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Movie Rating: 8 / 10

Inspired by the incendiary bestseller that exposed the hidden facts behind America’s fast food industry comes a powerful drama that takes an eye-opening journey into the dark heart of the All-American meal.
Richard Linklater‘s Fast Food Nation traces the birth of an everyday, ordinary burger through a chain of riveting, interlocked human stories – from a hopeful, young immigrant couple who cross the border to work in a perilous meat-packing plant, to a teen clerk who dreams of life beyond the counter; to the corporate marketing whiz who is shocked to discover that his latest burger invention – “The Big One” – is literally full of manure.
As the film traverses from pristine barbeque smoke labs to the volatile U.S.-Mexican border, it unveils a provocative portrait of all the yearning, ambition, corruption and hope that lies inside what America is biting into.
I thought Greg Kinear’s performance was awesome as he aptly translates, for the average moviegoer, how it feels to know something is -very- wrong althewhile risking your job if you were to “rock the boat” about it. Bruce Willis plays the rowdy business type who has everything to gain by keeping things just as they are, whichever dangers to human health it may pose. It’s all about the money, right?
Although fast food is often portrayed on screen, most viewers will probably have a hard time going back into a fast food chain to buy a burger since, after all, this isn’t a movie based on fiction, it’s actually heavily inspired (and casted) in real life.
A must see if you feel fast foods are the best of things for our collective future.
Tags: fast food, nation, usa, burgers, minimum wage, cattle, fiction
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In so many ways, this movie could’ve been made into a documentary but fortunately, the entertainment value is left untouched and this movie remains quite interesting.
For anyone used to eat in fast food chains, the content of this movie might turn out to be a powerful motivation, in and of itself, to look elsewhere for that next “tasty little lunch” ; )