Breakfast of Champions

[Jacob Segal]

>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

I believe that Rudolph worked under Altman earlier in his career.

Jacob Segal