Mmm... Beef

I have a lot of respect for Richard Linklater. Most of his films have been really good, if not drop-dead amazing, especially in recent years. The "Sun-" pair of movies (Before Sunrise and Before Sunset), Waking Life, School of Rock... Hell, the only movie he's made recently that I missed was Bad News Bears, and that was the fault of shitty Singapore movie distributors who didn't care to bring it in, and not mine.

Which brings me to Fast Food Nation. Most movies are mediocre at best. It's not their fault. It's just the way of the business, just like how most books that are written are crap. Even though I subscribe to the train of thought that says that it's better to make a spectacularly awful movie than a mediocre, forgettable one - at least people will remember you better - it's not a crime to make a mediocre movie.

Unless you're Richard Linklater, that is.

And that's what exactly what Fast Food Nation is - mediocre, forgettable, disposable. Sadly and ironically, just like the very products in its name.

It's sprawling, with a large cast of characters and subplots, when it really needs to be sharp, concised and focused. As it is, I can't tell whether the focus is on the fast food industry, or the meat processing industry, or the lives of illegal immigrants, or one man's dilemma between doing the right thing or safeguarding his career.

Linklater is great at long, talky scenes like those involving a bunch of idealistic college students (the cow-releasing sequence is pure genius) or Ethan Hawke (is it just me, or is the guy in every Linklater movie?) as a concerned uncle. His observations on human (and corporate) behavior is also sharp and well-observed, like in a scene where a hotel receptionist goes through all the questions on her internal script without caring about the answers, and when a human resource executive (they really are the antichrist) is, well, being a human resource executive (i.e. pure evil). Especially delicious is an extended scene between shady guy Bruce Willis (oozing charm and slime in equal quantities) and truth-seeker Greg Kinnear that goes on far too long but is enjoyable as hell. But equally common are scenes in which information, facts and statistics are doled out to the audience in the form of exposition-ey dialogue - especially criminal in a Linklater film.

I haven't read Eric Schlosser's nonfictional bestseller on which this fictional film is based, but somehow I doubt it would go into as many irrelevant subplots. Enjoyable as they are, they're nonessential to the film and its arguments, and merely serve to pull everything down into a mush of decent ideas in need of better execution and focus. Here's hoping that A Scanner Darkly (which those fucking Singapore distributors seem to be ignoring) will be better.

Addendum: Funnily enough, I think I wasn't that affected by the cow-slaughtering scenes. Do Americans, used to seeing their meat in palatable styrofoam plates at the supermarket, react stronger to these than Asian or European audiences, who see bloody carcasses at every market they go to? Just a thought.