by ·Comments Off on Fast Food Nation (2006, Richard Linklater)

Fez from That 70’s Show and his girlfriend Maria Full of Grace sneak over the border with Luis Guzmán’s help, and they get jobs in the meat plant. Chrissy “Growing Pains” Seaver works at the McSomethingBurger after school where she has management potential and hopes of college. Oscar-nominated Greg Kinnear is a McSomething PR executive trying to clear up some rumors and student studies regarding shit in the meat.

Fez gets hurt on the job, Maria’s sister gets drugged up and has lots of sex with her supervisor, Maria gets away from the meat plant for a while but ends up back there working on the kill floor. Whole American dream thing doesn’t work out as planned.

Chrissy gets a visit from her inspirational rebel uncle Ethan Hawke, who turns her against the McSomethingBurger, leading her to quit her job and organize an attempted freedom raid on the local cow ranch.

Greg gets to interview two colorful, obstinate characters. Indie rancher Kris Kristofferson tells him that the meat plant is filthy and deceptive, and pally meat-packer/restaurant liason Bruce Willis basically tells him to fuck off and not go digging around anymore.

Avril Lavigne is in the movie, but I don’t know who she plays. Far as I can tell, she’s only in there in order to give people an easy way to ridicule the movie when I tell ’em I saw it… like Lindsay Lohan in A Prairie Home Companion. Ethan Hawke serves the same purpose, but I kinda like him.

Mostly an easygoing picture, feels pretty comfy to watch, except when illegal Mexican immigrants are getting their legs chewed off by the meat machines. The shit-in-the-meat stuff was of course no big deal since I’ve read the source book and stopped eating McSomething. Despite what any lefty film critics might shout, it seems a minor Linklater movie, way below the Scanner Darkly / Before Sunset level. An admirable picture, well done, would’ve been cool if it’d been a hit and exposed the ideas & research of the book to malls across America, but it died quickly and quietly instead.

Katy didn’t watch it but wanted to.

by ·Comments Off on A Scanner Darkly (2006, Richard Linklater)

Yay, exactly lives up to expectations. Great adaptation of the book, great casting and animation and interpretation. Which means it gets fully depressing at the end, and makes me sad just to think about it. Sits inside the mind of a drug addict and tears his mind apart, turns it into not just a paranoid government conspiracy but a small-scale personal tragedy. Amazingly, unexpectedly, Linklater casts his jovial stoner hero from Dazed & Confused as the first addict whose mind falls apart… seems like a personal comment thrown into what is otherwise PK Dick’s vision (even including Dick’s list of dedications from the end of the book).

“We were all very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief.” “There is no moral to this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were.” – PK Dick

by ·Comments Off on The Newton Boys (1998, Richard Linklater)

More likeable than I’d expected. Don’t know why I thought it’d be a boring movie. Maybe just soured on the whole “western” thing after seeing The Wild Bunch and not liking it.

Anyway. Matthew “Willis” McConaughey is an alright thief with his explosives-expert partner, but could use a few more dependable men, so calls in his brothers Skeet “Joe” Ulrich, Ethan “Jess” Hawke, and eventually Vincent “Dock” D’Onofrio. They rob a whole ton of banks successfully, and finally pull off the biggest railroad heist in history, getting away with some millions of dollars and five bullets in Dock, who I couldn’t believe survived it. Eventually all get caught after the railroad job and get off with light sentences and live to a ripe old age.

Newton Boys

Completely fun, convincing movie that just gets better as it goes on. Great court scene, great ending and credits, lovely antiheroes, everything that Ocean’s Twelve wanted to be – a crime movie where the criminals are having such a good time that the audience gets caught up in in too. Don’t know why it’s got such a bad rap on the IMDB (5.7). I’d see it again.

Newton Boys

by ·Comments Off on Dazed and Confused (1993, Richard Linklater)

Not as Altmanesque as I’d first considered… just a lot of easily distinguishable characters in an ensemble piece. Should be easy, but hardly anyone can pull it off.

Dazed and Confused

I was barely two when the seventies ended. Avoided this movie for so long because I thought it was meant only for stoners and/or seventies kids wanting to relive their stoner and/or seventies days. But not having lived through that era myself, I can still tell this is a damned brilliant movie. Captures the high-school experience yes, but captures so MANY experiences, and character types, and so well, it’s almost an unbelievably good movie, one for the ages. Better even than most Linklater movies. I think. Better watch it again before making any sweeping declarations (“best movie of the nineties, better than Dead Man, etc”).

Dazed and Confused

No real point in outlining plot, since story wasn’t the point. No real point in outlining characters… just see it again sometime. Wiley Wiggins was great. Now I feel bad that I’m the last person to see this movie… somehow got it mixed up with Reality Bites or something. Now I wonder if I’d like Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Or Rock and Roll High School.

Dazed and Confused