Good movie. Fast Food Nation will keep you hooked to the end -- I just wish they had crammed fewer issues into the movie.
In Fast Food Nation, Greg Kinnear plays an executive in charge of finding out what is really going on with a burger patty plant: management suspects there is bull crap (like, feces) going into the patties. Ewwwww. Eww. Ew. All sorts of gross scenes ensue. The movie really makes you re-think your meat eating habits, that's for sure. On Kinnear's quest for the truth, we skim through Mexican immigration, greedy corporate america, sexual harrasmnet at work, you name it (except, of course, for the gays, that was left out of the political discussion). The issues are certainly related to how the fast food industry exploits low-wage illegal immigrants, blah blah blah, but I just don't think the whole thing was put together seamlessly.
Maybe something like Nine Lives, or Crash or Babel would have worked better.
We had only one tiny reference to the gays. In one scene Catalina Sandino Moreno (that bitch rocks!) comments on seeing a few weird scenes in a hotel (she cleans hotel rooms), and the other cleaning lady mentions the other day she saw 
two guys in action in the room while their wives were out shopping and that the wives came back never knowing what went on. The comment depicts a circumstance not so nice for the gays (closeted gays married to women), but I thought the tone from the cleaning lady was pretty neutral.
Bobby Cannavale deserves special mention for his good performance as a prickalicious verbally and sexualy abusive hot Latino boss. Fast Food Nation is out on DVD.
just saw Fast Food Nation, it's an impactful flick to say the least... earlier today i passed up a sausage mcmuffin because of it. Evidently it is worth passing up fast food for more than the obvious health reasons.
Posted by: patrick | Mar 19, 2008 at 06:01 PM