Starbucks Nation
A Satirical Novel of Hollywood
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Here is a devastating, hilarious satire of coffee-swilling, celebrity-obsessed Southern California pop culture by one of the freshest new voices in fiction. Morgan Beale has a celebutante, masochist wife and a home being renovated. He begins adapting the latest bestseller, The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag, from a local hotel room. Dodging the paparazzi one morning on his way to Starbucks, he discovers the surreal otherworld of Starbucks Nation, a film set littered with characters from Beale’s life and the novel he’s adapting, including a talking Chihuahua and an elite commando unit of ethnic cookie-making elves. Mercilessly lampooning our fascination with reality television, celebrity blunders, B movies, and mindless infotainment, Starbucks Nation brilliantly showcases the absurdities of modern society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Delivering an exhaustive inventory of L.A. archetypes, this debut by the writer/director of Who is Cletis Tout? fails to offer insight into the media-blitzed circus at which it discharges its big guns. Morgan Beale, a jaded screenwriter of "mythic" stature busy adapting bestselling book The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag for the screen, one day runs into his long-dead writing partner, Luke. Luke quickly entices Beale into a Hearse, and so begins a hallucinatory if largely incoherent trip into an alternate universe where Ver Wiel allows Beale to go about shooting fish in a barrel. Beal targets "chimp" producers, paparazzi, reality TV hosts and contestants, actors, celebutantes, critics ("I hate critics"), TV anchors (and their segment producers), FEMA and his starlet wife-"the whore of the corn." Unfortunately, this reads mostly like a score-settling hit-list than Tinseltown parody, and it rarely rises above the level of a drugged-out diatribe-particularly during a lengthy, surrealist delirium involving a talking Chihuahua. Beale's bilious outpouring makes his Hollywood shooting gallery almost endearing by comparison.
