BEFORE: Wow, I came very close to breaking my chain, because this film is just not available anywhere - not on cable, not on streaming, not on Amazon - which is never really a good sign, because films that are in demand, that people WANT to see, tend to be made available. But this WAS available on YouTube (umm, for free) when I decided on this path a couple of months ago, and that video has since been taken down. This makes no sense - if the film's not available anywhere else, who's getting hurt by that film being available on YouTube? Agreed, for years I had the mentality that no creator's work should be shown on YouTube without permission, because of copyright laws and fair use and royalties and such, and I had many many videos removed from that service with just the click of a mouse, but my position has softened somewhat. If a video can't be seen anywhere else for pay, what's the harm in letting people see it for free? If anything, publicity itself is worth something, and if a film gets a ton of YouTube views, that could help get it on a pro streaming service at some point.
Jeez, this one's not even on iTunes - I was willing to pay $2.99 (really, for this one it should have been even less) but it's not available there, either. What? Simply everything is on iTunes, no? I've found in rare instances a movie can be so bad that all technology seems to reject it, like if you've ever seen your VCR or DVR refuse to record something, you know it's got to be terrible. These are supposed to be unfeeling, impartial machines that don't render judgement on human viewing choices, but once in a while, it seems like they have a mind of their own. So my guess is that the iTunes service must have rejected this film, as a matter of self-preservation.
But, you have to figure, simply everything is on the internet SOMEWHERE, so I kept looking, past the first few pages on Google, and eventually I found it, I'm not going to say where, but I'll give you a clue - it was titled "El desayune de campeones". Whew, sigh of relief, crisis averted and the chain can continue. Will Patton carries over from "Code Name: The Cleaner".
THE PLOT: In a fictional town in the midwest that is home to a group of idiosyncratic and neurotic characters, Dwayne Hoover is a car dealership owner who is on the brink of suicide and is losing touch with reality.
AFTER: A couple quick programming notes - yes, I know it's May 4, which means it's "Star Wars" Day. Ideally I was supposed to be in Florida this week, and though my wife and I were planning to visit Epcot Center, there's a non-zero chance that I might have suddenly remembered the faux holiday and I think I could have convinced her to switch to the "Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge" park. But all the parks are closed right now, and we got a voucher for our airfare, so who knows, there's a chance we could take the same trip next year, maybe I'll be in Orlando for Star Wars Day 2021. That's if the park opens up, and maybe people will still be hesitant to go to a theme park, so it may not be very crowded. I'm going to count this film as my nod to "Star Wars" because it has Nick Nolte in it, and he recently provided the voice of a character in the Disney+ series "The Mandalorian". Check it out, if you haven't already.
Also, I have seen this film before, or should I say I tried to watch it, and I gave up after deeming it unwatchable. Now that I need to use it as a critical link between a Will Patton film and another Albert Finney film, I'm going to finally cross it off the list. I've encountered this a few times before, where I've tried to watch a film and didn't make it to the end, or maybe I did but that movie proved to be so damn forgettable that even having seen it, I just wasn't sure. Better to be sure, right?
Now I've double-confirmed it, this film is quite forgettable AND quite unwatchable. I'd hoped that maybe someone has kept it off YouTube because they were working on a remake, a proper adaptation of Vonnegut's short novel, and they didn't want the previous version to interfere with the new one. Nope, it's being kept off of all streaming platforms just because it's terrible. Don't get me wrong, I think that Vonnegut's fiction is pure brilliance, he's one of my favorite authors, if not THE best, but I have to concede that his work just doesn't translate well to film, or else it needs to be done in a very particular way and so far, no director has really cracked that code. "Breakfast of Champions" is a book written in a very simple way, with the author explaining simple human concepts and pieces of American culture as if he were talking to an alien, or someone unfamiliar with modern society, so he sort of dumbs everything down. Some things are explained in unusual ways that may give new insight to the human condition, like he describes humans as "walking bags of chemicals" who can be strongly influenced by any changes in those chemicals.
