The scoop: Over at my long-standing 366WeirdMovies gig, I undertook my own side challenge to figure out the best / weirdest Kurt Vonnegut film adaptation.
So far, the score is settled at Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) as the best, but maybe second-weirdest. A strong case is to be made for the utterly bonkers Slapstick of Another Kind (1982), but it is a terrible movie, almost painful despite its all-star comedy cast. Last and definitely least is Breakfast of Champions (1999), which is not only bad, but damn near a war crime and a deliberate sabotage of Vonnegut’s work by a director with nothing but hatred and ugliness in his heart, Alan Rudolph.
I have seen Mother Night (1996) too, and while it is very good, I didn’t recall it being a contender for weirdness.
I well remember the day Kurt Vonnegut died. In 2007 I’d started really rolling on my freelance writing career, and followed him with interest. Vonnegut was one of the chief influences on young me. I’d read all of his then-published novels by the time I was out of high school, and any of his essays and short stories I could find too. I was amazed at the tricks of his prose, so unadorned and yet so deep.
I felt bad for him that he lived through the whole Bush administration, whom he hated, and never got to see Obama take office, with whom he would have been thrilled. I knew he was getting up there, but still some people leave a mark on the world that cannot be erased by mere mortality.
When he passed away, I was in shock. I blogged a eulogy on my old now-defunct blog. I felt like I’d lost a godfather. My wife had to drag me out shopping that day, and I walked like an oldster let out of the nursing home for exercise. I got dizzy at the store and had to sit down, in the dairy case. She had to talk me out of there. I’m a neurotic pain in the ass to live with sometimes.
Anyway, Vonnegut is an author whose works, I contend, are neigh on impossible to film, but Hollywood keeps trying due to his massive following. It takes a special kind of director to envision his work, and George Roy Hill had what it takes. Hill also adapted The World According to Garp (1982), by John Irving, another tough author to film. But Hill did it with flying colors, because he kicks ass.
Want to know about another work by director George Roy Hill? Picture, if you will, a roaring ’20s (hey, they’re back!) flapper busting a human trafficking ring. As a musical. With Julie Andrews. That’s Thoroughly Modern Mille (1967), a completely unscrewed period piece which I should also get around to reviewing someday.
That elevator you see people tap-dancing in? It’s actually supposed to be malfunctioning, so that you have to tap-dance in it to get it to move. It’s a running gag throughout the movie with a hilarious payoff. This is just one of the creative quirks of this corny flick, but a tribute to the imagination of Hill.
