Fast Food Nation

[Split Infinitive]

*ahem*

http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=708.0

Just tryin' to spread the Love.

[Ravi]

ooh, mildly positive!  now i can't WAIT to see this!  i have a feeling this is going to be a real lukewarm year for linklater fans!

Its his Art School Confidential.

*ahem*

[RegularKarate]

ooh, mildly positive!  now i can't WAIT to see this!  i have a feeling this is going to be a real lukewarm year for linklater fans!

*ahem*

http://wip.warnerbros.com/ascannerdarkly/

which keeps with the lukewarmocity

[MacGuffin]

'I've never been in the firing line like this before'
Director Richard Linklater is known for his gentle, Gen-X movies. Now he's taking on the American meat industry with Fast Food Nation. He talks exclusively to Xan Brooks
Source: The Guardian


Richard Linklater (left) with Eric Schlosser.

Richard Linklater's film Fast Food Nation ends on the killing floor, as cattle march placidly up a ramp to be slaughtered. We see them shot and shackled, sliced and diced. Grey loops of intestine come sweeping down the conveyor belt like some demented version of The Generation Game. Inside the cinema at Cannes, the audience groaned and covered their eyes.

Fast Food Nation is Linklater's filleted, fictionalised take on Eric Schlosser's 2001 bestselling exposé. The director worked with Schlosser on the script and then shot it at speed, with A-list actors (Bruce Willis, Greg Kinnear) camped out in a motel, and a Mexican slaughterhouse doubling for the abattoirs of Colorado. An outside bet for the Palme d'Or, the film marks the latest twist in a freewheeling career that has carried Linklater from the fringes of Austin, Texas to mainstream Hollywood and back again.

We are hiding out in the dark corner of a hotel bar. Linklater and Schlosser flew into Cannes a few hours earlier and are eager to hear how the press screening went. What did the audience make of that final scene? Did anyone run out screaming? The director is keyed up, excited about the prospects of a movie that dares lock horns with the giants of America's cheap meat industry. "I've never had a film that's been in the firing line like this before," he confesses. "I mean, I've made films that people have liked or disliked, but never anything like this. It's kind of fun, actually."

Schlosser strikes a more cautious note. "You say that now," he says gloomily. "Wait and see how you feel when the movie comes out." At home the author has been targeted by a website bankrolled by the food lobbies, and routinely finds his book readings disrupted by protesters. "Rightwing nuts," Linklater calls them.

It remains to be seen whether the film of Fast Food Nation will ruffle as many feathers as the book did. Undeniably, it does a fine job of converting Schlosser's source material into a multi-strand drama in the style of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, covering all aspects of food production, from the impoverished migrants who work the packing plants to the grinning executives in their sun-drenched boardroom. But the film is essentially a drama, not a documentary. Linklater suggests that this makes the message easier to swallow, arguing that an audience will respond better to a human story than a thicket of facts and figures. "Characters take you beyond the politics. You can watch a movie and like it without necessarily agreeing with what the director is saying." Schlosser concurs: "This is a fictional film, but the plot elements are all taken from real life," he says. "All of this really happened at one stage or another."

Even so, some major changes have been made. The star of Schlosser's book is McDonald's, but in the film the corporation has been relegated to the role of background artist, a name to be dropped in business meetings. Instead, the action focuses on a fictional fast-food chain called Mickey's, which we are led to believe is a little bit like McDonald's, except (of course) for the fact that it exploits its workforce and specialises in hamburgers that contain a high "faecal content".

Linklater and Schlosser insist that there is no way they could have found a bigger role for McDonald's. The fact that the brand crops up at all, they explain, is only down to their own perseverance. "It's one of the most frustrating things about making a film," says Linklater. "Out in the real world there is no avoiding these companies; they're shoving themselves down your throat every waking second. Then suddenly you make a film and you can't even put them in the background, or you could get sued."

If the film is at all critical, the situation is harder. "These days we can be sued for disparaging an industry. It's like it's a felony to say something bad." Linklater shakes his head. "I think they should make it a felony to criticise a film product. Particularly my film product. It's anti-American. I'd like to see people get sued if they wrote a bad review of my movie. If you can't say something nice you shouldn't say anything at all."

"We're joking about this, but it's true," says Schlosser. "You can't criticise these big corporations. If you do you're an anarchist, socialist, whatever."

I suspect, though, that Linklater has always relished his role as an anarchist-socialist-whatever. This is the man who name-tagged a generation with his 1990 breakthrough Slacker and who has since steered a wild, iconoclastic course through American cinema. His films are airy, loquacious, full of warmth and wit. One thinks of those star-crossed chatterboxes, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise, or the criss-crossing interactions of the teenage revellers from Dazed and Confused. "My plan B has always been to make a film about people who talk a lot," Linklater explains.