In the fictional Vonnegut-verse, there's an author who keeps popping up again and again, so he's most likely the stand-in for Vonnegut himself, and that's Kilgore Trout, a barely-successful author of many science-fiction stories (many of which also give new symbolic perspectives on the human condition) who's had his greatest success with getting his fiction published in nudie magazines, and it's no surprise that many of Vonnegut's stories got serialized in Playboy magazine. Good thing he wasn't bitter about that. Kilgore is to "Breakfast of Champions" what Jo March is to "Little Women", it's the voice of the author shining through, even though the author speaks through all the characters, it's that one in particular to keep an eye on.
Here Kilgore's work is finally going to be properly appreciated, by the Arts Festival of Midland City, at the behest of mysterious billionaire Eliot Rosewater. The Arts Council writes Mr. Trout a letter to invite him to be their keynote speaker, along with a check for $1,000 for travel expenses. The author, who lives alone in a cluttered basement apartment with only a pet bird as a companion, dusts off his tuxedo and starts hitchhiking to the festival, clearly he doesn't know how to book a train or a bus, or perhaps he just wants to keep as much of the travel expense money as possible. As someone who works with animators who are typically invited to various film festivals, I can confirm this is sometimes how independent artists or authors think.
This puts the author on a collision course with Dwayne Hoover, who owns a car dealership in Midland City, along with a real-estate property he's developing that's also being investigated by the EPA for toxic chemicals. Dwayne's got a wife who's crazy or bored of life or just plain zoned out in front of the TV, and also having an affair with the dealership's receptionist. His son "Bunny" is living in the fallout shelter, wears bunny slippers and too much make-up and is performing nightly at the hotel lounge.
Also thrown into the mix is sales manager Harry Le Sabre, who enjoys wearing women's lingerie at home, and ex-convict Wayne Hoobler, who's come to get a job at the dealership just because his name is so close to Dwayne's, and he's been an admirer for a long time. OK, a couple of things - who the hell admires a local car dealer? Nobody looks at crazy car dealer commercials and thinks, "Hey, I want to work for that guy" or "Hey, I want to BE that guy." They're hucksters, lowlifes, basically carnival barkers, and I don't really see anyone aspiring to that level. So I don't really buy into the Wayne Hoobler character at all. OK, maybe it says something about the American culture that car dealers are the way they are, but you can't have it both ways, you can't have Dwayne Hoover putting a gun in his mouth and contemplating suicide at the start of every workday, while also showing people who would love to be in his position, his line of work. It's either bad or it's good, which is it? It can't be both, right, or can it?
Coinciding with the Arts Festival in Midland City is "Hawaiian Week" at the car dealership, where they're going to give away a trip for two to Hawaii to one lucky car buyer, only Harry and his wife have been dreaming of such a vacation for a long time, so he's looking for a way to rig the contest. Dwayne is going out for a little "afternoon delight" at a hotel with his receptionist, Francine, because it's the only thing that seems to get him through the day, while Wayne Hoobler, who hasn't been properly trained by anyone, seems to be living out of a car in the parking lot and selling other cars from the showroom at exceedingly low prices.
Meanwhile, Kilgore Trout is still hitching to Midland City, and swapping stories with the truckers who offer him rides, some of them seem to know his crazy old sci-fi stories, but are unaware that the author is riding next to them. One of a thousand little ironies, I suppose. Kilgore wrote one story about a world where laws were determined by the spin of a roulette wheel, which must have been some kind of political commentary by Vonnegut at the time. Mr. Trout gets as close to Midland City as he can, but unfortunately the highway is closed for some reason, and after passing Celia Hoover on the road, as she's leaving Dwayne and Bunny behind, Kilgore decides to walk through the toxic waste pool on Dwayne's development property to get into town, and he walks into his hotel with congealed toxic waste coating his entire legs.
