An Indie Gem or Cereal Ad?

[Flakes] has all the ingredients to make a great, quirky indie flick: Zooey Deschanel—who you should always try to have on hand to play your quirky, plucky, indie heroine if you can possibly help it; the off-beat locale of New Orleans; an up-and-coming actor with carefully mussed hipster hair to play the protagonist; and a quirky premise (here it's a cereal café, where only cereal is doled out to regular customers).

The problem?  Flakes is a plug for Kellogg’s, in a cringe-worthy way.  The opening shot is one of Flakes Café manager Neal Downs, played smug and smarmy by Aaron Stanford, standing behind the counter and in front of a huge wall display, gloriously rendered larger than life, of mostly Kellogg’s brand cereal.  Pops, Corn Flakes, Raisin Bran, you name the Kellogg's cereal and they’ve got it.  I can’t count the number of times Christopher Lloyd, who plays the café owner Willie, is forced to utter the words “Kellogg's” in an ill-advised ramble about his the redemptive qualities of the grain.  It’s frankly embarrassing for Lloyd, an icon of popular culture, to be reduced to a glorified spokesperson.

What’s infuriating about the film is the fact that it goes to great lengths to espouse a bargain-basement anti-authority, anti-capitalist philosophy, while all the while acting as a corporate plug for a huge conglomerate.  Neal Downs and his girlfriend—oh-so-avant garde-ly dubbed “Miss Pussy Katz” (played by Deschanel)—spout this damn-the-Man philosophy that’s watered-down with pseudo-intellectualism. 

The most appalling part of the film, however, stems from its setting.  It’s set in New Orleans, and damned if you can make a film within a couple of years of Katrina without being sensitive to that issue in some way.  But while almost the entire cast of the film is white, there is one scene that deals with the largely black population put at a huge disadvantage by Katrina.  Neal decides to one-up the Flakes rip-off across the street by passing out flyers to the mostly black, poor locals advertising 10 free bowls to help the Katrina homeless paid for by the competitor.  He then sits back and relaxes as a mob of hungry poor blac people who show up and demand their free food. Neal, looking on with binoculars, is yukking it up the whole time. The only time the overwhelming population of New Orleans is featured in the film, they are used as a meaningless prop to execute a painfully unfunny gag that comes across as pretty tasteless. 

Ultimately, what makes the film a failure is not only the above, but the fact that the characters are difficult to relate to.  Neal and Miss Pussy are struggling artists who want to stick it to the Man and then live happily ever after. I just can’t muster up the effort to care, probably because both characters are such huge assholes.  While he was busy using homeless black people to play a prank on Stuart, she was plotting the demise of Flakes, the livelihood of Willie and his love project, so that her boyfriend could work on his probably lame album.  They are completely consumed by their relationship with the other at the expense of everything else in life, so that, by the end, you’re not rooting for them to make it work, you’re rooting for them to shut up.