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This Weeks Movie Reviews: Fast
Food Nation
Directed by Richard Linklater. Written by Eric Schlosser and Richard
Linklater. Cinematography, Lee Daniel. Music, Friends of Dean Martinez.
Starring Patricia Arquette, Bobby Cannavale, Paul Dano, Luis Guzmán,
Ethan Hawke, Greg Kinnear, Kris Kristofferson, Esai Morales, Wilmer
Valderrama and Bruce Willis. Fox Searchlight, 2006. R. 116 minutes.
There's a conflict at the heart of Fast Food Nation, the new film inspired by the Eric Schlosser book, and it isn't about whether you want fries with your order. Directed by Richard Linklater, who in recent years has been moving away from the slacker-type films that made him famous — Dazed and Confused and, well, Slacker among them — Fast Food Nation wants to melt your heart while raising your blood pressure at the same time. Never the most nimble of directors, Linklater has stuffed a surefire story of corporate corruption into a larger, melodramatic narrative of Mexican immigrants working at a meat processing plant. The result is a dull compromise between a soap opera and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Read more...
Apocalypto
Directed by Mel Gibson. Written by Gibson and Farhad Safinia. Cinematography,
Deam Semler. Music, James Horner. Starring Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez,
Raoul Trujillo, Gerardo Taracena and Mayra Serbulo. Touchstone Pictures,
2006. R. 139 minutes. At the small, speedily beating heart of Apocalypto is a story about a guy who just wants to get back to his wife. It's a familiar hero's journey, but in the strange vision of director Mel Gibson, it's story steeped in blood and gore, a tale set at what seems to be the end of the Mayan Empire, imagined as a fantasyland of violence. It's not the human sacrifices, the stabbings and the throat-slitting that are the problem; it's the carefully rendered way they appear on screen, more vital to the story than character or dialogue. Read more...
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