Unfortunately, there will be no podcast episode this month, and I apologize for this. I tried my best to pull something together, but I’ve decided to just accept that consistently putting out decent quality content for eight months in a row, and making sure said content is substantial and won’t age like milk after a few months, is a pretty reasonable accomplishment. I do want to leave you all with something, though, so I’ll share some thoughts on a movie I saw recently. A movie called Buffet Infinity.
Buffet Infinity is part of what feels like an abnormal streak of notable Canadian movies this year. If you’re a horror fan, you’ve definitely heard of it because it spent a significant amount of time sitting at number one on Shudder’s rankings after it hit that streaming service. I am not really a horror fan and only heard about it because my wife is a horror fan, which I’m thankful for because I can rely on her to clue me into horror movies that are worth watching. This way, I don’t have to wade through a bunch of dreck that you have to scrutinize to determine the exact type of satisfaction you’re getting from it, which I do enough of with anime. And indeed, I would say that for most of the people reading this website, Buffet Infinity is worth your time. The movie consists almost entirely of local television commercials that weave together to document the invasion of a small town in Alberta by an Eldritch cosmic horror in the form of a buffet restaurant located near a mysterious sinkhole. I suppose you could make the argument that this is a film that lacks actual filmmaking as we understand it, but it certainly is a movie, and maybe more than the sum of its parts.
If you think this premise is appealing, it may be because you’re enticed by the idea of old television commercials being meticulously recreated, and you are certainly not alone. Buffet Infinity’s premise seems novel on the surface, but nothing about its existence surprised me. In Canada, we place an enormous amount of importance on the nostalgia around television’s ephemera or presentation. Now don’t get me wrong, we certainly punch above our weight when it comes to reminiscing about the actual TV shows and movies we made, but that tends to require a bit more legwork because we have a long history of just not making as much of that as we should. I think the most potent nostalgia for Canadians lies in the ads, the station IDs and other filler material that we packed around foreign and domestic content alike. Admittedly, we tend to lean on the copious amount of PSAs that were produced in the 80s and 90s a bit too much, and there is a limit to how much we can milk out of the house hippos.
One problem with our fixation on nostalgia is that, as much as we love it, we’re actually very bad at catalyzing it effectively. Retrokid markets their YTV apparel as “Keep it Weird” despite all of the iconography clearly being from the “You Rule” era. The 4K Blu-ray special edition release of Heated Rivalry is themed like a seedy VHS tape despite the series taking place over the course of the very digital era of 2009-2018. Don’t even get me started on CBC’s endless time travel shows that can never seem to keep computer technology decade-appropriate. We’re not exactly applying Mandrake levels of rigour and care here.
This is a big reason why I was so happy to see that Buffet Infinity largely defied this trend. For at least the first twenty or thirty minutes, all of the ads felt real. Each of the segments, whether they were riffing on ads for injury lawyers, local restaurants, emergency broadcasts or self-help books, felt like something that truly would have aired on a small town local television station in Alberta twenty or thirty years ago. The one that impressed me the most was the very first ad for the buffet which perfectly captured the presentation and format of the incredibly low budget ads that would appear on the television listings or TV Guide station that would normally be found on channel 1 or 2 in most cable packages: low quality audio and and still images that would occasionally be interspersed between barely readable scrolling text and public domain soft jazz. This is not an appealing aesthetic very many people are clamouring to be reminisce about, but it’s something that existed and something the filmmakers took the time to recreate whether you care about it or not.
After the first third or so, the ads become a little less believable as the demands of the narrative force character and story to become less incidental. Perhaps this suggests that the premise wasn’t really sustainable or suitable for an entire movie, but maybe it also means that the grip nostalgia has on us isn’t always going to lead to savoury or desirable places. The exact timeline the film takes place in is also unclear. The technology and settings that appear in the actual footage are firmly contemporary, but the idiosyncratic styles of each ad evolve from what you might see in the 1990s to the 2010s. Despite this, the recurring characters do not age in a way that suggests a significant amount of time has passed. It’s easy to dismiss this as an oversight, but I do believe it was intentional. As one line in the film suggests, the Buffet would like to relay its message to you, the filthy Millennial viewer, through the comfort of television as you remember it. It is possible that none of these ads are real, but the nostalgic sentiment is, which might be why the attention to detail is all the more important.
I had hoped to see Buffet Infinity in theatres, but despite popping up at a few film festivals over the past year or so, it didn’t really get a proper theatrical release of any kind. It was screened at The Rio for exactly one day before it hit streaming but I had to miss out due to other commitments. Given that the film consists entirely of simulated television advertisements, maybe streaming is the better way to experience it, but I really would’ve liked to witness the crowd reactions and collective awkward reminisces to this one. Frankly, since I’ve been trying my best to avoid American movies in theatres entirely for reasons, I’d just like to have more opportunities to see more Canadian films since I still need to go to the theatre, damnit! Yeah, it’s great that it’s been such an astonishingly good year for English-language Canadian films, but it would be nice if we had a pipeline that would allow a little more exposure for anything that doesn’t happen to have Matt Johnson, Jay Baruchel or Sara Polley’s name attached to it.
Buffet Infinity is not conventional by pretty much any standard of filmmaking, but maybe we need to abandon this kind of thinking to determine what is worthy of being in hundreds of theatres across the country. I’m already starting to view American cinema as a whole, especially Hollywood cinema, like an historical artefact comparable to Soviet films rather than something living and thriving or even continually relevant. Maybe more people would agree with me if we found a way to flood theatres with low-budget examinations of the easily-abused grips of nostalgia shot almost entirely in someone’s basement.
