'Fast Food Nation' website: Eat now, Linklater

Usually, we don’t link to movie promo websites just for the sake of doing so, but the brand spankin’ new site for Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation is a little different. (And we do mean brand spankin’ new: EW.com may be the first news outlet to link to the site, which launched just a few minutes ago.) In addition to the usual photo stills and trailer promoting the film’s Nov. 17 release, the site serves as an aggregator for a supersized array of fast feeds — to YouTube videos, Technorati blog posts, del.icio.us links, and other content from outside providers. It’s all grouped according to the political, social, and public health issues raised by the film; with one click on the ”Fast Food for Thought” module, you can alter the entire home page to deliver feeds on a new topic. Distributor Fox Searchlight claims the site makes unprecedented use of Web 2.0 technology for a movie promo page, and from a design standpoint, it’s certainly very sleek. Whether this makes the whole project sound overly earnest or geeky, and whether it will actually whet your appetite to see the film, I won’t speculate, but it might spur you to activism, which would probably be fine and dandy by Linklater.