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Thread: Richard Linklater's FAST FOOD NATION

  1. #1
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    Richard Linklater's FAST FOOD NATION

    FAST FOOD NATION
    Written by Eric Schlosser & Richard Linklater
    Directed by Richard Linklater


    I’ve tried on a number of occasions to eliminate McDonald’s from my diet. The first time I tried was a few years back, after reading Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction work, FAST FOOD NATION. I remember going to buy fries for the last time before reading the chapter entitled, “Why the Fries Taste so Good.” I had to go for that last fry before I could never look at them the same way again. I went for months without a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder with cheese but it didn’t last. Eventually I succumbed to my cravings that persisted despite the time that had elapsed. I knew what I was doing was wrong but as I bit into my two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame seed bun, I conveniently forgot about all the chemicals in the meat, the subliminal advertising geared towards toddlers and the migrant, illegal workers in dangerous meat rendering factories that made my burger possible. No sooner had I had my last bite did my stomach twist into a tangled mess. The pain was both horrible and familiar. Unfortunately, Richard Linklater’s narrative interpretation of Schlosser’s novel is nowhere near as nauseating or as a big a turn-off as the feeling of a Big Mac sitting at the bottom of your stomach.

    The decision to translate FAST FOOD NATION from a non-fiction work of in-depth investigative journalism into a narrative film is a bold one. I was apprehensive at first but Schlosser’s involvement co-writing the screenplay with Linklater made me less so. Shaping facts into a story certainly humanizes the global implications of the fast food industry but if the narrative is not compelling then there isn’t much of a point. FAST FOOD NATION tells different stories to show the wide reach of how many are affected by the fast food industry. Greg Kinnear plays Don Anderson, an advertising executive responsible for The Big One, the latest burger success at Mickey’s, the fictional fast food chain at the center of the film. Don must investigate reports that there are significant traces of cow manure in the meat (Fun!). Ashley Johnson plays Amber, a teenage Mickey’s employee who juggles school and work while she begins to see her role in the corporate machine that is waiting in her future. Wilmer Valderrama and Catalina Sandino Moreno play Raul and Sylvia, two Mexican illegal immigrants who have been brought into the United States specifically to work at the rendering plant that manufactures the millions of patties that become The Big One. Very little is revealed about the characters themselves as they are merely symbols for the bigger picture. Consequently, there is very little identification with the film. A film that is trying to tell everyone, “America … this is what you’ve become,” needs the audience to feel like this is their America.

    What FAST FOOD NATION best exemplifies is America’s complacency with the progression of its society. The problems don’t stop at Mickey’s. The fast food industry is merely just one faceless industry that is driving the American people into hopeless futures. Kinnear’s Don is a prime example. He has spent his life packaging products, feeding them to people the way they like it. All the while, he has also been feeding his convenient lies to himself as well. A successful burger comes at a cost and as he travels from his board room to the assembly line and begins speaking with people who don’t have any stake in the production of The Big One, he understands that there are truths under his lies that he cannot go on ignoring. By the time we see him bite into his third burger, his apprehension to do so is rampant. Yet, he still takes that bite. This is what we do. We get fed a ton of information from different angles. The product pushers tell us how wonderful it is and the non-believers prove otherwise. Schlosser’s book, which clearly details all the subtle atrocities the fast food industry unleashes into the fabric of America to make one more dollar at the expense of its loyal customers, is well researched and fact-checked. The flip side to the convenience of fast food, from obesity to the exploitation of underage employees, is being discussed by too many people and with increasing validity to be ignored. Yet millions still take that bite.

