Opens Fri May 7.
It is uncannily hard to watch the preparatory stages of Morgan Spurlock's diet experiment in Super Size Me, the stage during which he visits doctors and nutritionists who calibrate, in every thinkable way, the ways in which he is perfectly healthy. Watching this man--all happy, puppyish energy and handlebar mustache--prepare to throw himself under the wheels of the fast-food juggernaut has the eerie air of readying for sacrifice.

Why would a person do such a thing? Don't we all know that fast food is bad for us? Well, apparently we don't know, or didn't know, precisely the horrifying extent. Spurlock's doctors and nutritionists predict that he'll gain some weight and that his cholesterol will go up (one nutritionist begs him to take vitamins, but Spurlock won't ingest anything that McDonald's doesn't offer... imagine it: "You want a multivitamin with that?"), but they're pretty sure his liver and kidneys can handle the extra fat and salt.

On day two, Spurlock throws up a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and you wonder how he's going to make it to day three. But after a few days he's not only handling the food, but craving it. He's got headaches and spates of irritability that evaporate once he's eaten--symptoms we'd recognize immediately if he were experimenting with, say, cocaine. What has happened of course is that Spurlock had become addicted to all the fat and salt and sugar--something like 30 pounds of it eaten over the course of the month. And there are other side effects he hasn't prepared for, such as depression and loss of sex drive.

And the doctors were wrong: His liver couldn't handle all the fat. By the third week, his liver is so toxic one doctor begs him to stop. Which he doesn't; like a true warrior, Spurlock powers through to the end, and on to the surprisingly difficult work of undoing one month's damage. (In one of Super Size Me's most touching moments, Spurlock's girlfriend, a vegan chef, outlines for us the detox diet she's planned for him, which she's got all neatly formatted and printed out: the hopeful application of some order onto destruction. It's a moment of real love that Hollywood can't match.)

All told, you might expect Super Size Me to be a screed, but it isn't. (Well, at the end it gets a little screedy, but the filmmaker's earned it.) Spurlock fills out his investigation with side trips to school cafeterias to see what kids are eating (Twix for lunch!) and interviews, including one with a diabetic about to undergo gastric bypass surgery who cheerfully admits to drinking about two gallons of soda per day. There's a priceless quip, a classically libertarian moment, from Reason editor Jacob Sullum about why we feel it perfectly acceptable to harangue a smoker but won't lecture fat people; he's absolutely correct about collective shame, and interestingly enough, when Spurlock shows images of obesity, the faces are tastefully blurred, but smokers' faces are not.

What Spurlock is trying to do is untangle the question of personal versus corporate responsibility by looking at the attendant issues (although the question of obesity and poverty or social class only glancingly comes up), and while he doesn't come down on the side of legal action against fast-food companies, he does invite you to take a good hard look not only at what you're eating but at what the purveyors of what you're eating are telling you. And lest you think that this film is only for Fast Food Nation types, that it's aimed only at those who already have the information, remember that Spurlock put his own body on the line to get your attention. That's why he did it. He did it for you. EMILY HALL

The Mudge Boy

dir. Michael Burke

Opens Fri May 7.
Although this modest debut from writer-director Michael Burke is mostly your typical queer coming-of-age film, it hints at thematic and psychological possibilities that reach far beyond the film's actual grasp. Young Duncan Mudge lives with his father in the sort of rural community where teenage boys salute the Confederate flag and husbands mourn their wives without altering their facial expressions. The film never doubts Duncan's sexuality, and of all its flaws, that might be the most fatal. Because his sexual fate is already determined, the movie turns into a screed against the evils of repression, and we've all seen that movie before.

As played by Emile Hirsch, Duncan (probably about 16 years old) has a quality of overripe juvenility to him, a mixture of femininity and prepubescence sort of like Jerry Lewis on Ritalin. Besides a remarkably well-trained pet chicken, Duncan's only friend is a local testosterone factory named Perry (Tom Guiry) who fights like hell to suppress the secret relationship he seems to encourage. Instead of then forming the film's central questions into will-he-or-won't-he terminology, the filmmakers might have done better to inquire into the nature of Duncan's choices, and not separate the answers so neatly into a single category. Regardless, the film's truly interesting conceits are barely developed. Just under the narrative's surface are the psychosexual implications of a boy who expresses his blossoming homosexuality through the emulation of his deceased mother, and the father who resents him because every day his son reminds him more and more of his wife. Even if he doesn't know what to do with these things, the fact that Burke brings them up at all makes me think he will be a director to watch in the future--but he really should get somebody else to write his dialogue. ADAM HART