The speeding and slowing of things, set to ominous music

A friend of mine came and plunked herself down in the seat next to me after the second of two experimental film shorts programs that I've now watched. I hadn't seen her in the audience previously... my brand new earring had just broken and I was duly concerned with fixing it, sans pliers. You know, I used to carry pliers with me everywhere. And yards of steel wire. When I'd ride the trains back and forth between my college campus and Manhattan, I'd sit there and make hundreds upon hundreds of these little wire sculptures. During that project, my wrists were constantly torn to shreds. Rough-cut metal wire has sharp ends. I've never been shy about shedding my own blood for creative endeavors, have I? But I suppose, appearing as though I'd tried to off myself with a Daisy razor doesn't so much say "sacrifices for her art" as much as it says "participates in a half-hearted malaise." (Um. Consider this paragraph an topical anomaly of this post, yeah?)

Anyway, the title of this post is a (terribly reduced and probably hopelessly misquoted) paraphrase of what my friend said her reaction to the experimental shorts was. And seen en masse, she's right. It DOES seem as though, if one were to define the concept of "experimental films", based on this year's NaFF offerings alone, one would have to concede that there is a great deal of screwing with speed settings and eerily percussive music in them. However, I attribute these commonalities to the venue, rather than the actual films. It's tough to watch a whole bunch of this stuff at once. They're non-narrative, so there's not much on which you could hang a hat. Some of them are long and pointedly repetitive. They are often hypnotic. If you've been running, as I have, from the second that first dog nose inserts itself in some very personal part of your body (usually it's either into an armpit or between my buttcheeks... I love how dogs have no boundaries, eh?) every morning of your "vacation", it can be a little tricky to maintain consciousness throughout. (Falling asleep in public is getting to be a recurrent motif with me, isn't it? Perhaps I should break my only-one-cup-of-coffee-per-day rule. To hell with my fucking lumpy breasts!)

But if I'm going to be fair, I feel as though it's really quite necessary to forget about all the rest as I watch each one. Honestly, one of the real boons of getting to go to film festivals is that you get to see some of this weird stuff. It's not as though you'd even begin to know where to look for it on YouTube as most of it is so abstract that it's virtually unsearchable. But it interests me greatly that film, as a medium, can be used to do something that is neither narrating stories, nor reportage. So, in the interest of taking each one within only its own context, I'm going to try to plow through some snapshot analyses of each one and I hope this post doesn't get too fatiguingly long.

The first series of experimental shorts was screened on Saturday. It contained a handful of films from the Canyon Cinema archives, marking the 45th anniversary of Canyon-- which is the premier distributor of experimental film. Here's the roster:

Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, director, 1998): This one is probably the most easily digestible short in the program. And, as it was a little respite from all the more painterly stuff, it was very easy to fall in love with it. Basically, the director took little clips from this old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland film and edited them to completely bizarre and often hilarious effect. The Film Festival's program listing book give this synopsis: "Arnold remixes a[n]....Andy Hardy film to form an erotic Oedipal musical." And that's kind of accurate... but it's more than that, too. At one point, you hear Mickey Rooney yell, from off camera, "I'm coming!" and then you watch a clip of Judy Garland, as she is supposedly about to start singing, but the clip is seamlessly stopped, rewound, restarted, stopped, rewound, restarted such that Judy Garland appears to be having a big ol' sighing spasm.Even putting aside the jokes, though, the craft of the thing is truly remarkable. The editing is so smooth and precise that you really can't help but marvel at it.

Autumn Leaves (Donna Cameron, 1994): This one is a paper emulsion film that uses some shots of a family playing in some leaves. But it goes way down deep into the grains of color in the film itself. This one reminded quite a lot of a series of work by the artist Roni Horn that I saw in a gallery in Chelsea years and years ago. She had taken some photos of oceans waves or something and had blown them up so big that you could actually see how the points of pigment in the photograph itself separated when blown huge and then fused together in more distant iterations of the print to create the image that registered as something the eye could understand. This one was only 6 minutes long, which is good, because it was pretty for a minute, but would have been boring if it had lasted any longer.