Now, at the age of 44, he is able to mix mainstream crowd-pleasers such as School of Rock with more ambitious projects. Such is his rate of productivity that he has two films showing at Cannes this year: A Scanner Darkly, his Philip K Dick adaptation, screens later this week.

Inevitably, our conversation circles back to the killing floor. Linklater tells me how Mexican abattoirs are much the same as American ones, except cleaner; how the workers in the US are all Mexican anyway - the only thing they had to change was the language on the signs. But there is something preying on his mind. With its twitching carcasses and yellow mounds of fat, the last scene of Fast Food Nation appears expressly designed to put the viewer off meat for life. The problem is that for Linklater, a vegetarian since his 20s, it nearly had the reverse effect.

"It was the craziest situation," he says. "So many of the crew came out saying, 'I will never eat meat again.' But maybe it was all the smells. The warm blood. I swear to God it must have activated some long-dormant enzymes in my stomach, because I came out smelling a medium-rare steak, straight off the grill."

He pauses to chew metaphorically over the implications. "And wouldn't that have been the ultimate failure of this film? If it turned me into a meat eater." By this point he is looking alarmed. "I wouldn't have eaten the steak," he insists, as much to himself as to me. "But for a second there I almost could have."

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer

[matt35mm]

Most of that content is straight from the book.  Kinnear seems to be playing a new exec who doesn't seem to know anything about the business that he's in... at least that's how the trailer makes it look.  That will obviously be a fabricated character.

I also got to see a 5 minute clip from the film at a Q&A with Linklater around a month ago.  That one had Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as siblings in a completely fictional scene.  As far as the stuff at the meat-packing plants and the fast food kitchens go, there are enough true stories in the book, and it looks like the movie will use much of them.

I saw a couple of frames in there from the meat-packing that look to be quite gruesome (i.e. the cows aren't all that get cut up).  We shall see.

[MacGuffin]

Fast Food Nation Pushed Back to November

Writer-director Richard Linklater's "A Scanner Darkly" is topping out around $5 million; it cost $8 million. It is also unlikely that his fictional adaptation of Eric Schlosser's indendiary 2001 food industry expose "Fast Food Nation" will be a slam dunk in a very crowded fall market. Fox Searchlight is moving the movie, which should boast some appeal to hip college audiences, back from October 20 to a November 17 platform release. Participant Productions (An Inconvenient Truth, Good, Night and Good Luck) is executive producing, so they'll help with political outreach on the movie. The way Linklater describes it, "Fast Food Nation" "is not a documentary, but a character study of the lives behind the facts and figures. I'm more interested in fiction than non-fiction. You get to the point through human storytelling."

[modage]

Just a gut feeling: 2006 will be a great year for Linklater.

ooh, mildly positive!  now i can't WAIT to see this!  i have a feeling this is going to be a real lukewarm year for linklater fans!

unfortunately for linklater fans and linklater himself i suppose it was more of a lukewarm year after all.  the film follows the Traffic (& Syriana) structure of examining a larger social issue by examining stories of the people whose lives it affects.  it zips back and forth between a few loosely connected storylines but fails to gather the emotional weight of those films.  i guess fast food just isnt as involving as drugs or oil, but most unfortunate is, even without reading the book, the film doesnt do anything that you would find surprising.  it doesnt uncover anything that most people likely wouldnt already know.  besides a SPOILER scene in the slaughterhouse that was pretty disturbing SPOILER there wasn't anything you would find shocking. i enjoyed the film, but i didnt think it was great. so with Scanner Darkly, it looks like he ended up hitting a couple doubles instead of knocking either one out of the park.

[last days of gerry the elephant]

i saw this today knowing absolutely nothing about the film other the information i saw on the poster

it was one of the most satisfying films i've seen this year. i loved it.

i'm surprised, skimming over the previous pages, that this has been getting lukewarm reviews.

the above post mentioned syriana and traffic. i think the comparisions are unavoidable. i really disliked syriana. but i felt this was far more interesting. the quality of the cast depth is outstanding. certain scenes are performed so wonderfully i couldn't quite believe it. great to see linklater back after the bad news bears remake which is barely worth mentioning. bring on a scanner darkly.

doubt i'll enjoy subsequent viewings nearly as much though.

highly recommended.

Finally a positive review, there's still hope!

[Ghostboy]

Wow! Between this and Pan's Labyrinth, I've found myself agreeing completely with modage twice in one week! It's an okay film, but it's not nearly as galvanizing as I (being in complete agreement with everything it represents) wish it were. The best scene in the movie is the one with Bruce Willis. Brilliant writing, great acting, really well directed, and it sums up pretty much everything about the film in ten minutes.

[MacGuffin]

Wow! Between this and Pan's Labyrinth, I've found myself agreeing completely with modage twice in one week!

It's all just a matter of time before 'rental' becomes a large part of your review vocabulary.

