Page 1 failed to load.
Mike D'Angelo - AFI Fest 2026: Day Two
More from Mike D'Angelo
Mike D'Angelo - The Texas Chain Saw (Chainsaw) Massacre (2)
About This Title
Note that there'll only be three days total this year, as there was nothing I wanted to see today (Saturday). Also I idiotically secured tickets for two films that significantly overlap (no idea how I missed that), so should have time to catch either Digger or Primetime between the only two films I can actually attend on Sunday. Got 3 hours 20 minutes to kill, and neither of the AFI films will attract a crowd.
Nowhere to Lay My Eyes (Hong Sang-soo): 52
At this point, I think maybe Hong has achieved a degree of lightly rueful narrative minimalism combined with formal indifference that's gonna produce shrugs (at best) from me for the foreseeable future. This is actually my favorite of his films since in water (only three years ago, but he's made six other features in that time, none of which I liked), in part because it, too, boasts a peculiarly depressive air; images are in focus here (to the extent Hong's shitty camera allows, that is), but the protagonist's voiceover narration—a device Hong rarely employs, and never this conventionally, to the best of my recollection—is so casually defeatist, and gets so pointedly refuted (e.g., Sang-hee's brother goes looking for her literally seconds after her voiceover speculates that nobody's even noticed her absence), that I started tensing up for a possible suicide. Hong's not that kind of filmmaker (Hotel by the River's ending notably excepted), but I wondered again: Is he okay? So that was intriguing on the macro level. It's just...another movie featuring lengthy, mundane, "Really?"-punctuated* conversations at restaurant tables. Another movie featuring Kim Min-hee (her 13th Hong joint since 2015) and Kwon Hae-hyo (his 13th since 2012). Another movie in which multiple characters are either filmmakers or wannabe filmmakers. He's kinda run out of minute variations on the thin sliver of existence that interests him.
* This is the first Hong film I've seen in a theater since Walk Up, so I couldn't do my "Really?" tally. But it was the usual whole helluva lot.
Behemoth! (Tony Gilroy): 69
Cackled like a maniac through much of the opening 15-20 minutes, which first throws us into the deep end of a highly specialized and stratified world (orchestral film scoring) without concern for how much we'll comprehend and then executes some magnificent comedy rooted in diegetic vs. non-diegetic music, as Alex's desperate attempt to avoid his psychotic ex (Olivia Wilde's having a banner year) gets accompanied by the intensely dramatic spy-thriller cue we're simultaneously (via cross-cutting) watching him play cello on/for. At that point, though, I still expected, based on Gilroy's history, that Behemoth! would be plot-heavy, rather than the sprawling, wacky character study that it in fact is. Don't think there was an individual scene or sequence that I didn't enjoy, but the film's overstuffed, almost crazily ambitious in some ways (it earns that exclamation point!); I kept waiting for it to coalesce into something meaningful, and while it eventually does land on a specific idea, the simplicity of that revelation/relationship gets a bit diluted by the tangentially-related chaos from which it gradually emerges. (Trying to avoid spoilers, but I'll note that Eva Victor's role needed to be more prominent than it is, and Will Arnett's less prominent.) Still, it's so refreshing to see a mainstream-ish American filmmaker trust viewers to keep up with a dizzyingly complicated story that for a long time doesn't seem to be headed in any discernible direction. And the jargon's almost Primer-level indecipherable if you don't play an instrument.
I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies (Mani Haghighi): 36
If you didn't roll your eyes at the title (neither referenced in nor relevant to the film; apparently it's meant strictly as an attention-getter), you might have a better time with this freewheeling documentary portrait/essay than I did. In theory, it's sort of an Iranian Gleaners and I, with Varda replaced by a wealthy middle-aged married couple who spend much of the movie insisting that they're archivists and collectors, not hoarders, even as they concede that they're more terrified by the idea of empty space than they are enthused about the objects themselves. But this 76-minute unfinished doodle (authorities confiscated Haghighi's equipment and some of his footage, shutting him down) isn't really about Nasser Bakhshi and Roghayeh Najdi. Nor does it delve with any utility into the elements of Iran's history that they've preserved (even as they also bought broken grandfather clocks and other such junk). Instead, Haghighi uses his ostensible subject as a flimsy clothesline upon which to string whatever captures his notice. Varda pulled that magpie approach off via sheer adorable personality, and John Wilson turns discursiveness into comedy. I Deserve a Lover, like its dumbass title, just feels random. Why are we now getting a montage of people's tattoos? Apart from disrupting the shoot, what does Trump's idiotic war have to do with anything else in the movie? Haghighi's efforts to apply a political patina to this project were not persuasive to me, I'm...perplexed to propose. (Too many P's, might as well go all the way.) Artsy to a fault. Like the title!