China Girls (Michelle Silva, 2006): The blurb in the book says that this one is supposed to be some commentary on women and the aesthetics of fashion. It takes what appear to be 1970s-era film stills of women with skin tone palettes under their faces and intersperses them with those 9, 8, 7, 6 countdown things such as you might see at the beginning of film strips. If commentary was attempted, I'm not real sure it was achieved. The whole thing felt a little underfleshed, perhaps.

Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (Stan Brakhage, 1991): Stan Brakhage is a pretty huge name in experimental film and I was quite excited to see this piece. I've been aware of his name for some time, but have been feeling underexposed to his actual work. This one did not disappoint. The blurb says he used a fancy-pants hand-painting technique to "approximate the hypnagogic process whereby the optic nerves resist grotesque infusions of luminescent light," Aside from wondering after the redundancy of the phrase "luminescent light," I really don't know what that means. "Hynogogic" means "intending to induce sleep," though-- so, now I don't feel so bad about being sleepy through much the program. In any case, this film is really and truly visually beautiful. It's like a kaleidoscopic look at a melting Tiffany window, perhaps. Simultaneously liquidy and glassy, with some shadowy intimations of the macabre. A lovely exercise in expressionism. Remind me later to further investigate Brakhage via NetFlix.

Eaux D'Artifice (Kenneth Anger, 1953): At 12 minutes, this one bordered on too long. A woman wearing period costume and a massive feathered headdress trots through a complex infrastructure of staircases and fountains in an Italian garden. I'm not entirely sure what's experimental about this film, other than the fact that it's non-narrative. It was pretty, I guess, despite the extremely grainy film quality. Perchance it went over my head. I don't know.

Ellipses (Frede Devaux, 1999): This one is apparently made from taking found footage, cutting it up and sewing the strips back together. And it's supposed to convey something about "celebratory apocalypse". To me, it conveyed film footage, cut up and sewn back together. It made for some visual interest, sure, but I cock an eyebrow to its proposed message-y-ness.

Georgetown Loop (Ken Jacobs, 1997): This one takes some old 1905 footage of a train running through the Rockies and runs it in mirror image to itself, then turns it upside down and loops the whole thing over and over and over and over for 11 minutes. It's sort of blinding and snowy and a mountain appears to eat the train and then itself. OK. Now what?

Kaleidoscope and Color Flight (Len Lye 1935/1938): These two shorts are cheerful little color studies set to Cuban dance music. They look a lot like animation as they're basically hand-painted spots, splotches and color fields that swim and wave at you until they resolve themselves into some advertising slogans for cigarettes and for an airline, respectively. Apparently, Len Lye was one of the pioneers of camera-less filmmaking experiments, so these tickled my yen for film history. I'm not sure how else I might ever have seen such things.

And the last in this program was Psalm III: Night of the Meek (Phil Solomon, 2003): The blurb calls this thing a kindertotenlied. Oh, how I love the German language. Not only do they have words that mean evil twin (doppelganger... is this really such a problem for Germans that they actually need an independent word for it?) and taking joy in the misery of others (schadenfreude), but they have a word that means "song for the death of children." Unlike the intrinsically humorous Yiddish, in which every insult is a synonym for cock (a fact that makes me giggle relentlessly), the German language grunts along like every curmudgeonly stereotype one could imagine. Anyway, this film mostly feels like an interminable 23 minutes of silvery-looking acid bubbles on a black surface. Occasionally a recognizable image of a swastika or some hatted Gestapo marchings or an old button emerges from the sweeping silver winds. But again, it's painterly and abstract and quite beautiful, but it's an effort to remain patient with it for nigh on half an hour.

So then, the second experimental short program was screened on Sunday afternoon. Every year, NaFF puts together a show they call Film Without Boundaries and last year, sadly, the screening conflicted with something else I'd wanted to see. But this year, I managed to drag my mom with me and I think I liked this program better than the archival Canyon one. It contains a selection of the best of this past year's filmic experiments and, despite the slowing and speeding and ominious music, I really do think it showed pretty great variety.

The Drift (Kelly Sears, 2008): This film is a coy, ironic paean to slackerishness. I think. It reminds me of a Dean Young poem. It takes some vintage photographs of people working for NASA and tells a curious story about the siren song of outer space and, I guess, posits that song as responsible for the counter-culture revolution of the 60s. It has a lovely lyrical narration that is at once foreboding and nonchalant.

