Movie Review: Fast Food Nation
Nov. 16th, 2006 by adminBy John Mark Butterworth
Spero News - USA
November 16, 2006
Tendentious movie making at its worst (or would that be at its best?), Fast Food Nation is the kind of sophomoric nonsense you get when you turn a Berkeley teach-in into a fictional film. Made by the folks at Participant Productions, funded by an idiotarian eBay billionaire who has given us such tedious, coprolitic goodies as Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, and North Country, this movie does have a few surprises in it. Such as — what’s Bruce Willis doing in this thing? I thought he had some adult sense.
But a number of celebrities make cameo appearances in order to demonstrate their Hollywood solidarity in this low budget, even worse than Al Gore lecture. We get Ethan Hawke, Kris Kristofferson, Patricia Arquette, Greg Kinnear, and pop tart Avril Lavigne pops up to lend her weight to the role of serious college student who will save the world from the evil, white male, corporate bad guys.
This cinematic polemic was like strolling through an anti-war demonstration and catching snippets of conversations expressing righteous indignation at the Man, man. Like, see man, the Man is raping the planet. Cutting all the trees, having their cows pooping all over the ground so we can eat their feces laden burgers that the Madison Avenue Man made us want to eat by making us conform to the uniform straightjacket world, man. And the Patriot Act. That’s really out to get us. . . . . man!
“I can’t think of anything more patriotic than violating the Patriot Act,” as one character insists his little group become eco-terrorists as they hearken back to the really lame Bless the Beasts & Children of 1971. Save the buffalo. Save the whale. Save the bovines. Don’t eat that hamburger! Free! Be free, you lovely bucolic animals!
The only businesses that aren’t depicted as essentially evil done by white men in a conspiracy to rob everyone of their money and their lives is the smuggling of illegal immigrants, and the making of Hollywood entertainment (which we recently learned is major polluter of Los Angeles).
Ostensibly, the movie is about Greg Kinnear playing an executive at Mickey’s, a McDonalds clone who investigates the problem of fecal coliform bacteria in their meat. He goes to Cody, Colorado to inspect the slaughterhouse and meat packer. Intersecting stories include Mexican illegal aliens being drawn to jobs by evil people determined to exploit them unmercifully. Then there is the girl who works at the local Mickey’s who is destined for bigger and better things because she has the good sense to take up with the local college radicals and free the beef on the hoof.
The movie loses track of what its supposed to be about and then we get the grand finale - the Kill Floor. A nice little tour of the slaughterhouse where we get to watch cows killed, skinned, hacked, disemboweled, and so forth. It’s supposed to take us back to visions of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, but it doesn’t work. It isn’t that pleasant to watch large animals butchered, but it wasn’t horrifying, and the circumstances are rather clean all in all.
I just wonder if the filmmakers would ever dare to show an abortion of a baby with the same lavish attention to gory detail as they did to the killing of a cow? To ask is to answer. We will never see that, of course. No, Hollywood loves to rub our face in all kinds of gruesome things for our edification and to teach us a lesson, but not an abortion ever. Odd, don’t you think?
Bruce Willis plays a corrupt (implied) businessman who tells Greg Kinnear not to worry about a little fecal matter. “Just cook it. That’s all you need to do.” And adds, “We all have to eat a little s**t in this world from time to time.”
But he also points out that 40,000 people die in cars every year and they haven’t stopped making them or driving them. So what’s the big deal if a little meat kills someone every now and then? He has a point, but it’s delivered so cynically that the audience is cued to hiss at the bad white guy, Snively Whiplash.
Sacramento has its share of hipper-than-thous and more-caring-than-yous, and they often show up at the screenings of lefty film fare applauding at the end to prove they’re really showing the Man just how much they haven’t been fooled by the Man, man. And America is just like they know it to be, a scam perpetrated on the dumb bourgeoisie by the high and mighty who live like kings.
How come we never get movies on real kings like the Saudis who truly lord it over creation and Hollywood moguls in private jets preaching conservation and global warming?
Sigh.
John Mark Butterworth is married and has a teenage daughter. He’s been writing for 30 years - plays, novels, essays, poetry. He also composes music - rock, classical, jazz, sacred and plays guitar and a few other instruments. He’s the author of Brightness Springs: A parable, and writes at Sunny Days in Heaven.
