movie minute

Nation Of Choice: Another "important message" movie yet this one is quite up to par. Fast Food Nation (R) is a movie which is meant to show how shady, unsavory and cutthroat the fast food business really is. The movie is fiction but is loosely adapted from the book of the same name by Eric Schlosser (he was also a producer and writer on the film) which is actually a non-fiction book detailing the beginning and rise of fast food and how its made and the impact it has had on the country. The movie follows Raul (Wilmer Valderrama,the fey sounding Fez from That 70's Show) and Sylvia (the wonderful Catalina Sandino Moreno from Maria Full Of Grace) as they cross the border from Mexico and end up in Colorado and find jobs in a meat packing plant. Valderrama does his best laconic macho man impersonation complete with cowboy hat.

Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear) is a marketing manager at Mickey's (a not so veiled swipe at McDonald's) who is sent to Colorado to investigate the meat packing plant after too much feces is found in the meat used at the restaurant. More than a few jokes are made in reference to this which would be funny if it wasn't so gross.

Amber (Ashley Johnson from Growing Pains) plays Amber, a high school student who works at a Mickey's. The three stories are flimsily woven together and I kept thinking I was watching three separate movies. There were several scenes that were too long and one very disturbing scene at the meat packing plant; I'll never look at a cow the same way again. If there is a standout in this film, it would be Bobby Cannavale (Will & Grace) who steams up the screen as the lothario boss at the meat packing plant and plows his way through the pretty girls at the plant, including Sylvia. Nation is way too preachy and just didn't resonate with me. Stick with the book: It's an insightful, incisive and quite an eye-opening look at the fast food industry, how it got started and how it won't stop. The book is wayyyy better.

Bags of popcorn (out of 5): 1.5

paul