Fast Food Nation
You may not want to watch Fast Food Nation with a fatty-licious burger in hand. In fact, you may not want to watch this film at all if you want to blindly continue on as what the industry deems even a light fast food frequenter. (What is that now, ten times a week?)
The film begins with a board meeting of burger bigwigs making marketing decisions for fast food chain Mickey's (hmmm… I wonder what restaurant they might be alluding to…). Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear), new to the burger board, is informed of an alarmingly high fecal content of their burgers. (What would constitute an acceptable excrement level?) Don heads straight to the source, Cody, Colorado, to investigate the packing plant that provides the Mickey-meat.
Based on the book by Eric Schlosser, one might presume the film would follow its format and present as a documentary. But director, Richard Linklater, chose an interesting route--- one that has not been tackled since Woody Allen's Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask: Linklater and Schlosser crafted a fictionalized tell-all tale incorporating the book's non-fiction facts.
Enlisting an army of actors, multiple storylines serve up Sclosser's disgusting and disheartening findings in the film. To visit the issue of work conditions at the plant, Linklater follows the saga of a group of illegal immigrants who fall into its low-paying, treacherous trap. A group of do-gooding teens are utilized to reveal how useless it is to fight the animal-abusing hegemony of the industry. A cattle rancher (Kris Kristofferson), a meat buyer (Bruce Willis) and Kinnear's oddly naïve Anderson round off the list of characters caught up in Linklater's effort to fictionalize the sorted details of the messy, fecal-coated industry of fast food.
What we end up with is a film with a story structure like Crash, mirroring the book to film translation technique of a Woody Allen classic and the self-righteousness of An Inconceivable Truth. This combination might work if the film was a tad heavier on facts and a load lighter on fiction. Unfortunately, the silly little cartoon vignettes, The Meatrix, included in the DVD Extrashave more information in their few whimsical minutes than Fast Food Nation had in its 116.
Grades
Overall: B-
Story: C+
Acting: B-
Visuals: B-
Originality/Innovation: B
Enjoyability: B-
DVD Extras: A
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