Breakfast of Champions

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Peter K sent this:
>New York Times/ Arts section
>9/17/99
>'Breakfast of Champions': The Affluent Society? Welcome to the Fun House
>By STEPHEN HOLDEN
>
>What could be a more fitting theme for Alan Rudolph's phantasmagoric screen
>adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s novel "Breakfast of Champions" than that
>flowery 1950s ballad, "Stranger in Paradise"? The song, which runs through
>the movie like an ironic leitmotiv, distills an Eisenhower-era mood of
>sanctimonious freeze-dried optimism tinged with paranoia that the movie
>conjures with a demonic fervor.

Judging by his past works such as _Welcome to L.A._ (1977), _Choose Me_
(1984), _Trouble in Mind_ (1985), and  _The Moderns_ (1988), I don't think
that Alan Rudolph was a good choice for a movie based on a Vonnegut novel.
Have you seen them?  Rudolph is not a satirist.  His tone is (or at least
was in the aforementioned films) ironic, evocative, and wistfully romantic,
and his style deliberately flat.

_Breakfast of Champions_, if it had to be made into a film, should have
been directed by, say, Robert Altman 25 years ago.

Yoshie