Critics reviews

It's either an extremely difficult or very simple movie to embrace. On the one hand, it contains enough juvenile/dumb/low humor to elicit honest guffaws alongside of-the-moment '90s nostalgia to appeal to those of us raised on horror VHS tapes and Nintendo. Insults are clever and land with precision. The characterization of idiot manchild culture is somehow at once both obvious and insightful. More challenging to embrace, notice or even appreciate are the film's formal risks.

...What's more funny: Marty's ignorance about such terms, or the fact that capitalist culture has deemed an actual difference between "free" and "complementary" and convinced poorly paid hotel staff to reify that distinction? Such scenes cement Buzzard's place as one of the most damning contemporary independent films about American capitalism in some time.

Behind the amateurish aesthetic lies a director with high-art sensibilities who uses Buñuelian surrealism to undercut the film's verisimilitude. Like Potrykus, Burge shows great daring, his performance a high-wire act of ballistic anomie and genuine empathy; we may find Marty repugnant, but only because we fear ending up like him, a disillusioned hellion desperate for a way out.

Potrykus has a way of distilling the familiar adolescent spirit of contempt for this environment—which is, after all, contemptible—and shows indications of being the rare filmmaker capable of stirring up ideas about class in America without resorting to the usual drab, po-faced miserablism. Having worked his way through punkish provocation, he shows signs of becoming a genuine shit-stirrer.

The classic American underground film may seem extinct, but every year or two, as though through some fluke of recessive creative genes, one pops up in the indie landscape. Buzzard is one of these freaks of nature. Aggressively lower-middle-class, Joel Potrykus' black comedy tackles loserdom as though it were an existential condition.

Marty remains a blank even as his violent fantasies break through to reality, but his tenuous connections to his family and the countdown of his scant funds sketch a chilling story. Potrykus's puckishly outrageous visions are short on insight, but they pack an enduring hallucinatory power.

Starting with an oft-kiltered shot of its main character's hand breaking a Nintendo Power Glove, Buzzard is a truly uncomfortable sit featuring an asshole who pushes everyone's boundaries. But unlike the similarly designed The Comedy, Potrykus's film explores essential class issues at the heart of this film.

Despite its minimalist nature, Buzzard is a rather grand film, at least on a symptomatic level. As even the American middle class starts to feel the foaming jaws of poverty barking closer to its backside, the adolescent idleness that graced America up to the credit crunch is now a terror zone of financial and existential insecurity. Caught in this state of indefinite despondency its victims are failed by a vocabulary that doesn't contemplate any other alternative than consume or die....

In some ways, Buzzard embodies qualities I dislike in the American indie scene—a lack of formal craft, shallow depth-of-field cinematography, and an overall meandering quality—but somehow it works... The last gesture of the film is a surreal one that challenges the relationship between inner and outer realities, and suggests no possibility of real escape.

Potrykus's unflinching approach to the subject matter and his sincere respect for his aging slacker antihero make Buzzard an affecting character study. It's a fearless and moving exploration of a man whose smug ambivalence masks an inner rage, a disdain for a larger system that seems content to swallow him whole.

Marty is played, or rather embodied, by Joshua Burge, whose astonishing performance harnesses an almost feral intensity, like a young Denis Lavant... Around this unlikely hero Potrykus has fashioned a vigorous and strangely compelling character study, a sustained burst of punk-rock ferocity, and one of the most original American films to emerge in some time.

...Potrykus and Burge maintain that emotionally fraught yet comic tone throughout, the latter radiating intensity and barely suppressed anger even when the situations are absurd, such as Marty making a sandwich of corn chips between two frozen pizzas, or Derek and Marty challenging each other to a fight in the basement, the former'sStar Wars light saber versus the latter's clawed glove.