Buzzard

Paranoia forces small-time scam artist Marty (Joshua Burge) to flee his hometown and hide out in a dangerous Detroit. With nothing but a pocket full of bogus checks, his Nightmare Power Glove, and a bad temper, the horror metal slacker lashes out.

The film starts off strong, great impression of the main character without even showing his face. We then transition to a clever, devious and hilarious bank scene. Which gets better as it goes... heck, the film could stop after the first five minutes and it would be a winner.

There is no doubt the creator of this film loves horror. There are references to horror classics like "Nightmare on Elm Street", "Return of the Living Dead", "Wicker Man", "Demons" and "Suspiria". Heck, there is even a full-sized poster for "Leviathan", which is a rare find.

In summary, the film is one great scene after another. Treadmill Bugles? Brilliant. The spaghetti incident? Brilliant. Scamming a McDonalds? Brilliant.

Some critic smarter than me says the film is "notable for reigniting the angry young man niche, both in aesthetic and voice." Now, whether or not that is true is beyond me. Seems it is hard to reignite anything by itself... would it not have to create a trend? But it does have a man fighting against his own futility -- a futility he largely creates. And there is a message in there somewhere.

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!

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.

This is the sort of film that kind of immediately grabs you from its opening scene, for no apparent reason really. It's not visually stunning or doing anything outrageous, it just has a very clear tone and seems to know what it's doing. The ride throughout is interesting, even if it has some parts that don't entirely work. The directing is smooth and has an off-kilter vibe that many would be proud of. I think this sort of film has the capacity to establish a real fanbase, and I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Overall, the running time also needed to be a little shorter, for such a limited story, but I recommend this uneasy, weird film.

"I may live badly, but at least I don't have to *work* to do it." Hitchhiker from Richard Linklater's Slacker.

The slacker, Marty (Joshua Burg), in his titular reference, Buzzard, is more socially disaffected than Napoleon Dynamite and scarier in a covert sense than Freddie Krueger. In all, this comedy drama is a witty allegory about teen anomie and an indictment of a society that constructs barriers through bureaucratic indifference.

Marty is a small time scam artist, mostly stealing checks from his temp work at a bank to trading in discarded McDonald's sandwiches from the garbage for fresh ones. All the while this metal meat head has a poster of Freddie and a glove with knives for digits. You guessed it: If director Joel Potrykus places the glove in a shot early on, chances are we'll see it later on in a far less sedentary shot.

Yet meanwhile, Marty is pulling little cons with motel room access and check kiting and generally avoiding the law. He is alternately lovable in his counterculture way and menacing when faced with authority he doesn't respect. Through most of the film, Marty is an amusing though disreputable slacker, a temp worker ripping off the bank he works for and a buddy only temporarily engaged while he thinks of his next low-level crime.

"Buzzard" should get the year's prize for the most accurate title in film. Marty feeds off the carrion of society while he literally does so in his McDonald's larcenies. Until the climax, he evades the authorities, who must by now be up to his game. Without focusing on his criminal activities, an inference could be drawn that society needs to be vigilant and proactive to help these Napoleons have meaningful lives. Otherwise, Freddie has spawned a most lethal buzzard.