Our Daily Bread
October 11th, 2006
Koyaanisqatsi without Philip Glass and more butchery. Nikolaus Geyrhalter observes the industrialized production of food–cucumbers, tomatoes, olives, salt, fish, beef, eggs, apples, pork, chicken, etc etc. Except for casual snippets overheard during worker’s poignant luch breaks, there is no dialogue–just striking images: men crawling after a neon-lit vehicle on their knees to harvest salad at night. A machine designed to gut pigs. Scientists analyzing bull sperm like aliens conducting unnatural experiments. People in hazmat suits spraying enormous hothouses growing bell peppers. Chicken getting vaccuumed off the floor by the hundreds. A young woman who spends all day cutting off pig’s feet with a specialized metal claw. At the intersection of biology and mass consumption stands the conveyor belt: everything we eat sooner or later gets ripped from mother nature’s bosom and shuffled mercilessly toward civilization’s insatiable maw. Geyrhalter saves the killing floor for last, and it’s impossible to watch the endless, efficient slaughter without thinking of the trains that ran (on time) to Auschwitz. About.com review forthcoming.
Our Daily Bread. Nikolas Geyrhalter, 2005. ****
[tags]documentary, film, 4 stars, food, industrialization, mass production, slaughter, guts, tomatoes, koyaanisqatsi, nyff[/tags]
October 12th, 2006 at 11:39 am
No way I’m seeing this. No way. Ignorance is bliss. I was a vegetarian for three years, I did my time. And now a movie showing we’re being cruel to salad?!? Oy. When can we just take protein pills like Major Tom?
October 31st, 2006 at 7:53 pm
[…] Excuse me while I barf. Richard Linklater’s dramatic adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s muckraking bestseller plays like Traffic with hamburgers instead of cocaine. The story, such as it is, looks at the problem of mass-produced, mass-marketed food from the point of view of a legion of characters, from the marketing guys in the boardrooms to the franchise owners, burger-flipping youths, local wanna-be eco terrorists and the immigrant workers who clean the killing floor. It’s the kind of multi-faceted thing that John Sayles excels at, but Linklater’s approach feels less ridgid, more off-the-cuff, baggier, talkier. The cast is outstanding: Greg Kennear, Ethan Hawke, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Kris Kristofferson, Luis Guzman, Patricia Arquette, Ashley Johnson, Avril Lavigne, etc etc. It would be a great line-up for a party, and it’s too bad that the topic dictates that the movie should be a bummer in the end–dinner’s cancelled while I try to get those images out of my head. (Fast Food Nation would make for a vomitous double feature with Our Daily Bread.) Looks like I’ll be talking to Linklater on Thursday, so let me know if you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask the man. […]