Sera/Sera (John Murphy, 2007): The director of this one was in the audience and, during his Q&A, he explained the process through which this film was made-- and frankly, I didn't really follow it at all, so full of technical jargon it was. But he said he made it to prove a point to his students at Pratt: you don't need a camera to make an interesting film. He took some old newsreels, I think, and some atomic bomb footage, layered it, set it to a reggae remix of "Que Sera Sera" and voila! A little anti-WMD-proliferation film! Ah, what would the world be with Macs?

Number One (Leighton Peirce, 2006): I think this one was my mom's favorite. Indeed, it was a beautiful collage of glowing water, wheat, grasses, fire and human body images. It's both atmospheric and tactile. My mom, who's currently deeply immersed in her own painting projects, doubtlessly responded to its references to more static imagistic arts.

Dig (Robert Todd, 2007): When was the last time you actually took note of the urban hieroglyphs of the construction site? You know, those little spray-painted arrows and markers of other sorts that all say, "Dig here!" or "Don't dig here!" Well, this film runs a rapid montage of those little doodles over a rhythmically edited recording of jackhammers. And then in the middle of it, it splices in some footage of strobe-lighted flowers. It appears to suggest a simple, if vague, environmentalist message of some sort. I do wish it had articulated its point just a little more clearly, but it was only 3 minutes long, so I don't know what I'd expected.

96 (Ariana Gerstein): Gerstein is one of the co-directors of my all-time fave documentary, Milk in the Land, that I saw at last year's festival. I know, I know, I know... I talk about how much I heart that movie all the time. But now, I can see something of the division of labor that went into its making. Monteith McCollum, the other director of that movie, is clearly the narrative structure guy. One of his other films, Hybrid, is stylistically interesting, but lacks the facility with stylistic technique that Gerstein brings to the table. This little short of hers, essentially an abstracted portrait of a woman's life, between the ages of 6 and 96, is just gorgeous. She's devised a very particular method for handling time-lapse photography and animated overlay with which I'm totally in love. It's creepy and Romantic and very recognizably hers.

Light Is Waiting (Michael Robinson, 2007): The idea behind this film makes me laugh-- probably quite a bit more than the actual film did. It takes an episode of the ever-insipid Full House and makes it eat itself. It begins with a straight, unchanged scene in which DJ and Kimmie Gibbler try to take the living room television upstairs, but accidentally drop it over the banister. And then it explodes the narrative, using footage from the episode in which the family went to Hawaii (or some such locale wherein they could wear a lot of floral clothing). And quickly, the whole thing devolves into a hell-scaped incestuous orgy in which Uncle Jesse becomes the multi-armed Hindu demon-king. He's, for sure, the ring-leader of this luau-turned-nightmare. And whichever Olson twin was on duty that day becomes Chucky (c'mon, it's not that big a stretch, is it?). Bob Sagat begins making out with himself and Lori Laughlin remains beautiful... which, of course, means that all her mirror-imaged hair-swinging does little other than set her up as sacrificial virgin in this little rite. There are loads of flashing lights and very distorted images, but it is, indeed, a proper come-uppance for those of us who *might* have had just a little crush on DJ when we were 11. I'm just saying. I'm not proud of my preteen television viewing choices, but at least I can admit to them at this here 20-year remove.

Sevilla [arrow, open parens, infinity symbol, close parens] 06 (Olivo Barbieri, 2006): Please forgive my butchering of the title of this thing, but Blogger won't let me insert symbols. A bunch of slightly smeared aerial footage of the city of Sevilla. The blurb says, "a tale about the perception of Europe in Africa from the vantage point of an airplane." Huh? I really missed the part about Africa, as literally, this is nothing but aerial video of the city of Sevilla, with the edges of the frame kinda blurred out. It's well edited and, again, we've got some of the eerie percussive music going on, and I thought it was visually interesting-- I thought it was kinda cool that I recognized some buildings I visited when I was in Sevilla several years ago-- but I have no idea how this thing is a comment of Afro-European relations.