    Linklater does not shy away from expressing his disappointment in the American people nor does he mince words about his lack of optimism relating to making change on the subject. Each character’s story is brought to a close and none of them are any better for any of their efforts. Some end up exactly where they wanted not to. Some end up continuing to support the industry despite their newfound knowledge. All these choices are made to ensure money is still coming in, to ensure the American dream is still within reach. Even the youth of tomorrow fail at their attempts to affect the future. The attempt itself does show a trace of Linklater’s hope, albeit it fleeting. Despite all this, Linkalter still wants to do his part. The last ten minutes of FAST FOOD NATION bring about some of the more gruesome footage found in the film. We finally get a tour of the “kill floor” at the rendering plant, with plenty of blood and dead cow to go around. The nausea comes too late in FAST FOOD NATION but you certainly won’t be rushing for another burger any time soon.
    Last edited by mouton; 11-19-2006 at 11:36 AM.
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  2. #2
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    Richard Linklater's FAST FOOD NATION

    Sloppy seconds


    By Chris Knipp

    This is a somewhat odd idea, though not unique: the mercurial, talented Richard Lnklater has taken Eric Schlosser's best-selling 2001 eponymous exposé of American fast-food chains and the increasingly bad eating habits they foster and turned it into a series of interwoven dramatic scenes. He has enlisted a cameo-chain of activist-minded actors like Ethan Hawke, Bruce Willis, Patricia Arquette, Kris Kristofferson -- and near the center of things, as a naïve junk-food company executive, perpetual good-guy patsy Greg Kinnear. And he has gotten hold of some good (but here relatively wasted) Mexican or Hispanic actors to play the roles of undocumented workers released by their border-crossing "coyote" right into the hands of a sadistic Casanova of a meat packing boss (Bobby Cannavale).

    The movie is divided into wise guys, patsys, and underdogs. Bruce Willis and Kris Kristofferson are wise guys, though one defends the new food culture of a capitalist machine and the other attacks it. Kinnear is a bland simpleton who thinks he's doing a good job and then seems outraged and ready to change things when he finds his company is using hamburger meat with shit in it. But at film's end he's quietly knuckled down and invented another flavor of Big Burger. Cannavale's character, the meat packing foreman who literally screws the female workers, is worse than a wise guy: he's a creepy, brutal lothario, an exploiter wildly out of control Ironically this actor was a quiet charmer who ran a little food stand in The Station Agent. He has moved up on the B List, and down in the food chain.

    Some of the characters are cast in white trash roles but hoping to rise by escaping from their crappy jobs, such as the girl and boy (Ashley Johnson and Paul Dano) who're fast food servers at "Micky's," Kennear's company. Arquette as the girl's mother and Hawke as her uncle represent particularly clumsy threads in the dramatization, but basically everyone is just a mouthpiece for the non-fiction which would have been more thought-provoking and more interesting presented straight, in a documentary, with more facts, and hence, hopefully, more complexity.

    An undocumented woman's husband is severely injured in the meat packing plant and the company accuses him of being on drugs. But this is another blurred point, since it's already been stated that the workers do resort to drugs to deal with their numbing, unpleasant work. In fact the meat packing plant -- and we see a real kill floor in some late sequences -- is so demonized that Linklater seems to be confusing dehumanization with evil and nastiness.

    The factory sequences ought to be compared with the more comprehensive and chilling ones in the currently highly praised 2005 German documentary Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot), in which Nikolaus Gayhalter depicts many phases of European mass food production in vast, coldly beautiful scenes presented without any commentary. The workers in these sequences may be suffering or they may be happy. That isn't the point of Our Daily Bread, which is how we're being cut off from local, slow food; how animals and plants are equally treated as factory objects. The processes are numbingly repetitive and everything is efficiently mechanized. In Fast Food Nation the processes are disgusting and criminally dangerous, but if you watch Gayhalter, that may not be the real point.

    Neither movie has much that's positive to offer. For that, you need to go to Deborah Koons' s 2004 The Future of Food, which while depicting the Orwellian controls afoot with genetic manipulation of foods, also shows there's a slow food movement, there are farmers' markets everywhere, and farmers are organizing to fight back against Monsanto.

