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."
Into this dumb-ass hipster Eden wanders a corporate snake in the form of
an oily cad (Keir O'Donnell) intent on co-opting Stanford and Lloyd's totally
authentic, boldly non-commercial concept of selling mass-produced, kitschily
packaged consumer goods at inflated costs to nostalgia-addled Gen-Xers.
Needless to say, Stanford isn't having it. Here, Stanford—whom you might
remember as the pretentious 15-year-old asshole from the beyond-dreadful
Sundance buzz-magnet-turned-instantly-forgotten-flop Tadpole or as Pyro in the X-Men movies—expresses his disapproval in the most
obnoxious, pretentious manner imaginable, with a rant apparently purloined from
one of Christian Slater's Pump Up The Volume monologues:
Ah, but Stanford is so much more than just an asshole who works at a
cereal shop. He's also an artist, maaaaaan!
He's totally going to change the world with his douchey brand of douche rock,
but first he needs to wriggle free from the crushing demands of pouring
slackers cereal for a week so he can finally finish his masterpiece. Here, we
learn a little more about his creative angst.
Incidentally, Lame-Ass Shit would
be a much better title for Flakes.
Stanford's artsy girlfriend Zooey Deschanel wants to work for him at Flakes,
but he isn't having it, so she goes to work for O'Donnell, who sets up a much
slicker, more corporate version of Flakes just across the street. Hey, did I
mention that Deschanel's character is named Miss Pussy Katz? Sadly, that's probably
the least strained, overwritten, trying-way-too-hard aspect of her character.
From there, Deschanel nags and brays and Stanford pouts, whines, and pontificates
on the evils of MP3s. He's really passionate about ensuring that massive record
companies—and to a much lesser extent, the artists they
employed/exploited—get their due.
I'm no business super-genius-person, but does it really make sense for a
new super-specific kitsch store to open within a block of a competitor with the
exact same business model? How much of a market for cereal bars can there
really be? Furthermore, wouldn't cereals from the '70s be hopelessly stale and
inedible by now? How does the whole retro/discontinued cereal thing work? Flakes afforded me ample opportunity to ponder
these questions, since I sure as shit wasn't distracted by its plot or
characters.
After O'Donnell sets up shop a block away, Flakes turns into a very poor man's Used Cars, as Stanford resorts to extreme measures to sabotage
the competition, like posting fliers promising the disenfranchised 10 free
bowls of cereal at O'Donnell's establishment. As others have noted, it's a
little sketchy that Flakes only
addresses New Orleans' hard times for the sake of a stupid throwaway gag where
hobo-Americans show up en masse for their free grub.
Alas, Deschanel's bright ideas help O'Donnell stay afloat. Things get so
bad that Stanford himself ends up working for his chief competitor. In the
film's only trenchant, insightful moment, O'Donnell admonishes new employee
Stanford to continue being a sour, sarcastic smartass, since customers love his
pseudo-indie hipster 'tude. It's a clever acknowledgment that slacker attitude
and sneering rebellion can be valuable commodities.
As in Reality Bites, the stuffy
corporate sellout, in this case O'Donnell, emerges as far more sympathetic,
interesting, and likeable than the shrill exemplar of scruffy, anti-corporate
integrity. Stanford eventually learns the necessity of compromise, but the life
lessons ring as hollow and empty as the film's characters. Flakes makes raging against the machine look like such a
noxious exercise in self-righteous jackassery that it single-handedly threatened
to turn me into a Republican. But before I bid you adieu, one last act of
mind-boggling jackassery from Stanford:
I do love me a girl with big eyes, though. It's too bad they're wasted in
this piece-of-shit movie.
How much of the experience wasn't a total waste of time? Two percent. Though it skirts complete
worthlessness, The O'Donnell character was interestingly ambiguous and I got a
cheap nostalgia buzz from all the cereals on display. In other words: Eat the
cereal. Skip the movie.