Laikals
The greatest movie ever made..!
Kailansorac
Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.
Payno
I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
Claudio Carvalho
The stutterer Francis (Aidan Gillen) is a lonely religious man that works processing photos and lives with his abusive stepmother Sal (Susan Tyrrell) that is invalid in a gloomy apartment. Francis has a dreadful solitary life and he works, takes care of Sal and goes to the Catholic Church and his relief is his faith in God. Francis is also a voyeur and spends his nights watching a beautiful neighbor in another building through a hole on the wall from the back stairs of his building and masturbating later.One day, Francis stumbles with the woman that is being robbed by a thief on the street and he helps her. She introduces herself as Gloria (Emmanuelle Seigner) and invites him to have dinner with her. Gloria explains that she is vegan and soon they have a love affair and Francis loses his virginity with Gloria that loves him. But Francis becomes obsessed to watch Gloria and he believes that she has other men and is cannibal, eating the flesh of her lovers. The schizophrenic behavior of the delusional Francis makes him see weird things in Gloria's apartment. "Buddy Boy" is a bleak tale of schizophrenia, with a dark story of a religious man that becomes insane and delusional. The director and writer Mark Hanlon makes a weird independent movie following the style of David Lynch and makes a tribute to "The Tenant", "Rear Window" and "Blue Velvet". It is unbelievable that "Buddy Boy" is the only work of this promising director. Aidan Gillen, Susan Tyrrell, Emmanuelle Seigner and Mark Boone Junior have exceptional performances. Emmanuelle Seigner is still in the top of her beauty and is difficult to find a reasonable reason for her love for the weird Francis. The colors in this movie are very dark, especially in the dingy apartment where Francis and Sal live. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): Not Available
Al Rodbell
Having just finished seeing this film I came to the message boards for answers, and only found others seeking the same thing. A vivid hallucinatory dream can feel like reality, with the imagery powerful, but undecipherable even to the dreamer. I conclude that this film was of this genre, a nightmare made into a public event, a film to be seen by all who can take it. Given the genre, given that it is valuable for someone to be into someone else's nightmare rather than their own, it is an admirable work of art. We go wrong when we ask for real world logic, where the bodies of large dead men do not disappear, and may not be taken away piece by piece on a bus. Dreams follow no such logic. They are there to allow a reconfiguration of reality into some kind of a resolution.The central riveting element for me was Francis' love affair with Gloria. She was luscious, kind, accepting, admiring and always there for him. (If that's not a clue that this is a dream fantasy, then what is?) His sexual pleasure was best when at a distance, through a telescope, only to be made flesh onto flesh with fear and reluctance on his part.There is a great word "verisimilitude" that describes the degree that a dramatic presentation approximates reality. It is usually considered a necessity, even though each work is allowed a degree of poetic license to vary from this for the purposes of dramatic effect."Buddy Boy," gets zero on the verisimilitude scale of actual life, as Francis is right not to believe that a girl like Gloria could actually love him. But this scale of realism has a different set of rules in nightmare films such as this. The only reality that must be sustained is emotional engagement, a working out of some unknown outside existence through the flashes of imagery that both intrude upon and advance the dream work.Francis, whoever he is when awake, is a suffering human being forsaken by God, family and the world around him. He also has come to believe that Jesus, whom he says gave his life for love of humanity, actually despises him. It is a world of kidnapped children whom he can not save, and vegans who kill and eat human beings.And yet, in the midst of all of this horror, he found someone to love him. No wonder he is reluctant to wake up.
Betty Hood
Loved it. Sensitive depiction of schizophrenia. And, of course, a multitude of other subjects that keep us wondering about the existence of God and the role of religion. Superb acting by all. Susan Tyrrell is simply amazing as Sal, and so is Aidan Gillen, as Francis, the protagonist, who cannot differentiate between what is real and what is not, and his eventual acceptance of that. Emmanuelle Seigner (who is married to Roman Polanski) is also terrific, with a subdued performance. Beautiful sets and lighting. Lush scenes of healthy food will make you hungry, and contrast beautifully with visions of cannibalism. We are forced to face our beliefs in God, and whether you believe in God or not, what we see is a depiction of a God that is cruel and selfish. What else could it be? Brilliant.
bob_meg
Read this ONLY if you've seen the movie. My attempt at deconstructing it follows.You won't find many movies as dark, ugly, and depressing as "Buddy Boy." This is a prime example of an excellent film that makes you feel very uncomfortable. That it was widely panned upon it's microscopic release only reinforces my belief that it was simply too strong for most reviewers.Don't try to make this movie more complicated than it is. My take on it is that Francis is obviously a very sick, unhappy guy who tries frantically to make some sense out of a very twisted life that he feels trapped in. When he's home, he avoids interaction with his "mother" --- really his brother, who's been driven insane by the murder of his mother by his father (not 100% sure on this, but something really f***** up on that scale). He thinks he finds an island of sanity in a dream girl named Gloria, but as the movie progresses it's clear that Francis too is growing ever more delusional and psychotic. He projects the "hypocrisy" of the religion he's been force fed his whole life onto Gloria, an avowed vegan whom Francis hallucinates is really a sadistic cannibal. My take on the ending is that Gloria has never really existed and he may have hallucinated her, her apartment, and everything surrounding his beautiful "escape hatch." His TRUE defense mechanism has been total nihilism, and in the end, it's all he has. Nothingness.My take on it anyway.... It is very similar to Polanski's The Tenant not only in the paranoid delusions of the protagonist put also in how Francis "watches" his own demise later in the film at Gloria's paganistic dinner party.This film really engulfs you and sinks you into a nightmare world. Proceed at your own risk!
