SHORT TAKES / Buffet Infinity
A movie made of fake infomercials and what else to watch this weekend.
It’s my season, astrologically speaking—I think. With my birthday two weeks out, I’m en route to Mexico City, where a woman in a hot-pink bunny suit sped past me at the airport, telling her normally dressed travpartner: “This is so East Coast. I’m scared.” It’s also baseball season, and as reading material, I have Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, which has been on my list, really, since it came out, and A.M. Gittlitz’s new book on the Mets.
In other news, earlier this year I interviewed Grace Gummer and Keke Palmer, for two different covers of CULTURED’s CULT 100, which are finally out now.
SHORT TAKES
I meticulously selected for my first GOOP kitchen order (bone broth; curry chicken summer rolls, which appear to have left the menu…?) to smuggle into a press screening of MICHAEL at the 42nd Street AMC—a merry plan of convenience that was ultimately thwarted by backorders. As for the movie… any fun stems from the MJ’s music, which survives intact. Otherwise is an incredibly rote and extremely lavish testament to Jackson’s singular gifts that stops short of actually exploring them. It gilds the man into something closer to wax (silicone?) than flesh—overly polished and sealed off. I thought Jaafar did a great impression of his uncle.
Sophy Romvari’s BLUE HERON (pictured above) is part memory piece and part excavation, handcrafted in every touch and set in the 90s—very generational resonant if you are familiar with this, and very worth your time regardless. You can read my interview with Sophy here.
THE TRAVEL COMPANION—the microbudget indie by Alex Mallis and Travis Wood— in reductive terms, is Frances Ha for the boys. The boys, best friends and roommates, are an aspiring filmmaker and the other a stable airplane scheduler, living a low-key existence in Brooklyn. The former clings obsessively to his status as the latter’s designated “travel companion,” enjoying free flights while quietly panicking about being replaced by a girlfriend. Thankfully, the film’s crisp cinematography cuts a swift line across the insufferable aspiring artist’s artless delusion.
Japanese horror film EXIT 8 combines the aggravating trials of patience-testing gameplay with the jump scares of horror films. I’m waiting for a more expert opinion from my friend Dan Schindel who recently joined Substack.
Don’t sleep on Maurice Pialat’s LA MAISON DES BOIS, a seven-part miniseries set in a small French village during World War II. Hour by hour, episode by episode, it accrues detail until it becomes a beautiful, expansive tapestry of intertwined lives. It’s exactly the kind of patient, novelistic television that I’d make an appointment with in a heartbeat. Pialat’s quiet wonder is matched by its pleasures of detail: knee socks, smocks, fisherman knits—and the most massive loaves of bread I’ve seen in my entire life.
MoMi’s First Look Festival kicks off today: The Thai film MORTE CUCINA offers some of the most unappealing eating on screen since Dennis Quaid in The Substance, offset by Christopher Doyle’s camera, which swings from pallid desaturation to sudden, mouthwatering color, making me think about buying a wok again. They’re apparently not as hard to use you think.
Only in its sixth year, Prismatic Ground features among many shorts, and one of the best debuts and discoveries of the year: CHRONOVISOR, a mystical, ensorcelling, bibliophilic mystery. If you missed it at MoMa and Lincoln Center, now’s your chance to catch it. My friend Joshua Minsoo Kim called it one of the best films of American independent cinema of the decade, maybe the last two.
I went to O Mandarin, the soup dumpling restaurant in a White Plains strip mall on the drive back from upstate. Contrary to popular opinion, I wouldn’t go out of your way. A gentle reminder that the James Beard often registers more as peer or industry recognition than a reliable guide for eaters. To be fair though, I didn’t try the duck.
I will, however, return to Let’s Chama, the bakery offshoot of Georgian restaurant Chama Mama next door, for hot khachapuri, the kind without the freshly cracked egg, and mkhlovani, a spinach pastry worth craving.
I thought we’d moved away from plastic packaging after Graza, but I keep seeing Psyche Olive Oil pouches pop up in some of my favorite shops, with truly terrible design. I’d mourn all the oil as it continues dribbling out of the tap—if it weren’t so distastefully unctuous, and lacking the fruit to balance out the fat. Once again, I point you to my fresh-pressed olive oil subscription.
Pour one out for Larry’s Caphe, gone too soon.
BUFFET INFINITY
Presenting as a steady stream of local TV commercials and infomercials you’d encounter very late one evening, Simon Glassman’s Buffet Infinity is a stoner fantasia—initially shaggy, then tightening cleverly and efficiently into chaos. The spots, drawn from the fictional Westbridge County, are pitch-perfect parodies of low-budget adverts: a meek, soft-spoken lawyer in a toupee whose signature on-camera move is a long, contemplative sip of water (later upgraded to whiskey); a young pawnshop owner and his hapless sidekick goof-rapping; a local author and musician who may or may not be a cult leader—or a cult victim; an aggressively costumed local car dealer; and news bulletins. It’s impressively lo-fi, but carefully constructed, and like real commercials, the repetition breeds familiarity as you begin to recognize, even anticipate, these faces.
At the center of it all are two businesses: beloved Jenny’s Sandwich Shop and the more corporate, vaguely sinister Buffet Infinity—the ad’s voiceover consistently boasts a staff of eighteen to twenty employees you never quite see but are assured do exist. Both occupy the same strip mall, and their rivalry escalates, a bit like subtweeting, with each ad responding to the next in a game of one-upsmanship (which of these is the most romantic place to take your date, one segmen tposes) and passive-aggression (insinuations about Jenny’s Italian heritage, the truth behind her recipes, about whether a certain “secret sauce” can truly be replicated)As time goes on, other businesses join the surreal, gossipy fray, each segment growing more deranged—yet still tethered to the logic of their trade—even as people begin to disappear. It becomes a miniature war contained within the confines of a TV set.
I keep mistakenly calling it Burger Infinity instead of Buffet Infinity—understandably, given that one escalation involves constructing a grotesquely large multi-layered burger. (I’d love to speak to the production design team about that.) Glassman keeps things just plausible enough—the kind of excess a suburban buffet might proudly advertise. And that, of course, is the point: the buffet is the perfect container for the insatiable appetites of consumer culture—endless, indulgent, and just a little sickening once you’ve had your fill.
RIYL: Tim & Eric, SCTV, waiting for the TV Guide channel to scroll and half-watching the trailers above, mall kiosks that sell nothing you need, menus that are way too long.
Screening at Alamo Drafthouse in Manhattan, and available to rent on demand starting May 8.
The balancing bird in Blue Heron hit me like a psychic fucking freight train
Last week I was visiting my grandma with a bunch of family and she wanted us to all go to this buffet that was excessively mediocre, vaguely Japanese... But it was only $20 so easy to get your money's worth I suppose
I hear the buffets in Taiwan are actually great.