Word: mickeys
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...nothing to do by 11:45—retrieve the sandwiches and hot chocolate Mom had prepared and head out, just father and son (later daughter) for the whole day, picking his brain non-stop. It didn’t matter that we were headed to a football game: Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax were always on the agenda until we reached a certain exit. Then, and only then, would we transition into our weekly airing of grievances, which inevitably started and finished with the litany of no-name, pre-Manning, post-Simms Giants quarterbacks (Dave Brown was the worst...
...beginning of the film, Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear), a marketing V.P. for Mickey's burger franchise, gets some bad news from a company exec: "The fecal coliform [bacteria] counts were just off the charts ... I'm saying there's shit in our meat." But Don is a hard man to rob of his optimism. Before he goes off to inspect a meat factory, he cheerfully enunciates a rule of Marketing 101: "Don't kill the customer. It's bad for repeat business...
...sardonic Thank You for Smoking (this would be Thank You for Poisoning Yourselves) and the plaintive exposé Maria Full of Grace (but with the illegal immigrants forced to slaughter meat instead of serving as mules for hard drugs). But in fictionalizing McDonald's as Mickey's while still trying to make all the points the book does, Schlosser and Linklater can't breathe life into any of the characters, content to create stick figures...
...Kinnear's Don is so wide-eyed in his early naivete, he might be a calf sauntering unawares toward the stun gun; once he sees the ugly light, he disappears from the film. The teenage Amber (Ashley Johnson), who grows from a Mickey's countergirl to an animal-rights activist, is just another couple of chapter headings for the charnel issues being raised. Same with Sylvia (Maria Full of Grace's Catalina Sandino Moreno), one of the horribly exploited immigrants. Even someone (like me) who might agree with every political point in the film will get exasperated with the obviousness...
...have to say I enjoyed Bruce Willis, who, as a wily businessman who cut the deal between Mickey's and Uni-globe, says sagely, "We all have to eat a little shit from time to time." Kris Kristofferson brings his flinty authority to the role of a rancher who knows all the dirty tricks of the meat business. And the knee-jerk Leftie in me appreciated Lou Taylor Pucci's comments as a campus activist. He notes that, these days, any of act of civil disobedience could attract the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, and adds, "Right...