Fast Food Nation
Do you want lies with that?
Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear)—a marketing executive at Mickey's Fast Food Restaurant chain, home of "The Big One"—has a problem. Contaminated meat is getting into the frozen patties of the company's best-selling burger. To find out why, he'll have to take a journey to the dark side of the All-American meal.
Leaving the cushy confines of the company's Southern California boardroom for the immigrant-staffed slaughterhouses, teeming feedlots and cookie cutter strip malls of Middle America, what Don discovers is a "Fast Food Nation" of consumers who haven't realized it is they who are being consumed by an industry with a seemingly endless appetite for fresh meat.
Member Reviews
i didn;t really like it - FRISCOSAURAS
Perhaps we don't want to know these things and rather sit through a fluffy blockbuster so we can leave the theater still happy and still naive. And perhaps make a quick stop at McDonald's to top off a splendid feel good evening. Perhaps.
I'm just glad that I don't eat that kind of garbage that those fast food company's produceFast Food Nation is a sharp, satirical look at America's fast food industry. - aj79
Why would you make a book which is so based in non fiction into a fictional film? The subject just seemed perfect for a documentary. Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me was an interesting look into the fast food industry, but not nearly as interesting as a Fast Food Nation documentary could have been. Tangled in legal issues, it probably wasn't even considered a real possibility. And that's a shame because the world needs to see that documentary. And anyone who's read the book knows where the film will eventually head. A climax that lets us finally see what happens on the kill floor. It's a sequence that is so gruesome that it might even cause some to convert to become vegetarian. If you've seen those PETA videos, than you know what to expect. Fast Food Nation has a major clutter problem, and it prevents us from ever really knowing the people, let alone caring what becomes of them. It was never a good idea to take Eric Schlosser’s gripping page turner and adapt it into a fictional movie with intertwining stories. While it’s hard to bash a movie with such good intentions, it’s equally as difficult to offer any real reason to see it.Unique and Original - MikeB
This film gets an 'A' for being unique and original; I have not seen a movie like this one before. It does authentically capture a sense of the wryness and mundaneness of life in America (ubiquitous fast foods, hotels, super hi-ways, super-farms... ) It also captures people trying to find a way out.
There are three groups of these in the movie - the executives, the migrants and the cashiers. The story revolves around these three.
In brief the executives (Greg Kinnear) try to find out what is going on with the food they are making and selling. It is obvious they have little control and idea of what that entails - aside from the 40 cents per pound. This is the most chilling part of the story, particularly the conversations with Bruce Willis and Kris Kristofferson. The migrants (imported Mexicain workers)process the cattle and the cashiers sell us the burgers.
If you are expecting a coalescing of these three groups featured in movies like Crash and Pulp Fiction - well there isn't any - and I feel the movie is stronger for avoiding this convergence gimmick. However the film is meandering with a lot of conversations - most work, but some just seem like a lot of babbling. What is the point of this uncle talking with his niece - the cashier? We already know she doesn't want to work the cash for the rest of her life - it's overkill to have a 10 minute conversation between uncle, niece and her brain-dead mother to tell us this.
Member Reviews
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i didn;t really like it - FRISCOSAURAS
Perhaps we don't want to know these things and rather sit through a fluffy blockbuster so we can leave the theater still happy and still naive. And perhaps make a quick stop at McDonald's to top off a splendid feel good evening. Perhaps.
I'm just glad that ...Fast Food Nation is a sharp, satirical look at America's fast food industry. - aj79
Why would you make a book which is so based in non fiction into a fictional film? The subject just seemed perfect for a documentary. Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me was an interesting look into the fast food industry, but not nearly as interesting as a Fast ...Unique and Original - MikeB
This film gets an 'A' for being unique and original; I have not seen a movie like this one before. It does authentically capture a sense of the wryness and mundaneness of life in America (ubiquitous fast foods, hotels, super hi-ways, super-farms... ) It also ...