Director: Joel Potrykus | USA | Fiction | 2014 | 97 mins
Film source: Oscilloscope
Marty is a bit of a loser. He does little to no actual work at his temp job at a bank, his diet consists of frozen pizza and Doritos sandwiches, and he spends his free time listening to thrash metal and designing a cross between the Nintendo Power Glove and Freddy Krueger’s razor-clawed appendage from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Always on the lookout to make a dishonest buck, one day he decides to sign a bunch of undeliverable checks over to himself—not realizing that banks have security measures like surveillance cameras and digital copies of checks—and in a panic he goes on the lam in a tailspin of paranoia and increasingly poor decisions. Buzzard, the third installment in Michigan-based cult filmmaker Joel Potrykus’ “Animal Trilogy” (preceded by the short Coyote and Ape, the Best New Director winner at the 2012 Locarno Film Festival), plays like a guerilla version of Office Space crossed with the nerdy aesthetic of Clerks. But it’s also, in its own bizarre slacker generation way, an unassuming indictment of American capitalism in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the calamitous economic collapse of Detroit.