Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal  - the book:
From Publishers Weekly
Schlosser's incisive history of the development of American fast food indicts the industry for some shocking crimes against humanity, including systematically destroying the American diet and landscape, and undermining our values and our economy. The first part of the book details the postwar ascendance of fast food from Southern California, assessing the impact on people in the West in general. The second half looks at the product itself: where it is manufactured (in a handful of enormous factories), what goes into it (chemicals, feces) and who is responsible (monopolistic corporate executives). In harrowing detail, the book explains the process of beef slaughter and confirms almost every urban myth about what in fact "lurks between those sesame seed buns." Given the estimate that the typical American eats three hamburgers and four orders of french fries each week, and one in eight will work for McDonald's in the course of their lives, few are exempt from the insidious impact of fast food. Throughout, Schlosser fires these and a dozen other hair-raising statistical bullets into the heart of the matter. While cataloguing assorted evils with the tenacity and sharp eye of the best investigative journalist, he uncovers a cynical, dismissive attitude to food safety in the fast food industry and widespread circumvention of the government's efforts at regulation enacted after Upton Sinclair's similarly scathing novel exposed the meat-packing industry 100 years ago. By systematically dismantling the industry's various aspects, Schlosser establishes a seminal argument for true wrongs at the core of modern America. (Jan.) Forecast: This book will find a healthy, young audience; it's notable that the Rolling Stone article on which this book was based generated more reader mail than any other piece the magazine ran in the 1990s.

Fast Food Nation (2006) - the movie: a fictionalized feature film based on Eric Schlosser's bestselling nonfiction expose.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film three out of four stars and added, "Eric Schlosser's nonfiction 2001 best seller, Fast Food Nation, started life at this magazine, but the bucking maverick of a movie he has scripted with director Richard Linklater (A Scanner Darkly) is cut from a different side of beef. It's less an expose of junk-food culture than a human drama, sprinkled with sly, provoking wit, about how that culture defines how we live ...
 If the movie stayed on topic, we'd have a muckraking probe with roots back to Upton Sinclair's seminal 1906 book The Jungle and extending to Morgan Spurlock's 2004 doc Super Size Me. But Schlosser and Linklater are hunting bigger game. The shit in the burger is symptomatic of a larger contamination.
The film is brimming with grand ambitions but trips on many of them as some characters aren't given enough screen time to register and others vanish just when you want to learn more about them."
Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote, "Richard Linklater's rough-hewn tapestry of assorted lives that feed off of and into the American meat industry is both rangy and mangy; it remains appealing for its subversive motives and revelations even as one wishes its knife would have been sharper ... In the end, viewers waiting for an emotional and/or dramatic payoff will be disappointed. As a call-to-arms, it's highly sympathetic but surprisingly mild-mannered."
Trailer-
You can watch the full film here...

"I'm Here" by Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze's Robot Love Story “I’m Here” Available Online For FREE

                                                                                                         From FirstShowing.net:

   Remember that Spike Jonze directed short film that all of us were raving about from Sundance this year? Well, after a fairly short wait the film has arrived online in its entirety for your viewing pleasure. Titled "I'm Here", the short is about two robots who fall in love, set in a world a bit different from our own. It's kind of hard to describe, but it's a wonderful film, one of the few shorts I've ever felt compelled by enough to feature on the site. Absolut (who financed the film) has put a cap on how many people can watch it, so you'll have to hit the official website to see it, but I highly suggest checking it out. It truly is an amazing short!

  
The 30-minute short is a robot love story set in modern-day LA. It is a simple, charming tale of (robot) boy meets (robot) girl. I watched it online earlier today and was very impressed. The visual elements of the movie are truly amazing. The robots don’t look realistic by any stretch, but that does not matter. You get the feeling that these are real creatures, and you care about them.

http://www.imheremovie.com/

"Validation" - a fable about the magic of free parking

From IMDB:
Fabulous Way to Spend 16 Minutes!
I've lost count of how many times I've been grateful for YouTube. Today a friend sent me the link to this short and within seconds I knew it was special.

Validation is truly a gem.
There are so many superlatives I could use about Kurt Kuenne's short. The acting, direction, writing, etc., are all superb. But what really stands out is the movie's heart and simplicity. The story (a parable, really) is subtle, uplifting, inspirational--
T.J. Thyne is perfectly cast as Hugh Newman, the uber-naive parking booth guy who works at the end of a darkly lit hallway and validates customers parking tickets while validating their lives at the same time. Just like any protagonist in a movie, he hits his roadblock and loses his mojo for a while but soon finds himself again, after he finds life taking him in another direction and gets back on the trail of making people's lives better. He finds out in the end that the good deeds he had been doing for people in the past, that he thought were not changing anything or anybody, actually changed the lives of even the most hardened hearts and in turn find him the complete happiness that he had been searching for the whole time.


Kurt Kuenne did an AMAZING job with this film, period. From the finger-snappy acapella soundtrack to the directing, editing and cinematography; all of it is perfectly fit into this beautiful story.
Validation is a movie I believe everyone should see. It's funny, charming, and at the end of it all, a piece of joy. Look it up and watch it. I can guarantee you'll be glad you did.