Buzzard (2015)

This is a movie by a middle class white boy for middle class white boys. It's a superficial and juvenile depiction of what a comfortable office worker imagines "deprivation" to feel like. And the ending? Carol conveniently getting fired in the last few seconds, problem solved everyone can go home now? Ugh.

You get just enough of a peek into the characters to want more and more and you could spin-off anyone of their appealing lives in a full feature film. I'd love to see a Derek spin-off personally as it would make for a fantastic flick. You could have that guy just walk from one end of a street to the other and enjoy what happens.Marty Jackitansky goes rogue, but does it in such a human manner that you feel emotions for the guy you didn't think possible. I wanted to hate him, but in a single scene you're left feeling sorry for Marty, then almost allied with his misguided cause. I didn't want the story to end, but seeing how it plays out into a violent crescendo was just beautiful.It's screams indie with pure perfection and while some films of the same style let you down in the final third, Buzzard just keeps surprising with all the right turns.I can't give it any less than a 10, as it was my film of 2014 and one of the best of its kind in any given year.

Independent cinema didn't always make for a comfy home for big stars to do something "dramatic" even if it's only Oscar fluff or if it's some kind of micro-budget genre piece of whatever. When independent cinema fires on all cylinders, not all the time but often this is the case, you see a filmmaker without much (or any) interference and showing a vision of the world, a point of view, that is unique to them. We may be able to tap into it, or it may be difficult, but the vitality is the key thing (hell, even Gummo is something I have to acknowledge as a one-of-a-kind thing). Buzzard is like that; if it were out in the 90's it probably would have received a decent release in theaters (maybe 100 or more, at best, hopefully) and then found a home on video. Today it might have one or two theaters and go straight to Netflix. Which, if you catch the right 'Netflix and chill' couple on the right moment may not be a bad thing. Maybe. Maybe not.Buzzard is as weird and off-putting as any indie I've seen in recent memory and a lot of it comes down to how the filmmaker Joel Portykus shows us this misfit Marty Jackitansky (sound a little like Rockitansky, the real name of Mad Max, just a thought, whatever). He's perhaps more than misfit: take a little of Travis Bickle, a little of Beavis & Butt-head (mostly the metal and horror movie obsessions but also the disaffection) and a lot of modern day slackerdom and you get Marty as a guy who lives on his own, has posters for Elm Street movies all over the place (even in his kitchen, nice production design touches!) and fashions his own Freddy Kruger knife-glove out of a Nintendo Power-Glove (which itself is a reference to Elm Street 6 - gotta love this director's indirect homage, but I digress).He works at a temp job but barely and tries to do any little scams he can - that is as someone who is fairly unambitious in his thievery (i.e. ordering office products on the company dime that he can sell back at another store with a guy who's cool) - and then gets into some possible hot water over some checks. Again, not for any large amount, but it's the principle of the thing: the guy just hates, well, most things it seems, and spend a chunk of this narrative on a (halfway) work buddy's couch (the director Potrykus is this maladroit nerd).It's a downward spiral kind of movie, and it's not an easy one to sit through. Matter of fact I think most people would find more to sympathize with in Bickle (at least he was a veteran in a sleazy city right?) and Marty is all about... well, who needs ambitions when you got the Freddy Kruger Power Glove and a Nintendo game system to play after all? And as the story goes on and he gets into further (albeit petty) criminal acts, it gets harder to feel empathy with him - one of the 'set pieces' involves an almost experimental-film level moment where he sits in a bathrobe in a nice Detroit hotel eating a plate of spaghetti leaning back in bed - but perhaps that's the idea.Sometimes art is about challenging our notions how people live and what we might do in their situation. Marty doesn't have much in the way of morals, he does what he does so he can get by. Don't many Americans living in the paycheck-to-paycheck scenarios? I think that what the film may lack in outright comedy - sometimes I found myself laughing, usually over the childish griping between Marty and Derek in the latter's basement, mostly in the movie I was silent - it has oodles of in fascinating behavior. You feel uneasy about this, and it lacks an original score outside of the very occasional diegetic music. I found myself hooked into this man's journey towards destruction and all of his own self-imposed beats to keep himself into a pattern (this includes a couple of awkward phone calls to his mother, it's in these moments I felt the depth in Burge's mostly interior except when angry performance).The very ending (like the last shot) is a little too perplexing for its own good (except to say, I guess, that doom will never leave him or something, it's too vague to make its point substantive), and not all of the non-professional acting is solid. Otherwise, Buzzard is an excellent, oddly ambitious and discomfittingly weird example of how to tell a story of very human self-destruction all with a guy who does every little trick he can to get by... until he can't. But hey, that's why he's got that glove!

Too real. Too uncomfortable. This is coming from somebody who loved The Comedy. But I think that's what the director was going for so I can't blame him for succeeding. The build up to the great ending just feels way too slow and the movie is way too repetitive. It's a short film drawn out into feature length and it feels that, hard. I'm going to keep comparing it to The Comedy. The Comedy was slow and story wise it had even less going on than Buzzard but it was much better filmed and while it doesn't exactly go anywhere it maintains the feeling of like it's going towards something terrible all through the movie. Buzzard has that same weird, uncomfortable tension (and it does build up to something) but it's soooooo slooooooooow.Nice effort. I'm glad it's a thing somebody made. But I didn't enjoy watching a second of it. Which is the point. But there are movies that have made the exact same point better.