Review of Fast Food Nation (2006) by Iamhea. — 25 Nov 2006

This film makes "Supersize Me" look like the lightweight it truly is. From the opening sequence it is clear that the fast food health issues visible to most consumers are just the tip of the iceberg lettuce, as the camera shows us cattle herds that threaten the ecology and public health, exploited undocumented workers losing their limbs and sexual autonomy in sped-up, infected slaughterhouses, and cynical corporate officials who find a way to cover it up and make it all pay.

Certainly director Linklater owes a great debt to John Sayles' film "Lone Star," as well as to Stephen Frears' "Dirty Pretty Things," inasmuch as he has shown the interweaving of lives at multiple levels of the de facto race, class, nationality and corporate hierarchies, and yet has nonetheless managed to give his characters the depth and respect they deserve instead of representing them as cardboard stereotypes a la the film "Crash.

" The message of this film is that unaccountable corporate hierarchies must not be entrusted with decisions that affect the conditions of labor, justice and public health for entire communities of people.

If you don't like that message then you are drinking the Kool-Aid that is killing the organic, cooperative systems that underlie everything that works in this world.