Harrachov (Matt Hulse, Joost Van Veen, 2006): It's hard to avoid cuteness when you animate inanimate objects. In this film, we follow the story of a bunch of junk-- tin cans, an abandoned tricycle, some other crap-- as they are all inexorably drawn to some big junk-monster, who we never see in full light, in a barn. Our hero, if you will, is an old tire on a spindle. He appears, and reappears, rolling down roads and through the woods. He's the only piece of junk who has his own traveling music (and this, I suppose, is why I've mentally assigned him a gender). He, too, goes to visit the scary junk-monster, but ultimately, he commits suicide, launching himself through a glass window from the upper story of the barn. But then we learn that's pretty much what's become of all the trash, as there are trash-shaped holes in many of the barn's windows. So, this film is working REALLY hard to not be cute. But, still, it kind of is.

Kogel Vogel (Frederico Campanale, 2006): Close-ups of guns and bullets going through glass in extreme slow motion. Very visual, very obviously statement-y, as you can't have images of guns-made-beautiful without it meaning something. But it reminded me a lot of this Nick Knight video. I guess I'm questioning, just a little bit, how experimental this technique really is.

Kip Maskar (Maria Petschnig, 2007): The blurb says this film "disguises body parts in altered pieces of clothing to create semi-abstract compositions that defamiliarize the human form." If that's actually what this film is doing, that's one hell of a daunting task. We are an egotistical species, for sure. We see human faces in everything from the front bumpers of cars to cinnamon buns. When you're looking at human skin, even in weird configurations, it's pretty difficult to become disoriented. I mean, yeah, there was a shot that I *think* was of elbows, but it was clearly supposed to look more like tits. And those "altered pieces of clothing" made some kneepits look like they were receiving some serious atomic wedgies. But essentially, when you're looking at flesh, bound up in elastic straps and whatnot, you know you're walking through a landscape of human eroticism. Now, set those visuals to a soundtrack of heavy breathing and, I dunno, some noise that sounded like the nylon strips of a woven lawn chair heaving under the strain of a body's weight (creaking, wheezing, subtly frictive), and you've got a VERY familiar point of reference. This might, actually, have been one of my favorites from this program (gee, betcha couldn't have predicted that one, eh?). I do think it's a successful little work, but I don't think it "defamiliarizes" a damn thing. Bondage is always bondage, even if it's only bondage with elbows.

The Green Bag:Documentary Happens (Tim Sharp, 2007): When you see a plastic bag caught in the wind, what's the first thing that pops into your head? American Beauty, right? That video from that movie has become an iconic shorthand for all that is abstractly beautiful ever after. In another film I saw yesterday (one I hope to discuss in another post), there was an extended shot of a woman's hair blowing in the wind. It's the same thing. As far as I'm concerned, you really can't reference a plastic bag or something caught up in a windgust without it being about American Beauty. And yet people are trying really really hard evade the reference. This film is a single shot from a camera posted on the roof of a hotel in Gondor, Ethiopia. It shows people walking back and forth, in and out of doors, with a plastic bag blowing around under their feet. The bag blows out of the shot and then back in and out again. It takes on personality, much in the same way that the trash in the Harrachov short did. The bag is playful, but persistent. It's territorial and it knows the camera is watching, even though all the people who enter the shot ignore the bag completely. And maybe if I'd never seen American Beauty, I might think that this was doing something new, particularly with that "Documentary Happens" subtitle. But no, it's just American Beauty, set in Gondor.

And the last, finally-- Daddy I'm Scared (Tijmen Hauer, 2006): This one employs an interesting technique in which it layers 13 different clips from mainstream animated films (I think I recognized The Hunchback of Notre Dame and maybe Lilo and Stitch?), one on top of the next to create a mostly-red visual cacophony. And the soundtracks are layered, too, so it sounds like a restaurant crowded with panicked children. The effect was a little creepy, I guess, but when you have the technique explained to you, that's pretty much all you see. It doesn't ever become a sum of its parts. Rather, it is what it is-- a palimpsest, rather than an amalgam.

Phew! I think I've gotten through them all. Though this kind of stuff might not be to everyone's taste, I can't help but feel like these shorts programs are one of the real treats of going to a film festival. It's the real art-for-art's-sake creative work happening in the medium and I'd never get to see any of it otherwise. For the purposes of my own continuing self-education, I find much value in all this weirdness. Even if it is all set to looming and sonorous tones.

Let me just call myself the prodigal daughter, as I'll be returning.

