"I don't generally write about movies, but when I do, it's because they are really good.

Last night, after spending several hours in my studio, I went to bed late. My wife is working the night shift this week, so I spent a few minutes looking around for a movie to watch while I fell asleep. I’m a fan of independent films, and I was a bit surprised when what looked like an indie popped up at the top of my list on Amazon Prime. The film was Yellow Bird. It’s the best 1 hour and 40 minutes I’ve spent with a movie in years.

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Actually, truth be told, it was three hours and 20 minutes, since I watched it twice.

 

Yellow Bird, brilliantly written by Tony Jerris and starring BrIan Doyle-Murray, the wonderful Kathy Garver, and newcomer Michael Maclane, is a tour de force by producer, director, and lead actor Angus Benfield. There is simply no bad performance or wasted moment anywhere in the film.

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Yellow Bird starts off as an over-the-top, almost campy comedy. But each subsequent moment and every character in the film draw the audience into an unexpectedly affecting denouement that is an affirmation of the human spirit.

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Yellow Bird is one of the most poignant and humane films I’ve seen in years. It doubtless cost Mr. Benfield a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to make up for a budget that might have been $11 to make the film. Yet Yellow Bird puts every contemporary, high-dollar, effects-laden studio film to shame. You should watch it.

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Yellow Bird ranks among my all-time favorite films, and for the same reasons. It’s an honest, slice-of-life film that cares about its characters despite their imperfections. 

 

There’s no pandering in Yellow Bird, and there are no easy paths forward. The characters in the movie make mistakes, and in this regard, this film is unyielding, but there is also acknowledgement and redemption. In the end, despite setbacks, the characters are all in better places—and not because of an ET in a bicycle handlebar basket either. They are better off because they engaged in the human struggle to change. That’s something that’s not easy. Yellow Bird makes this clear in two brilliant scenes, one involving a gnome, a bottle of $2000 whiskey, and Jake Rush (Benfield), and the other involving a dumpster at the very end of the film.

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I’m reluctant to compare films because I’m not inside the mind of the filmmaker(s). I can’t gauge their intent. I can only gauge what I see on the screen and relate that to my personal frame of reference. But with that caveat, this film reminds me favorably of Breaking Away for its honesty and trajectory and Fandango for character development (yeah, I know, I’m no Pauline Kael). The aforementioned scene with the yard gnome and whiskey packs, a Martin Scorsese money shot aside, the same emotional punch as Travis Bickle in the hallway scene on the phone with Betsy in Taxi Driver.

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You should find Yellow Bird on Amazon or perhaps at your local art house cinema (where I wish I’d seen it) as soon as possible. It’s a wonderful film; it’s getting some well-deserved buzz, and my hat is off to everyone involved. I think that Mr. Benfield just might have a budget bigger than what I spend on guitar strings for his next project." (Full Review at the link below)