[Pubrick]

the quality of the cast depth is outstanding. certain scenes are performed so wonderfully i couldn't quite believe it.

these comments don't mean anything and the second sentence sounds like a contradiction (on top of not meaning anything).

[Xx]

...

[MacGuffin]

Tough ideas to swallow
Source: Los Angeles Times

"It's not just about the food," says writer-director Richard Linklater, still looking boyish at 46 in jeans and a black short-sleeved shirt as he lounged in the Driskill Hotel bar at last week's Austin Film Festival. "We always thought 'Fast Food Nation' was a state of mind."

Indeed. Linklater's ambitious new film, which he adapted from the bestselling 2001 nonfiction book "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal" with its author, Eric Schlosser, is the "Syriana" of happy meals. "Fast Food Nation" attempts to dramatize American culture's obsession with profits by illustrating the connections among illegal immigration, poor public health, the corporate monolith, student activism, suburban sprawl, the exploitation of workers, crystal meth addiction, the minimum wage, and, of course, the manufacture, packaging, marketing and consumption of fast food. In other words, the ideas explored in Schlosser's book have been super-sized.

A vegetarian for years, Linklater has long wanted to make a film about the plight of industrial workers. He's been unsuccessful in trying to make a passion project called "Rivethead," about an assembly line worker. He once did a comedy pilot about minimum-wage workers called "$5.15 an Hour" that he said wasn't picked up because HBO thought it was a "bummer." In films such as "Dazed and Confused," "Waking Life" and "Before Sunset," Linklater has specialized in meandering true-to-life character-driven narratives. "Fast Food Nation," drawing as it does on Schlosser's copious personal anecdotes, merely extends this tradition on a grander scale.

Linklater was a fan of Schlosser's work, but it hadn't occurred to him to create a film out of his most popular book. Then Schlosser pitched a fictional rather than a documentary treatment, and what Linklater thought would be a short meeting turned into a four-year collaboration. The film's (and book's) source of inspiration is Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," written at the turn of the previous century. Sinclair's novel detailed Lithuanian immigrants working in Chicago's meat-packing industry and sparked a trend toward a safer, more unionized blue-collar workforce — a trend that the film "Fast Food Nation," according to its makers, argues has retrogressed nearly to its exploitative beginnings on the backs of illegal immigrants.

Other disparate sources — the documentary "The Corporation," which explores its literally soulless approach to business, and sprawling film landscapes such as Robert Altman's "Nashville" and John Sayles' "City of Hope" — found their way into the feel of the film. (Linklater even referenced "Psycho" to sell his pitch to the studio, but not for the reasons you might think — it has to do with narrative structure.)

Schlosser and Linklater narrowed the scope of their script to three intersecting story lines: Don (Greg Kinnear), a naive executive from the fast-food giant Mickey's, is sent to Cody, Colo., to investigate contaminated meat at one of the company's plants; illegal Mexican immigrants (Wilmer Valderrama, Catalina Sandino Moreno and Ana Claudia Talancón) traverse the desert and enter the violence-, sex-, and drug-fueled maw of the American meat-packing machinery; and Amber (Ashley Johnson) is a student working at Mickey's who slowly awakens to the potential effects of her choices.

Though the film includes barbed references to the Patriot Act and corporate malfeasance, the writers were mindful of turning the dialogue too much toward the polemical. But a pack of self-righteous college students and Amber's funky, free-thinking uncle (Ethan Hawke) get a chance to articulate their power-to-the-people rebellion. Bruce Willis, who has a meaty cameo as the company's industry liaison, gives voice to a virtuoso speech that articulates the cold rationale of corporate interests without ever raising his voice.

Linklater saw each of the film's characters as a representation of a different stage in his life. Hawke's character, a former anti-apartheid activist, was inspired by an uncle who fed Linklater leftist cultural and political ideas in his youth. In his 20s, Linklater slogged for two and a half years on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. "I know what it's like to be at the absolute bottom of an industry, where you're the expendable labor," he says, acknowledging that it was never as bad as what some immigrants suffer. "That always informed my view of the world."

[gob]

I  saw it as part of the LFF and liked it. I think it got better as the film went on. There were moments though that stood out especially as being very well constructed and very affecting, the most obvious being
(maybe spoilerish...)                                                            the kill room.

The acting was all solid - Wilmer Valderrama being surprisingly good - with the exception of Avril Lavigne being rubbish. The writing was pretty fantastic too.
I asked Linklater a question at the q+a after the movie about if he found it challenging balancing all the different storylines in the film and he said it was always a concern and the biggest thing was having a film where your main character practically disappears halfway through.

Plus the day after I saw it I went to a Screen Talk thing at the NFT with Linklater talking about his filmmaking career et al which was great and then I got to meet him afterwards. He's one cool dude, happily hanging around to talk to random folks without being false or doing it to look good.