FAST FOOD NATIONRiiight, so this is the movie adaptation of the muckraking McDonald's expose by the same name. The biggest challenge here is taking the book and making it into a story that you can actually watch, because a faithful translation of the book would be something more like An Inconvenient Truth or March of the Penguins.
Well, Linklater uses a stories involving a marketing Exec investigating the cleanliness of the meat, a teen girl working the counter and hanging with some hippy-activist college kids, and illegal immigrants working in the meat plant to illuminate different aspects of the Fast Food industry while adding a little narrative structure to the information presented in the book. The gimmick is a little odd because the characters have no relationship to each other and the whole thing feels a little forced, but that's because it is. Linklater does succeed in giving us realistic characters (so much so that we occasionally loose sight of the fast food issues and think we are watching a movie about immigrant workers or a teenage coming of age movie) and he resists the urge to get too Upton Sinclair on us. The characters were honestly portrayed and the movie never went off the deep-end, which is pretty much all you can ask. It did the best it could do with the source material it had.
I stand by the point that nothing in this movie was unrealistic or even exaggerated, and it isn't the end of the world. 99% of the people who watch it will continue to be occasional fast food eaters, myself included. We all go back to business as usual like Greg Kinnear, and like Bruce Willis tells us, we all have to eat a little shit sometimes to get a good, convenient product out and meet our profit margins.
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