But the more important Trout novel here is titled "Now It Can Be Told", which is told in the second-person to the reader, as if written by the Creator of the Universe, to inform the reader that they are the only creature with free will, capable of making decisions and having rational thoughts, and that every other person on the planet is a robot or a machine. When Dwayne finally meets Kilgore and reads this information, he takes it as fact, and suddenly his life begins to make some strange kind of sense (Remember, though, that Mr. Hoover has been slowly going insane for quite some time.).
Dwayne is suddenly free to do whatever he wants - unfortunately what he wants to do is go nuts in the middle of the hotel lounge and start beating people up, including his own son, Bunny, for various non-sensical reasons. Kilgore, however, has the affinity to bring him back to reality by informing him that "It's all life, until you're dead." After that, Kilgore steps through a mirror outside the car dealership, as he believes that all mirrors are portals to another universe, and if things were a bit unclear before, this is where the story really goes off the rails - is he dead or alive, did he really go to a different universe, or is he also insane in his own special way? Well, either way I guess he's never going to spend that $1,000 in travel expenses.
I can't really decide here if this story was amazingly prescient, or just plain hasn't aged well. It can't be both, or can it? Vonnegut's 1973 novel and this 1999 film foresaw a world where you just can't trust anything you hear on TV (and we know this is true, because it's spoken by the character who goes on TV and tells people they can trust him, so I think that's another paradox) and TV itself is mostly car commercials and ads for various medications (we're all just walking bags of chemicals, after all). But this was also a world where somebody could be committed to a psychiatric ward for cross-dressing, and I'd like to think we're beyond all that now. We've got people who change their entire gender, or identify as non-binary, so they've found some middle-ground, and in most countries, we're not institutionalizing those people. Programming note: if you watch this film, you run the risk of seeing Nick Nolte wearing women's lingerie - don't say I didn't warn you.
Maybe this film came back into my life at a very critical time - it's the kind of story that can make you think about who you are, where you're going, and whether you are your job, or if you don't have your job, or if your job is too stressful, what else could you do, who else can you be? In a country like America, where so much of our culture is absolutely terrible (infomercials, school shootings, non-nutritious fast food, global warming) that when it becomes time to re-open our society, I'm thinking, now, wait a minute, let's not be too hasty. Can't we just re-open the good parts, use this as a time to make some real changes, instead of just reverting to open market "every man for himself" capitalism? Hah, it sounds ridiculous even right after I just said it. We're probably just going to go right back to what we knew before, when we mistook comfort for happiness and didn't care about the long-term consequences of our actions.
It's all life until you're dead, so be sure you spend time with the people you enjoy and try to make the most of it. That's an OK message, but the film is still terrible, because you can't duplicate the apparent randomness of Vonnegut's work just by throwing a bunch of other random things into a movie in a (more or less) random fashion.
FUN FACT: The rights to this story were once optioned by producer Dino De Laurentiis, to make a film directed by Robert Altman, shortly after the success of "Nashville" in 1975. It didn't happen, but the casting choices included Peter Falk as Dwayne Hoover, and Alice Cooper as his performing son, Bunny. We'll never know if that could have been a better film, or if it would have ended up being just as terrible.
Also starring Bruce Willis (last seen in "Glass"), Albert Finney (last seen in "A Good Year"), Nick Nolte (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Barbara Hershey (last seen in "The Portrait of a Lady"), Glenne Headly (last seen in "Don Jon"), Lukas Haas (last seen in "Widows"), Omar Epps (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Vicki Lewis (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Buck Henry (last seen in "Town & Country"), Ken Hudson Campbell (last seen in "Bewitched"), Jake Johanssen, Chip Zien, Owen Wilson (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Alison Eastwood (last seen in "The Mule"), Shawnee Smith (last seen in "The Island"), Michael Clarke Duncan (ditto), Michael Jai White, Keith Joe Dick (last seen in "Tapeheads"), Diane Wilson Dick, Dawn Didawick, Raymond O'Connor (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), with a cameo from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
RATING: 3 out of 10 double-olive martinis
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