Buzzard

I loved everything about this film. An angry young mortgage worker starts to get into trouble with his scams and basically goes off on the world. Shot in MI (I think) with the bad side of Detroit on display. Lots of metal music and horror homages. Super cool through and through. Very funny characters, but not too wacky or intentional. They seem like real guys from my high school (even though they're probably in their late 20s.) Its funny sometimes, and dark and weird a lot of other times. A great blend that doesn't really fit into any genre. I was lucky enough to catch it at SXSW in my hometown, and cant wait to show my friends once it comes back to town. No romance no gushy crap!

Buzzard is a good little movie, and by little I mean it looks like it was shot on an iPhone for a budget of 500$. That's not at all a bad thing. Movies like this lean on good writing, memorable acting and characters in lieu of high end production value, and grab-as-you-go energy in place of finesse.

Marty Jackitansky is a hell of a memorable character; gangly, dour, my wife went so far as to call him 'grotesque' which I think is pretty accurate. I've never seen a character like him before, and I hope I never do again. Joshua Burge gives a disquieting, subtly hilarious performance that pulls the whole tone of the film into his gravity, warping the other comic elements into something darker.

BUZZARD follows Marty, a small-time criminal who tries to carry out various scams whenever he gets a chance. Shortly after he extends his activities to cashing other people's checks from the bank for which he works, he realizes that he is about to be caught. So he first goes into hiding in his nerdy work friend's basement, and then, as his paranoia about getting caught increases, travels to Detroit.

This movie was well-received by critics. The top critic comment, giving this a perfect score, called it a "scathing indictment of capitalism". Except, it isn't.

There certainly is social commentary here on how the capitalist system can turn people into drones dependent on the next meager paycheck, reduced to trading frivolous escapist entertainment for a higher sense of purpose, and even discharged of their empathy for less fortunate fellow human beings.

And I can see why a movie critic would think that Marty's story is an indictment of capitalism: although he is a crook, he has at times a child-like naivete which is hard to believe, and which sets him up for many of this troubles. If we squint really hard, we could argue that the capitalist system exploits this naivete to take advantage of him.

But the problem is that, as the character is drawn, his compromised ethics is not the result of being exploited by the capitalist system, but simply of him being a person with low ethical standards.

Sure, there are scenes where he speaks to his mother and lies not for personal advantage but to make sure she does not worry about him, and on one call he even makes a point to request that she tell his siblings that he loves them. These scenes certainly humanize him, and nobody questions that he is capable of love, but it does not change that, as drawn in this movie, his character would still be a criminal in a more just society, one that did not try to take advantage of him at every turn. And that is what undermines the movie as an indictment of capitalism.

It is instructive to compare BUZZARD to EMILY THE CRIMINAL (2022), a thematically very similar movie which is both better entertainment and a real "scathing indictment of capitalism": Emily's ethical standards are also lower than those of most people, but she hangs on to a fundamental sense of fairness that Marty simply lacks.

Only when this sense of fairness is violated by the Kafkaesque obstacles erected in her way by the capitalist system does she resort to crime. It really makes a huge difference in how we contextualize her situation compared to his. And I think that is exactly how it should be, because there has to be a point at which blaming the system becomes merely an abdication of personal responsibility.

The various ways by which Marty carries out his many small scams are amusing, as are various sequences of silly games he and his friend invent and play. His portrayal as a small-time crook seems naturalistic to me and may be interesting as character study. But Marty's lack of a fundamental sense of fairness made it hard for me to relate to him, and it negatively affected my enjoyment of the movie.

There is a tonal shift toward the dark when the movie goes into the third act and Marty goes to Detroit, but it didn't feel that pronounced to me because the purportedly more lighthearted earlier acts already felt uncomfortable.

The movie ends on a note of irony and takes a small surrealist turn, but I could not do much with that. This is not the kind of comedy I would normally watch for entertainment.

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!

"No one will be seated during the thrilling, five-minute long spaghetti eating sequence."

The tone of this movie changes from funny, goofy characters in silly situations, to a really uncomfortable third act where our lead character descends into paranoia and violence. It is really hard to continue watching this movie once the setting changes to Detroit. The tone change does not work for me.

That said, the first two acts are great. They have clever scams and funny scenes. The acting is wonderful throughout.