has stuck with me over the past few weeks in ways that more accomplished, less ambitious movies sure haven't. There's a larger discussion here worth having, one about the emptiness of our crap franchise culture and how every main drag in every American town now looks almost exactly identical, with interchangeable register jockeys slinging the same corporate office-approved scripted greetings like robots. I was quite taken with Ethan Hawke's small role as something of a self-styled conscientious objector and I appreciated the way he addressed the nagging question of what on Earth you're supposed to do with all this information after you've been shocked out of your stupor.
It's telling that Kinnear simply throws up his hands and walks out of the movie somewhere around the halfway point, and his final interaction with that chirpy, blank hotel clerk hit a note of despair that's haunted me far more than any of the graphic slaughterhouse sequences. (Although I'd be lying if I said I could bear to eat a hamburger for couple days after seeing this flick.) Also, that Bruce Willis cameo is one for the ages.
: Man, I'm glad you found a unifying theme to all this unfocused muckraking as I'm still not certain of why the film was even made. My problems were less with the film's aesthetics than with the self-congratulatory tone that permeated much of the film's second half (when, as you pointed out, Greg Kinnear's storyline comes to an abrupt halt). Linklater's meandering, just shootin'-the-shit style of presenting half a dozen different storylines plays a lot better when all that's on the line is the squirm factor of how many microbes of cow excrement are in your hamburger meat or just how disgusting the oily-faced slacker kids behind the fry cooker really are.
That Willis scene is as effective as it is because it lays out the situation in terms that are repulsively callous, but also a little pragmatic. Basically, it's always been this bad; the only difference is we just we know about it now. Watching Kinnear's character abandon his short-lived social consciousness to avoid making waves and go promote a new hamburger is the sort of commonplace, stinging defeat that keeps these corporations bringing in billions every year.
The closer the film hews to this sort of death-by-a-thousand-pinpricks pessimism, the more effective it is. But of course, this can't just simply be a film about how horrible fast food is for you (I think Morgan Spurlock covered that one already), so it casts a super-wide net around every troubling issue that Linklater's currently working his head around these days, including drug abuse by immigrant workers, unsafe conditions at the meat packing factory, the disappearance of the American rancher, and selling-out your beliefs. By the time we get to Catalina Sandino Moreno bartering with her body in order to get an extra shift at the meat factory you realize we're a long way from spores in the chuck.
Employing documentary footage of a real slaughterhouse as a backdrop for the further indignities suffered by the film's illegal immigrant characters is exploitive and after-the-fact, a clumsy stab at sweeping relevance for a film that just doesn’t have the legs to support it. feels like it was made by Avril Lavigne and Lou Taylor Pucci's know-it-all, activist college students, wedded to the notion that flailing about in a misguided effort for change is the same thing as actually accomplishing something. This isn't filmmaking; it’s an op-ed column in an Alt-Weekly.
: You'll find no argument here on the Mexican laborer storyline, which felt so diagrammatic and forced that I could call every tragic event that was going to occur three scenes ahead of time. The only angle that really worked for me was the sadness of how tacky and empty their dream-vision of America was, culminating in a romantic night out at a lousy chain restaurant eating crummy frozen food. But I did breathe a big sigh of relief at the Lavigne and Pucci sequences simply because these kids didn't, in fact, know it all… they only thought they did, in some terribly amusing ways.
Was the "the most patriotic thing we can do right now is violate the Patriot Act" line actually supposed to be taken seriously? I doubt it. Remember, their grand dorm-room scheme to "liberate" the cattle provides the movie's most hilarious moment, as well as the kind of potent visual metaphor that sums up the picture: floundering helplessly before nation of cows who would prefer to remain in their pens.
posted by Keith Uhlich at 5:00 PM has stuck with me over the past few weeks in ways that more accomplished, less ambitious movies sure haven't.
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