Word: fasts
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...first night in Cannes, I didn't have time for a full French dinner, so I grabbed take-out at the local fast-food joint: McDonald's. In France, that's the culinary equivalent of a war crime. I felt a little guilty about it. Now, after seeing the movie Fast Food Nation, which is in competition for this year's Palme d'Or, I feel bad in a different way. A couple of different ways...
...Eric Schlosser's non-fiction best-seller Fast Food Nation suggested that, if Big Macs and Whoppers weren't killing the average American (who consumes three burgers and four orders of French fries a week), they were stuffing him with toxic waste. The book, and Schlosser's kid-friendly sequel Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food, might have made for a stinging documentary film. But that was too simple for him and director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, School of Rock); or maybe they thought that Morgan Spurlock's Super Size...
...movie made from Fast Food Nation takes as much from The Jungle as it does from Schlosser's book. Here the immigrants are illegals from Mexico, but their path, their Calvary, is the same. They survive a perilous trip into the U.S. and are assigned a literally vomitous job handling cattle innards at the "Uni-globe" meat plant. The women endure rough handling by their sexually avaricious overlord; some of the men get mangled in the machinery, only to be told they're not eligible for insurance...
...Again, I agree that fast food may be bad straight down the line: for the cattle, the factory workers, the kids behind the counter and the people addicted to them. (Though in France the burgers sure taste better.) But I don't go to films only to have my prejudices reinforced; I'd like to see a story with surprising vectors, characters who are more than caricatures, a sense of vitality or elegance in the visual style. The Linklater Fast Food Nation has none of this. Why, it's so lifeless, it almost makes The Da Vinci Code seem like...
Next: Getting Indigestion Over Fast Food Nation...