It's official.

I've booked my tickets. I've gotten leave from my supervisor. I've warned my parents that I'll be camping out in their spare room. I've secured the company of Jon, my usual sparring partner in all things film-related.

Be forewarned: 2008 Nashville Film Festival, here come the brown rabbits, half-rabid and prepared to consume you whole! I still can't afford Sundance, but as this thing's grown to be the 4th biggest film festival in the country and attracts scads of truly fine filmic works, you can color me excited! Pinkly so!

If I see anything near as good as last year's Milk in the Land, I'll consider it worth the trip.


Oooh, I'm all a-tremble!

Not the eco-agricultural gem for which I was hoping, but stylish non-fiction filmmaking nonetheless

Ever since I returned from my orgiastic-ly exciting film-viewing vacation wherein I went to the Nashville Film Festival last spring, I've been talking everyone's ears right off about Monteith McCollum and Ariana Gerstein's spooky and spot-on documentary, Milk in the Land. If you don't believe me, please take a li'l jaunt back into my archives. And also, please refer to all the conversations that you've had with me in the last four months. Undoubtedly, I will have mentioned that film no less than twice in your average five minutes.

In hopes of finding more of the same, I rented McCollum's earlier documentary, Hybrid-- maybe it would be another beautifully presented cautionary tale about the American food pipeline. But that's not at all what Hybrid is about.

Instead, Hybrid is artful near-biography of Milford Beeghly. Milford Beeghly is one of the pioneers of practical corn hybridization. He's also a quaint--and ancient--Iowa farmer, a singer of old Irish brogues, a champion hog-caller (endowed with an elusive quality he and his son call "hog-appeal"), a stoic father, and a dude who likes to bicker with his second wife, Alice.

It seems that McCollum fell so hopelessly in love with his subject matter-- the man, not the corn-- that I really learned very little beyond the most basic of rudiments of corn hybridization. I mean, I was all geared up to be freaked out by the ways humans have figured out how to fool nature into doing crap nature shouldn't be doing... but I arose from my sofa without much framework for forming an opinion about how we grow corn, one way or the other. And it's not like corn is the LEAST controversial food item on the market-- not by a long shot! So, I was thinking that this was fertile ground for some good ol' eco-agricultural rabble-rousing! Instead, I sat through 93 minutes of a love poem to an old guy.

So, once I got over not getting that for which I had bargained, it became pretty clear that many of the cinematographic techniques that lent a polished, yet otherworldly sense of menace to Milk in the Land were experiments in Hybrid. McCollum squanders long sequences on time-lapse shots of the Beeghlys' farmstead, of farm cats drinking milk, of corn stalks in silhouette against the sun, the barn, the silo, a tractor... The thing is, I would have expected such sequences to have an air of piquant nostalgia for the small-scale American farms of yesteryear. Once again, however, McCollum defies my expectations. The whole thing is shot in black and white and so, lush, sunlit scenes of farm life become acrid, slightly over-exposed and a little to harsh for comfort. Or maybe it's just that the light/dark contrast and McCullum's own emotive viola-playing is keyed up so as to create an atmosphere of barren-ness in a landscape that is so often idealized. Clever, eh?

McCollum is also in possession of one decidedly understated sense of humor. And he doesn't really let us forget that the hybridization of corn is, as is everything else, really all about sex. The film is primarily narrated by Mr. Beeghly himself, but every once in a while, his son Weyland offers a comment or two. And Weyland's description of normal corn reproduction-- that without any human intervention--involves the concept of corn masturbation. Basically, an unbothered corn stalk is pretty likely to fertilize itself-- the tassel on top is the male, pollen-producing part. And the pollen seeps down into the undeveloped ear-- the female part-- and fertilizes each ovary, and then each ovary becomes a kernel. Next time you eat a cob of corn, will you remember that you have a mouthful of ovaries? I dunno... but Weyland's description of corn "playing with itself" was pretty cute in and of itself.

McCollum's particular artistic sensibility may have given rise to an entirely new genre of filmmaking--corn porn! Honestly, I never knew you could eroticize an ear of corn, but he managed to create some stop-action animation sequences that, well, make corn sexy. In one of them, a couple of ears dance and flirt and, finally, rub up against each other. In another, a single ear upended on a stool performs a luscious striptease, ever so seductively slipping out of her-- uh, its--husk. By the end of it, I wouldn't have been at all surprised to have found little nipples on each kernel of that damn corncob!

