Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn't
impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why
there's I Watched This On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend
time with trashy-looking yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing
the long odds in hopes of a real reward. And a good time.
Cultural infamy: According to the
Internet Movie Database, the 2007 film Flakes grossed under a
thousand dollars in its opening weekend and played on a single screen, in spite
of a starring turn from Zooey Deschanel, America's Smart-Mouthed Slacker
Sweetheart (she's like a real-life Juno!), direction from Heathers' Michael Lehmann, and Christopher Lloyd more or less
reprising his beloved Taxi space
cadet as the senile proprietor of a hipster cereal restaurant/countercultural
dive. No wonder The Hollywood Reporter called it "minor to the point of barely existing" and accurately predicted
a "quick ride to home video." The reviews were overwhelmingly negative. It
scored a paltry yet still overly generous 35 on Metacritic. The Village
Voice called it "impossibly flimsy" and
noted that it seems to take place not in the present, but in some sort of
grungetastic, flannel-crazed 1994 time warp. Our own Noel Murray adroitly
compared Flakes to the infamous
Jeremy Davies commercial positing the Subaru Impreza as the automotive
embodiment of punk rock, and argued persuasively that it's just a shade away
from being a satire of blinkered hipsterdom. In other words: essential viewing.
Curiosity factor: Reading Noel's review of Flakes, I thought, not for the first time: "Wow,
that sounds terrible! I can't wait to see it!" We here at The A.V.
Club are equal-opportunity haters. We're
just as likely to give a scathing review to that grainy leftist digital-video
documentary about how George W. Bush is worse than Hitler, or that dour
independent drama about blind narcoleptic migrant farm workers in love, as we
are to dis a big schlocky action or horror movie. When I think about the worst
films of the past few years, ostensibly noble, artsy fare like Lions
For Lambs and Chapter 27 spring to mind more readily than, say, College. (Although
Jesus Christ, is College an awful
fucking movie.)
I also have a longtime fascination with the way subcultures and
countercultures are co-opted and exploited, in what Thomas Frank calls the
commodification of dissent, and a fondness for at least some of the actors
involved, most notably Lloyd and Deschanel. Alas, while Deschanel earned a
seemingly inexhaustible amount of goodwill with her prickly/adorable
performances in Almost Famous, All The Real Girls, Elf, and
even Failure To Launch, she's
subsequently exhausted it with one terrible, barely released movie after
another. As a Gen-X slackazoid in good standing, I find that the idea of an
all-cereal restaurant stocked with the sugary foodstuffs of my youth appeals
shamelessly to my sense of cheap nostalgia. My first stepmother never let me
eat sugary cereals as a kid, so I've perhaps fetishized the Lucky Charms and
Fruit Brutes of the world even more than the film's cereal-obsessed characters.
The viewing experience: It's
never a good sign when the mere sight of a character's hair makes you hate him
with the passion and intensity of a thousand burning suns. It's even more
alarming when that character is the protagonist you're expected to spend 90 minutes
rooting for and identifying with. Alas, the mere sight of Flakes' leading douchebag Aaron Stanford, with his
immaculately tousled hair, simian eyebrows, creepy pubic-hair child-molester
mustache, and "Look, ma, I'm growing a beard!" stubble filled me with bottomless contempt. And that's even
before Stanford opened his stupid mouth to say stupid things in a stupid way to
stupid people in unbelievably stupid scenarios.
Flakes peaks in its first four
minutes, during a sequence where the camera lovingly lingers over cereal boxes
of yore and the tacky little cereal spokes-creatures that wormed their way into
our collective hearts while we were still cartoon and sugar-addled kids.
It's all downhill from there, as we're introduced to the paper-thin
collection of stereotypes and one-dimensional caricatures that populate the titular
cereal eatery, all of whom seem to have stumbled in from a cancelled sitcom.
First there's a crazy rock 'n' roll drummer played by what's apparently the
world's only/foremost Jason Mewes impersonator. We know he's a rock 'n' roller 'cause
he's totally drumming with beef jerky he calls "meat sticks." How crazy is
that? Then there's the sassy black woman who flips Stanford off as a greeting,
Stanford's boss Christopher Lloyd—an acid casualty with a totally
hilarious case of dementia—and an impish old man with a jones for what
Stanford calls "righteous lids."