Fast Food Nation (2006)

While I admire writer/director Richard Linklater's intentions in all of his films and while I also agree on many of his posits, I find his films to sermonize a tad too much. The stories are interesting enough, we don't need to be lectured 8 times in a 2 hour movie.

This film has over a dozen main characters who play various roles connected to a meat processing plant - from the fast food worker to the rancher to the immigrant workers who cut the meat to the advertising executive. The thrust of the film is that since meat is such a big business, there isn't anyone big enough to control the quality of the meat, so it's bound to be subpar healthwise - plus the workers are treated like E. coli generators.

The beginning of the film, as all films are allowed to, contains expository elements, but it doesn't stop there, it continues to explain everything, veiling the sermon with too many weak stories, though the immigrant one is compelling when it makes it cyclical appearance.

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