Butt Boy (Tyler Cornack, 2019)

If I asked my eight-year-old nephew to come up with an idea for a movie, I wouldn't be shocked if he offered something butt-related, say, a story about a man who sucks up large objects and a baby into his butt but the baby grows up in the butt and survives by eating poop and the man also sucks up a little kid and an adult in his butt, etc. And yet this is the very premise of Butt Boy, a film written and directed by verifiable adult Tyler Cornack who also stars as the titular antihero. It's a juvenile film, to say the least, right down to its unrepresentative title (Ass Man is more appropriate but doesn't scan as well and carries unrelated connotations besides). Much of it plays like a lame inverse of a superhero/fantasy movie. It's just a ring of a different kind and there are plenty explosions.

What's so intriguing about Butt Boy is that it forces a meditation on the relationship between form and content. One might imagine that a story such as this would be conveyed in the irreverent style of John Waters who named Butt Boy his favorite film of 2020 in Artforum. But Cornack has created a rather muted film and he gives a dour, unshowy performance as the appropriately named Chip Gutchell, a thirtysomething schlub in the requisite loveless marriage and dead-end job. Shades of Office Space seep into the film, especially Austin Lewis' hilarious turn as Chip's cheer-forcing boss. But the overall feel is of a grimy Michael Mann drama or Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice as told by your eight-year-old nephew. Everything from William Morean's cinematography (capturing rainy alleys and unnatural lighting) to the performances (including Tyler Rice as the grizzled, alcoholic detective hot on Chip's tail and Shelby Dash as Chip's distracted wife) to the changing-same synth score (by Cornack and producer/co-writer Ryan Koch) bespeaks commitment and a high level of maturity. 

So in the end the film it resembles most is I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978), a trashy, exploitative rape-revenge flick done up in art-cinema longueurs. Or, more precisely, it reminds me of the dislocations of so many great pop songs (which I wrote about here) in which the sass of the lyrics contrasts with the mournfulness of the music. It's difficult to position oneself with respect to these works since the style is asking the audience to take the material more seriously than it may deserve. But getting stranded in an itchy place is far more compelling than having a film tightly packaged for one's smooth consumption.

Grade: A-minus