    Unlike either of those documentaries, Linklater's film overloads its statements at every turn, without providing an effective drama. None of the characters are developed very well in storytelling terms, and various narrative lines go astray. There are many lurid payoffs -- enough to make the film nasty and unpleasant to watch -- but no conclusions. Bruce Willis' character, the middle man who got Micky's its cheap prices for the meat factory's products, is a welcome voice (though he's basically just lecturing us in a cameo, like Kristofferson) because in taking a "realistic" position he is able to see the food production issues as ambiguous. Surely it isn't true as he asserts that there's always been fecal matter in the meat we eat. This is the result of fast food mass production. But it's true as he says that the Mexican workers are diligent and admirable and life requires compromises -- just as it's always been true as Kristofferson's character says that the meat packers have always been mean guys. But these are only tiny glimpses of the complexity of a very complex subject.

    Fast Food Nation is a shrill polemic posing as a sort of drama. These indie film actors seem exploited too (and were probably paid low wages). For actors of the caliber or charisma-level of Wilmer Valderrama, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ana Claudia Talancón and Luis Guzmán to be used in these generic roles is the cinematic equivalent of being ground up into fast food. They're not playing in a compelling fiction but acting out little scenes in a morality play. While Our Daily Bread seems at times in desperate need of a little commentary, Linklater's film is too overstatedly explicit in its criticism to let us think. We're being browbeaten non-stop, and we don't know if we're getting real "information" because there's no nuance. I kept hoping the fast food restaurant employees would start making loud wisecracks, like the guys and girl in Clerks II. This movie desperately needs believable characters and a sense of humor. Instead it lectures us, like Lucy in Peanuts, till our stomachs hurt and we feel nauseous. The people who praised a lurid documentary like Capturing the Friedmans will praise this too. Linklater has given us one great movie this year, A Scanner Darkly, and we didn't need to be served this indigestible second course.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 12-05-2006 at 08:51 PM.

  3. #3
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    I don't remember the last time I loved a movie that you dislike so thoroughly. And I don't have time at the moment to do justice to Fast Food Nation (just a capsule review below). I can't see how one could say that "the movie needs believable characters" and that "basically everyone is just a mouthpiece". Moreover, you say the film offers "no conclusions". You probably find it preposterous that I like Fast Food Nation more than A Scanner Darkly. Perhaps the phrase "agree to disagree" is worth applying here.

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    FAST FOOD NATION (2006)

    This masterful agit-prop drama convincingly makes the case that we are all interconnected by our dependence on an economic system that sacrifices human beings at the altar of corporate profit. Moreover, it's hard to remember another fiction feature that dramatizes the sacrifices of undocumented workers with such conviction. Each of Fast Food Nation's three narrative threads is firmly anchored by a character in searcher/observer mode. Characters who guide the narrative without having an agenda or an angle. These are Catalina Sandino Moreno's young immigrant wife, Ashley Johnson as a girl entering the labor force, and Greg Kinnear as an insider conducting an investigation into his company's meat supplier. They enter the narrative as innocent, inexperienced or ignorant and end up corrupted, frustrated and/or disillusioned. I was moved by their transformations in a way that no documentary could possibly achieve. I imagine this is the main reason why director Richard Linklaker decided to turn Eric Schlosser's titular non-fiction book into a fiction film.

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    I was moved by their transformations in a way that no documentary could possibly achieve. I imagine this is the main reason why director Richard Linklaker decided to turn Eric Schlosser's titular non-fiction book into a fiction film.
    (I hope this isn't meant to serve as a review.) I'm sure you know very well that a documentary can actually be quite moving -- and that one can be much more practically informative and effective as agit-prop. I imagine you may be right--about Linklater's motives. It wouldn't have suited him to make a documentary; it's not in his line. But neither is agit-prop and it isn't very well done. Another piece of agit-prop about undocumented workers is A Day Without a Mexican, also a very bad movie, alas. Indeed worse. Brecht did brilliant agit-prop; Linklater is off-key and this doesn't work. I'm not surprised at your opinion because you had hinted at it earlier, but I'm disappointed that a film buff like you would endorse so warmly such an unimpressive piece of work. It's disappointing that you manage to "love" this. But we've differed sharply before.

