In other words, when Amber and her newfound comrades sit around the dorm debating strategy and raging against the machine, they are attacking one version of the American dream while embodying another. The only thing Amber wants more than to change the world is to get out of Cody, and one of the filmвЂ™s quiet insights is that these two desires - to fight the system and to win by its rules - are not necessarily incompatible, though they may seem contradictory. Ashley Johnson is completely convincing as Amber, the striving high school student whose idealism is the flip side of her ambition. Kinnear is, yet again, the All-American dad and solid citizen, at once a paragon and a parody, thoroughly decent and just a bit sleazy. It helps that the performances are generally strong. Its loose, digressive rhythm keeps it tethered to reality, while the dialogue and the easy pace of the scenes allow the characters to register as individuals, not just as types. Curiously enough, the talkiness is what saves the movie from turning into a lecture. His most characteristic movies - вЂњSlacker,вЂќ вЂњBefore Sunset,вЂќ вЂњWaking LifeвЂќ - consist largely of unfettered, idiosyncratic talk, and вЂњFast Food NationвЂќ is thick with debate, argument, rumination and repartee. Linklater is a nimble and versatile director, but what he does best - what he seems to like most - is to film people in conversation. And a teenage burger-slinger (who works at one of DonвЂ™s franchises after school) undergoes a crisis of conscience when she falls in with a group of anticorporate activists from a nearby college. Meanwhile, a group of Mexican immigrants, having crossed the border illegally, arrives in Cody (Don unknowingly drives by the van transporting them) and takes up dangerous, stomach-turning jobs at the meat-processing plant. Don Anderson pokes around in fictional Cody, Colo., trying to balance his search for the truth with an apparent desire not to do anything that might hurt his career. LinklaterвЂ™s film tells multiple stories, which radiate like spokes from the hub of a central theme. In what has become the preferred cinematic method for addressing complex social issues - see also вЂњCrash,вЂќ вЂњTrafficвЂќ and вЂњBabel,вЂќ among others - Mr. Burroughs once contemplated вЂњa frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork,вЂќ and вЂњFast Food NationвЂќ aims to produce a similar moment - to shock, to demystify and to force a kind of horrified, questioning clarity. If itвЂ™s true that we are what we eat, then how, this film asks, do we even know who we are? The writer William S. Schlosser have really undertaken a much deeper and more comprehensive critique of contemporary American life. While the climactic images of slaughter and butchery - filmed in an actual abattoir - may seem intended to spoil your appetite, Mr.

It is didactic, yes, but itвЂ™s also dialectical. Which is too bad, because вЂњFast Food Nation,вЂќ while it does not shy away from making arguments and advancing a clear point of view, is far too rich and complicated to be understood as a simple, high-minded polemic. вЂњMost people donвЂ™t like to be told whatвЂ™s best for them,вЂќ says Bruce Willis in a sly, brilliant, single-scene cameo, and the suspicion that the movie is doing just that may provoke some reflexive resistance. A similar response was evident last spring in Cannes, where several American journalists bragged (or at least joked) about heading for the local McDonaldвЂ™s after the вЂњFast Food NationвЂќ screening, as if to prove they had resisted its lessons. Hence the impulse to point out that contaminated leafy greens have recently sickened more people than dirty meat. Linklater, dwells on conditions in the feed lots and slaughterhouses where future hamburgers live and die, it can plausibly, if a bit glibly, be interpreted as a brief for vegetarianism. SchlosserвЂ™s best-selling investigation of the industrial food chain and directed by Mr. Since the movie, adapted by Richard Linklater and Eric Schlosser from Mr. coli bacteria - вЂњfecal coloform counts off the charts!вЂќ - in his companyвЂ™s beef supply. If you go to see вЂњFast Food NationвЂќ with a group of friends, there is a good chance that someone - the smart-alecky contrarian thereвЂ™s one in every crowd - will bring up the subject of spinach.Д®arly in the film a fast-food executive named Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear) is dispatched to Colorado to investigate reports of E.

Don 2006 movie review