Film

Breakfast of Champions (1999)

Director: Alan Rudolph

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Everyone loves retail king Dwayne Hoover (Willis). Still, Dwayne starts every day sticking a gun in his mouth. His wife Celia (Hershey) is bed-bound and their son Bunny (Haas) hides in a subterranean bolthole while at work. Wayne's old pal Harry (Nolte) is so paranoid about his fetish for women's underwear he's oblivious to Dwayne's affair with his secretary Francine (Headley). Welcome to Midland City. But what welcome will Midland give Kilgore Trout (Finney), a man neither loved nor, like his writing, even known by the world at large? For someone has invited this raving troglodyte to the town's first Fine Arts festival. Barely recognisable from the signature romantic meditations of its director, this awesomely misconceived farce is in fact a project Rudolph has been harbouring ever since the early '70s, when Kurt Vonnegut's source novel first appeared. If the author's satire of parochial consumer society may be decidedly of its time, Rudolph dives into it with such abandon that he loses sight of any notion of a target or comprehensibility. Some spectacular moments, not least Nolte in red lingerie.

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