I’ve got to hand it to Morgan Spurlock, a documentary maker who has enough curiosity – and enough wherewithal – to make the movies he wants to make, and lots of them. “Mansome” is his second this year (after his entertaining Comic-Con doc), a slight but entertaining piece that is enjoyable if weightless.
Spurlock’s topic is masculinity, masculine vanity and the slice of the Venn diagram where they intersect. He breaks it down mostly by varieties of body hair: the hair on your head (or the hair that’s NOT on your head), mustaches, beards, body hair and the notion of the metrosexual.
The approach is the same with each segment: Have a series of talking heads (celebrities and otherwise) offer observations on the topic, then home in on one particular person who offers an extreme or ultratypical example of the subject.
With mustaches, for example, he lets the commentators give their opinions, then shaves his own mustache, which he’s had for eight years. (As someone who shaved off his own mustache of 30-plus-years duration a couple of years ago, I can testify that it’s a startlingly personal moment.) When he points it out to his preschool-aged son, the boy bursts into tears.
This review continues on my website.