The Greatest Story Ever Sold explores the art of product placement, and once the film wraps you’ll have no doubt extracting monies from corporate entities to have their products appear in the frame of a movie will seem like art. Morgan Spurlock wrote, stars in and directs this documentary in a very tongue in cheek manner.

Obviously this film has very limited core audience consisting of movie geeks who’ll see anything and producers looking for tips on the subtleties of negotiating with, say, Coke or Ban (deodorant) or in the case of Spurlock with Pom Wonderful. The juice seller (their product consists of pure pomegranate juice) ponies up a cool million for the right to present this film.

Oddly it’s never clear how the fine print of all this friendly chicanery reads. We hear at one point that the $1-million bonus is only payable if and when the film crosses the $10-million mark in theatrical distribution. It’s hard for a documentary or any film in limited release to garner that kind of sum. Look at Win Win, one of the year’s most acclaimed films. It hasn’t hit that amount and neither will The Greatest Story Ever Sold.

Along the way Spurlock offers tidbits from leading directors (JJ Abrams, Tarantino, Peter Berg) and gets one of the world’s best poster artists to do a mock up of the Last Supper in return for special placement in the credit role. At least I think that’s what happened. The Greatest Story Ever Sold plays exclusively at the Edwards Grand Palace.

- Michael Bergeron