“Buffet Infinity” is 3am Channel Surfing at its Finest
You know the feeling where you’re lying on your couch and the TV’s on in the background, but it’s not really registering? You’re fading in and out of sleep and before you know it it’s 3:00 a.m. and whatever channel you had on is showing the most surreal infomercials you’ve ever seen. Things feel hazy and too strange to be real, while the flickering light of the TV almost creates a trance-like state. Simon Glassman’s Buffet Infinity has taken that sensation and turned it into a fully-formed narrative film without losing that ephemeral feeling.
Courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures
There’s no easy way to explain Buffet Infinity. The entire film plays out through dueling local television ads. The movie gives the viewer the sensation that they’re watching TV in fictional Westridge County, Alberta, Canada. When the film begins, things are fairly normal. There are ads for the local sandwich shop, a pet store, a car dealership, and a pawn shop. All of these are charmingly insane in the way many local commercials are. News reports cut in from time to time. There’s a sinkhole in the parking lot of the mall, along with a strange sound no one can make sense of. The events of Buffet Infinity really kick off when a new restaurant,which shares its name with the movie title, comes to town. Oh, and there may also be a cult that calls Westridge County home.
Buffet Infinity is one of those movies where calling it “insane” is a compliment. It shouldn’t make sense or work, but it does. It’s almost 100 minutes of advertisements, terrible ones, and yet it’s so compulsively watchable. The painstaking detail that went into making these ads look bad, yet watchable, drew a fine line for the filmmakers to walk. Buffet Infinity has the uncomfortable awkwardness of an SNL or an SCTV. It’s a commercial parody mixed with a 1950s alien flick. There’s a sense of dread building in the background, but it’s the type of unease that skews silly rather than sincerely scary.
Courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures
When you peel back the layers of what Buffet Infinity has constructed — its hilarious crew of local weirdos and the fuzzy, analog sheen of channel-surfing nostalgia — the film has a little something to say about the overbearing nature of consumerism. That critique never feels like the driving force of the narrative, but it’s an undercurrent that shines through. Buffet Infinity, unlike the titular restaurant, does not want to stuff the viewer full of big ideas and postulations about the state of the world. It revels in its own creation of chaos. The amount of footage that had to be shot or found through stock media libraries is staggering. Because of its narrative structure, or lack thereof, the end result (it does lose a tiny bit of momentum toward the end) is something you have to see to believe. Buffet Infinity is so much larger than the sum of its parts, but also, if you isolated any of these advertisements and put them online, they could get traction of their own.
It’s so exciting to discover a film like Buffet Infinity. It’s a movie that doesn’t hold itself to the preconceived expectations of the medium, or of storytelling in general. It feels both cosmically massive, yet so very small. All the larger problems of the world can be boiled down to the goings-on of the towns we grew up in. As much as it is a movie, Buffet Infinity is also an experience in the charming, analog oddities of yesteryear.
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