Slackers' Revenge at the Movies

Say what you will about the French; they've got the whole food thing down. So when Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation , a fictionalized adaptation of the best-selling exposé [by author Eric Schlosser], was screened at this year's Cannes Film Festival, it felt like a call to arms against American gastronomic imperialism – kind of like looting a McDonald's, if a good deal less fun. And when Kevin Smith's Clerks II – in which the ever-clueless Dante and Randal find jobs in a burger joint after their convenience store goes up in flames – was screened at the festival a week later, you had to assume it was more than cosmic coincidence. I mean, what are the odds? The directors who defined American slacker culture more than a decade ago with Slacker and Clerks, respectively, turning up at Cannes in what amounted to a fast-food gross-out double bill?