Fast Food Nation at Cannes Film Festival
Here’s a review of Medium star Patricia Arquette’s Cannes Film Festival Movie Fast Food Nation:
Are we the consumers or the consumed? The Cannes Film Festival entry “Fast Food Nation” examines an America hooked on mass-produced conformity in its eats and just about everything else.
Adapted from the nonfiction best seller by Eric Schlosser, the film version creates a fictionalized narrative weaving together multiple characters. They are links in a food chain whose climactic question is “Do you want fries with that?”
With a cast that includes Greg Kinnear, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Bruce Willis, Avril Lavigne and Catalina Sandino Moreno, the film follows the travails of a fast-food monolith called Mickey’s as it copes with findings that its hot new burger, “The Big One,” is tainted with cow feces.
“Fast Food Nation” traces that scenario from the restaurant counter all the way back to the crowded pens where cattle are raised in assembly-line precision, including a gruesome slaughterhouse sequence that could put the heartiest meat-eaters off animal flesh for a while.
Shot at a Mexican slaughterhouse, the scene features graphic footage of cows being killed and butchered. The bloody imagery was necessary given the film’s message, said director Richard Linklater, who co-wrote the screenplay with Schlosser.
“I think that’s a reality everyone needs to know,” said Linklater, who directed “School of Rock” and “Dazed and Confused.” “We’ve become very separated, very divorced from where everything comes from. We have this delusion in our head: Oh, there’s this healthy little farm somewhere and they grow vegetables and they have a couple of chickens and a cow.”
“Fast Food Nation” is scheduled to debut in U.S. theaters this fall.
As filmmakers first approached Schlosser about a movie version, the expectation was that it would become a documentary. When the author hooked up with Linklater, it was Schlosser who suggested they transform it into dramatic form.
The result is a far-flung tale that meanders from the boardroom of Mickey’s to the U.S.-Mexico border, where immigrants cross illegally and find hazardous work in the company’s meat-processing plant, which is prone to mutilating accidents with machinery. [Click here to read the rest]
Tags: medium, patricia arquette, medium dreams, fast food nation, avril lavigne
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POSTED IN: Movies, Patricia Arquette
1 opinion for Fast Food Nation at Cannes Film Festival
patrick
Mar 19, 2008 at 2:10 am
just watched 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 health reasons.
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