Let Your Geek Flag Fly: COMIC-CON EPISODE IV: A FAN'S HOPE

“I want to die and go to Comic-Con,” says a grey-haired comics dealer towards the end of Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, a new documentary with a terrible title. We’ve been following him through the course of the movie as he and his staff lament that what started in 1970 as a dedicated comic book convention has become something akin to a geek pilgrimage for all types of media, leaving the lowly comics under-acknowledged. This year, they’re worried that lugging their wares to San Diego may not turn out to be financially successful. And still, he expresses his heavenly analogy for this, the biggest pop culture fan convention of the year.

He’s not the only one for whom Comic-Con is so important, either. Not by a long shot. This documentary tells some of their stories. It follows two men – one a bartender, the other a soldier – who place the final touches on their sample drawings, pack up their portfolios and head off to try and get discovered at the convention. There’s also a guy who plans on proposing to his girlfriend at a panel with director Kevin Smith and a group of garage-based amateur costumers who plan to blow everyone away with their elaborately detailed costumes inspired by the video game Mass Effect. (They even have a full-sized costume of a creature, complete with a fully functional animatronic head. Most impressive.)

Director Morgan Spurlock’s films are generally confrontational, though when he’s at his best it’s an entertaining form of confrontational. His documentaries like Super Size Me (not bad) and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (irritating) are gimmicky constructs devoted to telling us some fairly obvious truths. Super Size Me wanted to tell us that fast food isn’t something to eat for every meal of every day. That’s not too hard to believe. But he went ahead and did it, underlining his obvious point with obvious showmanship. It’s the same thing with product placement in Greatest Movie Ever Sold, except the point is even more obvious, and the execution a grating gimmick. Not so with Comic-Con, a documentary in which he never appears. He doesn’t even snark from the sidelines; his voice is never heard and his graphics are strictly stylistic and informative.

Spurlock is not out to explore Comic-Con’s history or its pop culture position and he’s certainly not in gonzo muckraking mode. He’s here to show us the convention floor, what seems like miles of memorabilia, panels with the artists and celebrities discussing their works (and their own fandom), and the thousands of fans in various levels of costumes and geeky T-shirts. Between the handful of fan stories he tells and the footage of this particular Con (I think it’s 2010, but there’s some 2011 mixed in with what appears to be second-unit material), he cuts to talking-head interviews with other fans and, more often, prominent geek icons like writer-directors Joss Whedon and Kevin Smith, Ain’t it Cool News creator Harry Knowles, and legendary comic-book writer Stan Lee. I particularly liked seeing Lee out on the convention floor. A fan shouts, “You’re my favorite!” He replies, “I admire your taste.”

Now, I’ve never been to Comic-Con. I have no particular burning desire to go, but I’ve nothing against it. I certainly hear enough about it in the entertainment press as that time of the summer rolls around. So as someone with no first-hand experience with the convention, I would have liked a documentary that was a little less of a pat on the back for those who already hold it dear. It’s way more of a celebration than an exploration of this event, but I’m okay with that. The press coverage focuses on the big studio events, the reveals of footage and news about upcoming movies and TV shows. It’s nice to see the ground-level fans that swarm in and make it what it is. The documentary may be light, slight, and indulgent, but it nonetheless makes for a pleasant surface look at the fans who make Comic-Con tick, people Spurlock clearly loves. 

Your Ad Here: THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD

Hey! Have your heard about this thing called advertising? Yeah. It’s apparently everywhere you look. It turns out companies, all kinds of companies, big, small, and in-between, will pay money, sometimes lots and lots of money, to make or keep people aware of the fact that they exist. Sometimes this money even makes its way to those in the entertainment business in exchange for endorsements, commercials or, most shocking of all, product placement. Yes, that’s right: product placement. Filmmakers and show-runners will actually take money in exchange for having characters use certain products on screen.

I’m so glad Morgan Spurlock, the documentarian who has previously told us that eating only fast food is bad for you (Super Size Me) and that Osama Bin Laden is – oops, make that “was” – hard to find (Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?), has decided to reveal this side of the art/commerce divide heretofore unknown to the movie-going public. How could any of us have ever realized how much money from advertising is poured into the content we enjoy without his help? To make such an important discovery, Spurlock has made a movie called The Greatest Movie Ever Sold and decided to fund it entirely with product placement.

He interviews some people (Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, for example) who are around just for the sake of saying that advertisements are bad. The rest of the film is given over to Spurlock schlepping his concept from meeting to meeting trying to get the funding he needs to make and release the movie. The extent to which he succeeds should be evident by the fact that it is now a completed product playing out on movie screens across the country as I write this. The documentary is a self-referential, self-parodying advertisement for product placement that ends up feeling like its really only interested in itself.

Spurlock gets [company] to provide their [product] for prominent featuring in the movie. They also give him quite a bit of money to purchase the rights to above the title sponsorship, so I suppose the name of the movie is officially [Company] Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. This is a feature-length block of paid advertising that tries to rail against that very concept. At least Spurlock thinks it’s funny. He also gets help from [company], [company], [company], and [company], among others.

This is less a film and more of a publicity stunt. It’s fairly well concocted and Spurlock’s certainly an amiable presence on screen, but the actual content presented here is a series of tonally squishy screeds interspersed with winking ads and the types of gimmicks and stunts that even Michael Moore would probably find too over-the-top and unnecessary. I’m sure there’s an actual interesting documentary to be made out of the subject, but it would have to be interested in history, context, and economics more than surface observations that just about anyone who has ever seen a billboard or a stadium or a broadcast TV show has already made.

What the movie taught me most was that if you want companies to finance what you’re already planning on doing, you just have to ask. You hear that, companies featured in this movie? Go back and take a second look at the fourth paragraph up there. I’d be willing to remove one of those generic labels and name your company specifically if you just pay up. The amount’s thoroughly negotiable. I look forward to hearing from you.