An avid student of the depiction of youth in movies, I’ve taken to calling the twenties, as we live them nowadays, the benties, after the British word “bent,” for messed up. And, while I realize not everyone will have found this decade of late adolescence / imposed maturity as disconcerting as all that, I know …
Julia Written & Directed by Matthew A. Brown USA, 2014 Not all movies have a grand message or thought-provoking theme. Some movies are satisfied with being a beautiful orgy of sex and madness. Matthew A. Brown’s debut film, Julia, is a stylized bloodletting that pushes the limits of good taste and tests your allegiance to …
During a post-film Q&A, director Joel Potrykus was asked by young man in the audience what one could do to live a life like Martin Jackitansky, the protagonist, if you could call him that, of Potrykus’ film Buzzard. Jackitansky, played by a volatile Joshua Burge, has a crappy job that he slacks on and steals from but never gets in trouble. He spends his time playing video games, and executing low level scams for free junk food. The inquiring audience member just had to know if he too could live the dream life for the realistically unambitious cog, grinding away in the corporate consumerist badlands of middle America. Though Potrykus gave an honest answer that most of Jackitansky’s traits and scams were autobiographical, it’s probably a safer bet that most of us are already living the Buzzard life, we’re just not on film so it’s not nearly as exciting.