Fast Food Nation

Director Richard Linklater’s love of the 1970s may have reached its zenith with this film, which would fit well with the paranoid classics Coppola, Pakula, and Altman made some thirty years ago. Adapting (with author Eric Schlosser) the controversial non-fiction account of the fast-food industry, he avoids the hysterical polemics of, say, Michael Moore, for a much more engaging—and infuriating—story. The film follows a teenaged worker at the Mickey’s chain undergoing a political awakening; a burger exec facing a crisis of corporate faith; and a group of Mexicans whose lives are wrecked so that we may eat cheaply. “The machine don’t give a shit,” one character laments, and like the cows in the meat-processing plant, the people of Fast Food Nation are, in fact, devoured by the system.