Reality isn’t just for TV anymore

It used to be that documentaries were about as popular as bran for breakfast.

They might be good for you, but they sure were tough to swallow.

Anyone who has been a regular moviegoer over the past several years can tell you how much that has changed. With filmmakers such as Errol Morris (“The Fog of War”), Michael Moore (“Fahrenheit 9/11”), Andrew Jarecki (“Capturing the Friedmans”), Robert Greenwald (“Outfoxed,” “Uncovered: The War on Iraq”) and Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”) on the scene, documentaries may be many things – irritating, intriguing, confounding, irresistible, maddening, enthralling – but they’re hardly boring.

Take Spurlock. The director and star of “Super Size Me,” Spurlock documents a monthlong gorge at McDonald’s. His intent: for 30 straight days to eat only what he can find on the fast-foot chain’s menu.

And while there’s an important point in there somewhere – uh, that eating nothing but fatty foods three times daily will cause you to gain weight? – the key to Spurlock’s success is his ability to make us laugh while we think.

Never has vomiting been funnier (except, of course, for “Team America: World Police,” in which a marionette pukes bile greener than Kermit the Frog on a half shell).

Important aside: Spurlock will appear at Eastern Washington University on Nov. 17 to speak about his film.

In the past few months, a number of documentaries – along with the films listed above – have played in Spokane. Here’s a short list:

“Bush Family Fortunes”: muckraking reporter Greg Palast’s attempts to do the same thing that Moore does (at least in part), to tie the Bush family to Saudi Arabian oil interests.

“Control Room” (available this week on DVD, VHS): takes viewers inside al-Jazeera’s central command headquarters in Qatar, introduces us to the Arab news service and gives us an alternative look at the war in Iraq.

“Emma Goldman: an Exceedingly Dangerous Woman”: introduces us to the 19th and early 20th century feminist and radical social activist.

“My Architect: A Son’s Journey”: director Nathaniel Kahn’s attempt to track down what he can on the late Louis I. Kahn, the father he barely knew and the man who created some of the world’s most beautiful buildings.

“The Corporation”: an attempt to trace the history of the corporation and to track the business entity’s effect on the world.

“Libby, Montana”: a look at the asbestos poisoning of a mining town, based on the reporting of former Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Andrew Schneider.

“Unconstitutional”: Peter Greenwald’s latest effort was to co-produce this film, written and directed by Nonny de la Peña, which takes a harsh look at the USA Patriot Act of 2001.

If you haven’t seen any of these, but wish you had, then you need to pay closer attention to what Michael Smith is doing at The Met, the venue that he manages. Most of them played there, thanks to Smith’s ongoing commitment to providing the very best films that he can find between live acts such as The Rolling Stones and Billie Holiday.

Just kidding on that last part. The Gonzaga University Wind Ensemble doesn’t exactly do covers of “Strange Fruit.”

Looking ahead for real: Smith is bringing in a couple of outdoor film events – the Soul Purpose Ski & Snowboard Film (Nov. 5, which helps benefit the Mount Spokane Film Festival), the annual Best of the Banff Mountain Film Festival (Nov. 19-21) – and he says he’s trying to book, though he has yet to set a specific date for, the documentary “The Yes Men.”

Here is how Roger Ebert describes the film: “‘The Yes Men’ is a disturbing documentary in which a couple of tricksters named Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum create a fictional WTO spokesman named Hank Hardy Unruh, and a fake WTO Web site where he can be contacted. Real-world groups contact Hank Hardy, and he flies out to their meetings to deliver a speech at which he summarizes the anti-WTO argument in terms the audience, incredibly, absorbs and passively accepts.”

Two of the three co-directors of “The Yes Men,” Chris Smith and Sarah Price, directed and produced the hilarious 2000 documentary “American Movie,” which told the story of filmmaker wannabe Mark Borchardt and his struggle to make “Coven.”

It should fit right in with the recent slate of films that, in one way or another, document this adventure we call real life.

And if we’re lucky at all, it’ll taste more like, mmm, an Egg McMuffin than bran buds.