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    You're not surprised at my opinion because after I watched the film I wrote that Volver, The Queen and Fast Food Nation are better films than Little Children. I wasn't surprised you didn't like the film. Not after I read this bit:

    "I haven't seen Fast Food Nation (which Denby panned, now that I think of it), but I have doubts from what I've read and for my money probably one great Linklater film a year is the most we can expect and that one's A Scanner Darkly." (Chris Knipp)

    It's statements like "basically everyone is just a mouthpiece" and FFN offers "no conclusions" that made my jaw drop.

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    I didn't find Fast Food Nation offered any conclusions either. After having read the book, I felt enlightened, learned. After having seen the movie, I felt bored. Considering how important the topic, I was surprised at how irrelevant most of the film felt. The last ten minutes, when we're finally given a glimpse of the kill floor, turned my stomach (hence the vegetarian pizza I ordered later that day for dinner) but everything that came before failed to inspire anything in me. I found the cameos to be distracting and overtly obvious as devices and not characters (especially Bruce Willis and Ethan Hawke). The only issue I felt the film put forth well was the complacency of the American people towards accepting their role in the "Fast Food Nation" (A city becomes more exciting because it now has a Chili's). FFN offers a very bleak view of America. People can continue on in advertising despite knowing there's shit in the meat; people can work for a rendering plant despite all their better judgment just so they afford their trailer payments; and people can try to set free all the cows in the world without success. No one wins and no one is learning either - just getting worse. But if you're going to dramatize a work of non-fiction to get me to see the direct impact on humanity, you'd better give me the chance to actually care about the humans on screen.

    I did also prefer Fast Food Nation to Scanner Darkly ... but that's only because I really disliked Scanner Darkly. Saying I enjoyed FFN more is hardly a compliment.
    Last edited by mouton; 12-05-2006 at 10:32 PM.
    I have no idea what I'm doing but incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.
    - Woody Allen

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    Oh ... and I just watched LITTLE CHILDREN again this evening ... To suggest FFN is better ... well it gives me that feeling I get after eating a Double Big Mac.
    I have no idea what I'm doing but incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.
    - Woody Allen

  9. #9
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    I wouldn't know. I haven't had a Big Mac since '82.

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    You may suggest, Oscar, by quoting my prior remarks that I prejudged the movie, but movies often don't turn out to be the way I expect them to be and I go by my viewing, not my prior thoughts.

    I've read some things that suggest the book is more positive than the movie, offers more solutions.

    No doubt Fast Food Nation offers various sides of issues and the incisive way Willis does that in his cameo is what makes him one of the stronger voices. But the imipression that one is being lectured is the overriding one and that is what is a turnoff for me. I think this is going to be remembered mainly as another entry in the long indictment of the meatpacking industry -- this time, in relation to the production of cheap hamburger patties. Labor and management issues are seriously raised, and on various levels, and that's interesting. The role of Latin American border crosser workers is emphasized. The rest is going to fall by the wayside.

    Critically A Scanner Darkly has fared generally better than Fast Food Nation. And one would certainly hope so. With so many good actors in Fast Food Nation each momentarily brings his or her character to life, but still one could say as Rosenbaum did about Babel, that Linklater doesn't seem to care very much about these characters -- or about solutions to the issues the scenes and dialogue raise. I can offer The Future of Food as one film about US food that offers some options and hope.

    It seems early to play the rating game and unwise to rate this movie over some of the year's best. I think, whatever metaphor you want to use, Fast Food Nation has to rank somewhat below A Scanner Darkly, and well below Little Children, The Queen, and Volver -- and also The Departed, The History Boys, Inland Empire (in my opinion anyway), An Inconvenient Truth, and others in the English or foreign language categories for this year.

    If anything I have long been a considerable admirer of Linklater. I think he's one of the most interesting of the established younger American independent directors. A Scanner Darkly and Before Sunrise and Before Sunset -- and Waking Life and School of Rock -- are all to different degrees terriric movies; I'm a fan. But I don't think Linklater produces an absolute gem every single time. What does impress me about Fast Food Nation is that it's another sign of the variety of things Linklater is willing to tackle.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 12-06-2006 at 07:06 PM.

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