Flakes (2007)

Absolutely brilliant

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

An aspiring rock musician is severely chided by his girlfriend for being a slacker at his "art." He also manages a local bar that serves nothing but cereal-his idea entirely-and attracts a loyal clientele. When a businessman rips off his idea and opens up a new, larger, and fancier store across the street, an all-out war begins. The girlfriend at first considers joining the original Flakes but then joins the competitor. Things then get rather heated as-well, remember Cheers and Gary's bar? This could be shown in college business classes as how businesses and competitions are run. I thought it was a good movie and had a good cast. It was funny and delightful from start to finish. It was a good way to pass an hour and a half.*** out of ****

This is a movie that tries to be poppy and indie at the same time. There are lots of movies that do this, and they rarely hit the mark. There's enough quirkiness to keep you watching it, but not enough to really make you remember that you actually did watch it the day after. As amusing as the concept is of guys who buy black market cereal is, there's only so much you can do with the concept, and it ends up with a story line about a nice girl with a jerk boyfriend who really doesn't have the ambition to record his mediocre songs. It is nice to see New Orleans, and to see Christopher Lloyd dusting off his Jim-from-taxi persona one more time. It's the kind of movie you could recommend to your parents when they're trying to figure out how to set up their Netflix queue, unless they don't like swearing, that is. In the end, they probably should have just scrapped the whole idea of being edgy, and gone for the poppy movie thing.

Checked out this movie OnDemand last night on a lark - my girlfriend and I read the description and decided to give it a shot. I wish I could get my six bucks back. It was the kind of movie that looked like it was written and directed by a 14-year-old trying really, really hard to be "indie." I was shocked that Zooey Deschanel and Christopher Lloyd allowed themselves to be associated with this awful excuse for a film.The dialog was cliché at best, the acting was miserable, and the entire premise of the movie was ridiculous. How can you eat vintage cereal? I know the stuff is loaded with preservatives, but I'm pretty sure you can't open a box of cereal from the 70s and eat it.After about 45 minutes of watching this trainwreck of a movie, we decided we couldn't take it anymore and turned it off. The only advantage of watching Flakes was that it made the Arrested Development episodes we watched immediately afterward look like the most genius pieces of entertainment ever crafted.

Michael Lehmann's new film, Flakes, could have been a quirky comedy, centered on a new type of concept "cereal" bar. Instead, it tries too hard to be a romantic comedy with a quirky setting, and unfortunately, doesn't really deliver anything romantic or comedic. I mean, the setting really is great. And the overlying plot--young entrepreneur threatens to Starbuck over a local establishment with a local following--might have worked, if the film had been completely different.But instead of focusing on the fact that these guys live, eat and breathe cereal, Lehmann decides to cliché it all up by introducing the same old, badly written girl-wants-slackerboy-to-quit working-his-dead-end-job-and-focus-on-his-aspiring-music-career theme. And because of this, we never really get to learn that much about cereal, or what great toys come out of cereal boxes, or really anything cool at all. We do get some slack-off acting and a shameful appearance by Christopher Lloyd. All-in-all, it's a waste of time and plays more like a badly written sitcom than an actual feature film.