Much of this film reads, not so much as an informative documentary, but more like an experimental art-house film. While Milk in the Land demonstrated the ways in which McCollum is able to employ his virtuosic visual techniques towards imparting a distinct and moving message, Hybrid shows less of his investment in reportage and more of his remarkable ability as a film stylist. While I quite like the idea of there being plenty of room for cinematographic risk-taking within the genre of non-fiction films, I suppose I must admit that I really liked all there was to learn in Milk in the Land. And so, while I really do heartily approve of this director's idiosyncratic style, I still want more than mooning over a geriatric Iowan for my 93 minutes, thank you.

Will someone please teach me something about corn now?

OK, Cosmos, I get it. Message received, loud and clear.

I'm often impressed with the way the universe decides to drive particular messages home to me. I just put up a post about carbon emissions and animal livestock last Friday. My friend Jai just put up a post on his blog about The Center for the New American Dream's C3 project--a project designed to give people ideas for small ways through which they can reduce their personal carbon footprints-- and subsequently, I put a button for it down there at the bottom of my own blog. And for reasons that really have little to do with ecology, I'd decided to greatly reduce my own intake of animal products a couple of months ago. But it seems the mindful eating and mindful consumerism have become something of a crusade for me. And the universe just keeps putting information in my path that lead me to believe I'm on the right track.

By now, I feel like I've watched a million documentaries about how the American food pipeline is a wonderland of horrors. I can't remember the last time I frequented a McDonald's or a Burger King or a Wendy's or a KFC or a Jack-in-the-Box. The stuff those establishments peddle does not provide nutrition that would support a high-functioning body. Beyond that, contrary to popular opinion, that crap really doesn't even taste good. I know some folks will argue with me there, but if you can accustom yourself to eating a better quality of food, the smell alone of your average BigMac is likely to turn your stomach. But I dutifully watched Morgan Spurlock's Supersize Me and I blogged long and hard about a documentary that I loved, Milk in the Land: Ballad of an American Drink. But I know a documentary is a hard sell for most folks (god knows why! Nonfiction filmmaking is in the middle of a renaissance of some note right now.).

So along comes Richard Linklater's latest ensemble piece, Fast Food Nation, based on the (nonfiction) book of the same title by Eric Schlosser. Somehow, these two, as a writing-directing team, have managed to magically conjure a deeply disturbing realist-fiction feature out Schlosser's exhaustive research on the fast food industry. The phrase "required viewing" or "required reading" has become something of a regular recurrence in my blog. And I realize that I've developed a propensity towards self-righteousness about all things food-oriented. But, holy hell, the message of this movie is scary--and important.

This film elucidates the way this industry abuses its immigrant work force (denying them disability and insurance rights on the merest suspicion of drug use, forcing them to work in a virtual war zone of animal offal and flayed carcases, undertraining them such that they are prone to slicing open the entrails of the animals in such a way that the fecal matter gets spewed all over the meat (and then blaming them for the mistakes), subjecting them to extremely dangerous machinery (that has been known to remove more than a few human limbs--I don't suppose it's surprising to learn meatpacking is the most dangerous job in the country, causing more than 24% of work-related deaths annually) with similarly inadequate and slap-dash training, etc, etc, etc...). It elucidates problems with the ways the industry exploits the primarily teenage workforce in the restaurants themselves. And it elucidates a grand, grand disconnect between the corporate marketers and the veritable sewage that they're selling.

And then the film shows us how unconscionably badly the cattle are treated. They're kept in miserably tight confines (often, there's not enough room for them to turn around) where they get to muck about in their own excrement and are seldom given access to actual daylight. Often, the animals are not only still alive, but STILL CONSCIOUS when the "processing" begins. The film is a top-down cross-section of one of the more corrupt business models in this country. And if you aren't appalled at all points throughout your viewing, I have no qualms with assuming you're a heartless, ethically devoid asshole. So there.

