Fast Food Nation film review

By Peter Daniels:

Fast Food Nation offers some bitter truths about America

28 December 2006

Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater, screenplay by Richard Linklater and Eric Schlosser

Richard Linklater’s film version of Fast Food Nation, the best-selling 2001 exposé by Eric Schlosser, is an effort that cannot and should not be dismissed, despite major and somewhat predictable weaknesses.

Linklater has something to say, not only about the fast food industry, but about the overall state of US society.

It’s not every day that a major American film depicts “illegal” immigrant workers sympathetically, with dialogue about the worthlessness of the Democratic and Republican parties and “the machine that’s taken over the country.”

Linklater has worked with Schlosser to turn his non-fiction investigative journalism into a fictional narrative, undoubtedly in an effort to draw a wider movie audience.

Three separate strands of the story are woven together in an attempt to give the issues raised in Schlosser’s book concrete human form.

First there is Don Anderson, a vice president of marketing for the fictional Mickey’s fast food chain, named obviously with McDonald’s in mind.

Anderson (Greg Kinnear), a rising star in the company as the man who conceived of “The Big One,” the firm’s number-one product, is asked to travel to Colorado to investigate high fecal coliform counts in The Big One, or, in the words of the company’s chairman, reports that “there’s shit in the meat.”

Anderson arrives at the huge meat-processing plant in Cody, Colorado, a fictional town whose depiction is among the film’s strong points.

51% of Americans making over $75,000/year are now eating fast food at least weekly: here.

Jamie Oliver and food: here.

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• The Future of Food? (foodworksblog.wordpress.com)
• Fast Food Nation – Movie Review (rawlivingfoods.typepad.com)
• Murder charge after grisly fast food restaurant discovery (abc.net.au)
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