Get your own Free Home Page
I waited for this treatment of the vintage antiestablishment novel to show up in a theater around here, but it never made it. No problem; just because it took in less than $200,000 in a handful of venues didn't mean it wasn't any good. Sometimes really neat little films fail to register on the radar when the studio neglects to fully engage its marketing engines. The fact that it was shot on a small budget with big-name stars working scale for the sake of putting Vonnegut onscreen could have indicated it was a potential cult classic. Besides, director Alan Rudolph did one of the more charming romantic comedies of the past few years, Oscar-nominated Afterglow.
Sigh. 'Twas not to be. Despite interesting casting, B.o.C. is little more than a garish technicolor splash that looks like "Pee Wee's Playhouse" all grown up and overmedicated, right down to the theme music.
Bruce Willis plays Dwayne Hoover, a brittle new-car mogul in the Four Corners area out west. It's hard to determine whether his life is falling apart because his wife (Barbara Hershey) is prescription-dependent, his mistress (Glenne Headly) is disenchanted, his sales manager (Nick Nolte) is a closet cross-dresser, his son (Lukas Haas) is an effeminate lounge singer who lives in a bomb shelter under the front yard, and his latest real estate development has been condemned for proximity to a chemical dump, or if all those things are that way because he's such a jerk. Enter Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney), a prolific, irrational, nearly anonymous old pulp author whose numerous works have never turned up anywhere except porno shops, but who gets invited to be keynote speaker at the local arts festival anyway. Like out-of-control trains on the same track, Dwayne and Kilgore are set to collide in a furiously manic neon indictment of Madison Avenue bourgeois materialism.
Which is pretty much like the book. Problem is, Vonnegut's hallucinogenic imagery is tough to depict on film unless the viewer is encouraged to slam his/her head in the refrigerator door every few minutes. Rudolph tries to capture the proper feel, but comes off less like a seasoned veteran than a struggling avant-garde music video director. It's like trying to rhyme in sign language; some things just don't translate well. C-
Get your own Free Home Page