However, among brilliant turns in this film is Lou Taylor Pucci, the kid from one of the best coming-of-age films ever: Thumbsucker. Despite a dyed-black, scraggly-looking wig, it appears that his progressing adolescence is treating him very well. And he also had one of the best lines in the movie--he plays a kid involved in a high school group of environmental activists, and another character has an idea about cutting a hole in the fence that holds all the cattle slated for becoming burger meat. The discussion arises about how such an act could be perceived as an act of eco-terrorism and then all the kids would be subject to sanctions via the Patriot Act. And so, he says something along the lines of "Well, in this case, maybe the most patriotic action we can take is to ignore The Patriot Act!" Hmm-- well, it seems less forceful when I relay it here, but it was darn punchy at its moment in the movie-- and it draws an important and pointed connection between concerns regarding food supply and virtually every other major political issue at play on the American landscape right now. And IMDb tells me that he's in the forthcoming film adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (can't wait!). Catalina Sandino Moreno is luminous as ever, though not quite as transcendent as she was in Maria Full of Grace. Wilmer Valderama is entirely too well-groomed and metrosexual to make a convincing bracero, but it's nice to see him as something other than the sibilant Fez from That 70's Show. An unexpected performance from Bruce Willis is another high point. And Ashley Johnson, who was once the youngest Seaver on Growing Pains, seems to have turned herself into a respectably intense young actress.

Also, because the movie is set all along the immigrant's trail between the Mexican border and a fictional Colorado town, Linklater saw fit to include a very nice little local cameo-- Fat Tire beer! For anyone who has ever lived in a Western state, Fat Tire is the quasi-local brew of choice, coming out of Fort Collins, Colorado (they were also the unofficial sponsor of any social event held at my house when I lived in Tucson, even if that event was nothing more than Michelle and I sitting around the mesquite grill, watching the portobellos cook!). In your inevitable (uh--highly encouraged) perusal of their website, please note their commitment to sustainability. It seems particularly significant that all the rebels in this film prominently tote their Fat Tire bottles and six-pack cartons. After all, whoever said eco-conscious activists didn't enjoy their adult beverages, too?

And then, when you've finished watching the film, there are several animated shorts on the DVD's extras menu that are not to be missed. Most of them can be found at this site. But the "Reverse Hamburger" one is probably the most disturbing of them all. This little piece somehow manages to summarize the entirety of Milk in the Land in under 5 minutes. And it does it with a cartoon. Perfectly brilliant.

Now, add all the information about the mainstream food pipeline that is to be gleaned from Fast Food Nation to all the information in my previous post about how animal agriculture is contributing to global warming and how can we all NOT be motivated to cut back on our consumption of meat and dairy? Seriously, readers! You don't have to go all vegan like I have, but maybe eating meat once or twice a week instead of twice a day? Maybe deciding that you really just don't want the folks behind the unethical business practices that control most fast-food restaurant chains getting any more of your hard-earned cash? Maybe signing C3's pledge this month and committing to consuming one pound of locally-grown food, so as to reduce the carbon emissions created by the transport of non-local food? These are such small things.

If you love me at all, you'll at least consider it. Pretty please?

UPDATE: I completely forgot to mention the scene in which Greg Kinnear sniffs chemicals out of bottles that contain the flavorings for all the various products that Fast Food Nation's fictional restaurant chain serves. He nods along saying, "oh, that's delicious!" or "hmm... maybe the customer will expect more lime with a name like 'Calypso.'" To this, an anonymous lap-coated guy rattles off the names of some complicated-sounding chemical compounds that correspond to the "lime" sensors in our tastebuds.

This scene is absolutely factually based. Our idea of "French fry taste" has very little to do with the actual flavor of a fried potato. "French fry taste" is solely a concoction of the behind-the-scenes chemists who work in fast-food restaurant test kitchens. And people doubt me when I say I don't think this stuff tastes like food? I actually DO eat real food. Therefore, I know what food tastes like. I'm tellin' ya-- liquid smoke, beef flavoring and fake lime are a far cry from a real hickory barbecue sauce or a real burger or a real caribbean-flavored anything. This is simply a matter of acclimatization. It is that to which we've all grown accustomed. It creeps me right the hell out.

Doesn't anyone else find the notion that our idea of what foods taste like has been wholly manipulated by a bunch of chemists, rather than determined by what food ACTUALLY tastes like, to be a little more than disturbing? Anyone?