Hey, I hope you guys are enjoying the new Golden Age. I wasn’t really convinced that we were living in great times for cinema until I saw the trailer for Richard Linklater’s next film, Fast Food Nation. It’s obvious that we’ve arrived at a point where incredibly talented filmmakers are getting money to make ballsy and interesting movies, not all that unlike what happened in the 70s, and probably for many of the same reasons – as Mission: Impossible III and Poseidon have proved two weeks running, your shitty old paradigms don’t work any more. Will the bloated, stupid action picture end up rusting out with the bloated, stupid musical? We’ll see.
But in the meantime let’s enjoy the good times we’re living in. Fast Food Nation is the kind of movie I wouldn’t have even imagined being made – hell, I read the book a number of years ago and it never crossed my mind that it could be adapted into a film. In the book Eric Schlosser takes a tour, from top to bottom, of the fast food industry. He visits the labs that make artificial flavors, the board rooms where rich white men scheme to get richer by making kids fat, the restaurants themselves that hurt the local job market, the factories that are dangerous, dirty and hire illegal aliens and the farms that pollute the environment and torture the animals. It’s a chain of evil, all dedicated to bringing you a fucking Big Mac.
Linklater is tackling the topic through a multi-story approach, bringing us aspects of the major points made in the book. After Bad News Bears it’s nice to see Linklater getting back to something more brainy, and he’s the perfect guy to tackle a film that may not be so linear – Dazed and Confused and Slacker (one of the all time great movies of my life) prove it.
Click here to watch the trailer on YouTube, a site trying to prove it’s good for more than videos of guys wiping out on skateboards and girls of questionable legality shaking their money maker on webcams. And be sure and go and see this movie. It’s going to be like Supersize Me, but without that Village People mustache.