Friday, March 21, 2014

Kill this BUZZARD (2014) New Directors New Films 2014 SXSW 2014 (Also the short PERSON TO PERSON)

World premiering at SXSW and then depositing its dead carcass at this year's New Directors New Films, Buzzard is a film that you'll either love or hate depending upon how you react to its central character Marty. If you click with him, you're golden, if not you'll be like me and head for the exits.

The plot of the film has to do with Marty, an obnoxious slacker jerk, who would rather goof off and run scams for peanuts than do anything that will make him real money. What does he do? He opens and closes checking accounts for cash bonuses, returns office supplies for cash and, setting things in motion, scams refund checks. When things go banana-shaped, he's hiding out and on the run.

I hated Marty a great deal. Not to put too fine a point on it: he's a dick and I didn't want to be around him. What's worse, the film is populated with people who exist only to allow him to be a dick; bosses allow him to wander off for three hours, bank tellers willingly cash a stack of checks not in his name, and store clerks give cash refunds without a receipt (not in any office supply store I know of). These are all bad sitcom people, not good movie people.

What's worse is I never laughed,. Never. The jokes were obvious and telegraphed. I do know that a couple of things got laughs in the screening I attended, but largely everyone just watched.

I freely admit that I left about halfway. I couldn't see wasting my time with an unfunny character and a movie that wasn't making me laugh.

Put it on the worst of the year list.

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Buzzard is screening with a short called Person to Person. It's not very good. It's a shaggy dog story involving a record store clerk telling about the aftermath of a party he had where he found a woman passed out on his floor the next morning and how she wouldn't leave.

Running a scant 18 minutes, it's badly acted and and very affected. Worse when you get to the end, you wonder not so much why the story was being told by the store clerk (I could see him telling the story), more why anyone would make a film illustrating it.

One of the least necessary films I've run across in a long time.

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