fast food nation
After walking down the new releases for a good half hour I realized there was a flick i wanted to see. I had read the book and wanted to see how they adapted it to a film so I picked up this one. Kinnear is usually decent enough and could have canceled out Valderrama. I say could have because this one fell short in a way that wasn’t even seventies show related.
To start I’ll say it wasn’t all bad. I mean there were a lot of parts that hit home when it comes to exposing the disgusting business that is providing low-cost obesity. It has all the stomach-turning awesomeness you’d expect. The acting is pretty decent throughout and it’s a star-studded affair [[ even though they aren't exactly top shelf, they can still pull some weight ]]. It follows a couple storylines adequately. It’s saturated with facts and thought provoking. And it definitely had an anti-fast-food reaction.
It starts off well enough, following a group of illegal immigrants [[ the folk that get big-business salivating ]] and a migraine-inducingly ignorant marketing executive. The stories are compelling, but hard to get into because there is so much effort put into placing as many different stereotypical personalities in each as one hundred and sixteen minutes will allow. The cast of characters expands to its limits and then by the end comes back to the same four that seemed like protagonists in the beginning. They always remain secondary and tertiary, but the details they add become distracting.
The dialog is borderline-laughable at points. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt here because the book is dense. It’s heavy on facts and information that would be almost impossible to translate to film. The problem is they try so hard that it becomes cluttered and unrealistic. It plays out like the big-pharm commercials where the generic actors in lab coats wander through a campus discussing disjointed side-effects and miracle advances. There’s no realism and because of that it loses credibility.
I enjoyed the movie because there are bits and pieces of the exposé that this could have been. These things are actually going on and they’ve been documented. People that these characters are based on still work in the industry. The spinach and peanut butter scares of recent months prove this. It will only get worse as testing becomes more reliant on big-meat and less frequent. This movie uses stereotypical, over-the-top characters to try and represent these problems with the industry and by doing this strips them of believability.
I’m giving this the credit it deserves for taking a difficult adaptation and running with it, but I’m disappointed with what it could have been if they could have seen a simplistic, four plot, detailed, docu-drama as the better route.
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