Note that there'll only be three days total this year, as there was nothing I wanted to see today (Saturday). Also I idiotically secured tickets for two films that significantly overlap (no idea how I missed that), so should have time to catch either Digger or Primetime between the only two films I can actually attend on Sunday. Got 3 hours 20 minutes to kill, and neither of the AFI films will attract a crowd.
Nowhere to Lay My Eyes (Hong Sang-soo): 52
At this point, I think maybe Hong has achieved a degree of lightly rueful narrative minimalism combined with formal indifference that's gonna produce shrugs (at best) from me for the foreseeable future. This is actually my favorite of his films since in water (only three years ago, but he's made six other features in that time, none of which I liked), in part because it, too, boasts a peculiarly depressive air; images are in focus here (to the extent Hong's shitty camera allows, that is), but the protagonist's voiceover narration—a device Hong rarely employs, and never this conventionally, to the best of my recollection—is so casually defeatist, and gets so pointedly refuted (e.g., Sang-hee's brother goes looking for her literally seconds after her voiceover speculates that nobody's even noticed her absence), that I started tensing up for a possible suicide. Hong's not that kind of filmmaker (Hotel by the River's ending notably excepted), but I wondered again: Is he okay? So that was intriguing on the macro level. It's just...another movie featuring lengthy, mundane, "Really?"-punctuated* conversations at restaurant tables. Another movie featuring Kim Min-hee (her 13th Hong joint since 2015) and Kwon Hae-hyo (his 13th since 2012). Another movie in which multiple characters are either filmmakers or wannabe filmmakers. He's kinda run out of minute variations on the thin sliver of existence that interests him.
* This is the first Hong film I've seen in a theater since Walk Up, so I couldn't do my "Really?" tally. But it was the usual whole helluva lot.
Behemoth! (Tony Gilroy): 69
Cackled like a maniac through much of the opening 15-20 minutes, which first throws us into the deep end of a highly specialized and stratified world (orchestral film scoring) without concern for how much we'll comprehend and then executes some magnificent comedy rooted in diegetic vs. non-diegetic music, as Alex's desperate attempt to avoid his psychotic ex (Olivia Wilde's having a banner year) gets accompanied by the intensely dramatic spy-thriller cue we're simultaneously (via cross-cutting) watching him play cello on/for. At that point, though, I still expected, based on Gilroy's history, that Behemoth! would be plot-heavy, rather than the sprawling, wacky character study that it in fact is. Don't think there was an individual scene or sequence that I didn't enjoy, but the film's overstuffed, almost crazily ambitious in some ways (it earns that exclamation point!); I kept waiting for it to coalesce into something meaningful, and while it eventually does land on a specific idea, the simplicity of that revelation/relationship gets a bit diluted by the tangentially-related chaos from which it gradually emerges. (Trying to avoid spoilers, but I'll note that Eva Victor's role needed to be more prominent than it is, and Will Arnett's less prominent.) Still, it's so refreshing to see a mainstream-ish American filmmaker trust viewers to keep up with a dizzyingly complicated story that for a long time doesn't seem to be headed in any discernible direction. And the jargon's almost Primer-level indecipherable if you don't play an instrument.
I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies (Mani Haghighi): 36
If you didn't roll your eyes at the title (neither referenced in nor relevant to the film; apparently it's meant strictly as an attention-getter), you might have a better time with this freewheeling documentary portrait/essay than I did. In theory, it's sort of an Iranian Gleaners and I, with Varda replaced by a wealthy middle-aged married couple who spend much of the movie insisting that they're archivists and collectors, not hoarders, even as they concede that they're more terrified by the idea of empty space than they are enthused about the objects themselves. But this 76-minute unfinished doodle (authorities confiscated Haghighi's equipment and some of his footage, shutting him down) isn't really about Nasser Bakhshi and Roghayeh Najdi. Nor does it delve with any utility into the elements of Iran's history that they've preserved (even as they also bought broken grandfather clocks and other such junk). Instead, Haghighi uses his ostensible subject as a flimsy clothesline upon which to string whatever captures his notice. Varda pulled that magpie approach off via sheer adorable personality, and John Wilson turns discursiveness into comedy. I Deserve a Lover, like its dumbass title, just feels random. Why are we now getting a montage of people's tattoos? Apart from disrupting the shoot, what does Trump's idiotic war have to do with anything else in the movie? Haghighi's efforts to apply a political patina to this project were not persuasive to me, I'm...perplexed to propose. (Too many P's, might as well go all the way.) Artsy to a fault. Like the title!
Comments (0)