Bobby Cannavale and Yareli Arizmendi in "Fast Food Nation," Fox Searchlight, 2005

"Fast Food Nation" (2006)

Based on Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal"

In the audio commentary for "Fast Food Nation," Richard Linklater boasts that the film is not a very faithful adaptation of Eric Schlosser's muckraking expose of the fast food industry. But most of the rest of the commentary track is given over to pointing out the film's accuracy and realism. It's especially true of the sequences set inside a conglomerated meat-packing plant that were filmed at a working Mexican slaughterhouse during regular business hours. Since the abattoir wouldn't shut down while they filmed, actors mingle on the disassembly line with real employees, and their dialogue was recorded on Super 16mm cameras without the benefit of lighting equipment. When you think about it, no doc could gain access to the places the Linklater's "Fast Food Nation" goes -- the chemical labs where new fast food flavors are concocted, the Mexican-American border where illegal immigrants risk their lives for a chance to risk their lives cleaning industrial equipment for $80 bucks a day -- and no interview subjects would say the things on the record that many of these characters do (like the fact that there's "shit in the meat"). To some degree, that makes this fiction film a more faithful reflection of Schlosser's book, and particularly the author's attitude about fast food, than any documentary could ever be.

It's Obvious This is Based on a Non-Narrative Nonfiction When... the film reaches the cow snuff film climax, where Linklater uses hauntingly graphic footage of real cattle being slaughtered. It's hard to imagine a film that wasn't based on a tell-all book going to such visceral extremes to make clear where exactly ground beef patties come from.

Based on Wendy Northcutt's "The Darwin Awards" series

The Darwin Awards "commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool...[by eliminating] themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species' chances of long-term survival." "The Darwin Awards" books by Wendy Northcutt are simply collections of the most extravagantly stupid of these numbskulls, like the guy who placed a lit firecracker between his butt cheeks, fell on it, and blew his reproductive organs to smithereens. The movie adaptation of the book concocts a flimsy and entirely too quirky narrative to hang reenactments of famous Darwin Award winners past -- it involves Joseph Fiennes and Winona Ryder as a pair of mismatched investigators traversing the country looking for Darwin Award winners in order to create a predictive profile for their insurance company employers -- but give director Finn Taylor credit for inspired casting. The roster of idiots includes Judah Friedlander, Tom Hollander and, as a man who straps a rocket engine to his car in an attempt to break a land speed record, David Arquette, who crashes and burns while screaming "I fucking did something!" a nice summation indeed for a film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to largely negative reviews and wound up going straight to video.

It's Obvious This is Based on a Non-Narrative Nonfiction When... you discover the sheer number of distractions piled onto the film to stretch it to feature length. Besides the numerous Darwin Award reenactments, there's also an ongoing murder mystery, flashbacks to the main character's childhood, a running gag about sporks, Wilmer Valderrama as a student filmmaker making a documentary about Fiennes' character, and cameos by the Mythbusters, Metallica and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Somewhere, Robert McKee is crying.

[Additional photos: Robert Morse in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," MGM, 1967; Gene Wilder in "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* (But You Were Afraid to Ask)," MGM, 1972; Dylan Bruno in "The Anarchist Cookbook," Freedonia Productions, 2002; Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried, Lacey Chabert, and Rachel McAdams in "Mean Girls," Paramount Pictures, 2004; David Arquette in "The Darwin Awards," Icon Entertainment, 2005]

Name (Required)

Email Address (Required, not displayed)

URL

Type your comments here...

Looie

I love IFC. But in the article titled "There's no Story in the Book," you've mistakenly listed David Morse instead of Robert Morse as the actor in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." I appreciate seeing the award -winning foreign films on your channel. Thanks for putting something interesting on my television.