making a film to appeal to a broad demographic as you often have to entertain rather than provide strict facts and it is a problem that documentary filmmakers from Werner Herzog to, most obviously, Michael Moore have faced. However, Morgan has found a fantastic balance: WHERE IN THE WORLD IS OSAMA BIN LADEN? is a near-perfect mix of style.

In the beginning of the film we learn Morgan's wife is pregnant, prompting him to ask himself, "How can I allow my child to grow up in such an unsafe world?" Though definitely tongue-in-cheek, this average and perfectly legitimate question leads him to the question of global terrorism and he decides to do what anyone in any big budget American action film does: a stupid ordinary guy fights back. Using his wife's pregnancy as a backdrop, he travels to Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and finally Pakistan to attempt to come to the conclusion of where Osama bin Laden is.

As an American college student, I can safely say that I am aware that the United States' foreign policy has not exactly put us in a good image for the rest of the world. Morgan Spurlock investigates what seemingly completely different cultures think of us and attempts to break the barriers of what common American propaganda has taught us about the Middle East. He interviews civilians, military officers, poor people, rich people, various relatives of Osama and other known al Qaeda operatives, government officials, heads of departments, and just people on the street to try to understand why the so-called "war on terror" is really as ridiculous as it appears to be. He tries to dispel common stereotypes about Americans while at the same time learning more about cultures and religions that we ourselves grossly stereotype to learn that we're really not all that different.

The film's greatest strength is the fact that Morgan learns with the audience. It does not feel like he is preaching to you, but you and him are both on this journey, from speaking to the Jews about Palestinians and the Palestinians about Jews, to finding relatives of known terrorists who watch professional wrestling and having dinner with farmers in the ghettos of Iraq while discussing raising kids.

It helps illuminates one of the world's greatest disappointments: how the people who are the most extreme and the most negative are the only people we care to think about, how the moderates majority's opinions are not represented, and ultimately how people are alike all over despite cultural barriers and popular stereotypes. All we are asked to find out if Osama bin Laden really is the most dangerous man in the world? Is Osama really the problem or is he the symptom of a bigger problem? Do the people we think like him even really like him?

It is a very good balance of an entertaining, mass-appealing film that neither dumbs down its material nor treats its audience like idiots or the director like a genius. It is also a very humanistic film, showing how the many good people are all too often overshadowed by the few evil ones who just happen to have more power and influence. I hope that more Americans, particularly ones constantly fed gross stereotypes and lies by their government get to see this film.

The movie was quite good, but the reviews here demonstrate the limited power of even a thoughtful documentary approach, to really edify. Take a look at how many of the reviewers think they were enlightened by the movie to stop being ignorant Americans, but like some kind of shameful stereotype come to life, don't realize even after viewing the movie, that Pakistan is not part of the Middle East! A main theme of the movie is that people from diverse societies, have a very different perspective on American foreign policy than we Americans can even consider. Another very subtle theme is that we Americans should be a little ashamed at our ignorance. A point not easily taken, apparently.