Photo courtesy of the American Film Institute.
In the fall festival circuit, perhaps none in Southern California feels quite as classy as AFI Fest. Taking place at the TCL Chinese Theatres, it’s situated at the center of Hollywood history as the festival highlights some of the most exciting releases of the coming year. This year, The Panther co-editors Celine Schuneman and Ben Price were invited to the festival, below is a recounting of their experiences.
Celine: This was my first time and Ben's fourth time. It was also my first time at the Chinese Theatre. I watched more screenings, but Ben ended up seeing the big premieres, so I think we balanced each other out pretty well.
Ben: What was your favorite movie you saw?
Celine: This is something I've been mulling over because I think I liked almost all of the screenings that I saw, bar one or two … I think, ultimately, my favorite feature that I saw was ‘Possible Love,’ which is one we’ll be talking about for the rest of the year. Even if it's not going to be huge in the awards circuit, it's still a pretty defining film of the moment.
Ben: You’ve been taking on some monster run times.
Celine: Yeah, ‘Possible Love’ really took me by surprise. It was my first Lee Chang-Dong film and it follows this intimate family story that's interrupted by a documentarian who is following them around.
Ben: It's very Lance Oppenheim, Nathan Fielder.
Celine: In a weird way, it's kind of the perfect supplemental piece to ‘You Can See Everything,’ but while ‘You Can See Everything’ is this critique of how we portray the upper class in documentaries, this is more so a critique of how we portray the lower classes of documentaries. Like a lot of South Korean films, there's a lot in here about labor dynamics. There’s a lot of really gorgeous cinematography, fantastic performances from Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu. I'm curious how Netflix is going to position this one, but it was really good. Highly recommended.
Ben: Speaking of Netflix, probably the highlight of my AFI experience was getting to see 17 minutes of ‘The Further Misadventures of Cliff Booth’ with Quentin Tarantino. That was a real surprise that we even saw any of it at all. I already feel that I could make some broad thesis about AFI feeling kind of old-fashioned, like a tired kind of American cinema. But I actually think your experience and the stuff that you saw directly counteracts that.
Celine: I think it was interesting for me doing this the week after Newport Beach Film Festival because, as much as there are these really unique global titles that are highlighted at Newport Beach, it's a festival that's very much oriented towards old white rich people who live in Newport. This is a lot more industry-focused, even for the global titles. But, I digress, what were your thoughts on the ‘Cliff Booth’ trailer?
Ben: Good. I mean, I feel like if you were to show me the first 17 minutes of any movie, it's hard to give a true evaluation just because right where the clip ended felt like it's where the actual movie is going to start. Brad Pitt knows how to play that part. I think David Fincher is a really fun director to put in that world because he's really good at capturing scumminess; I'm really curious to see what he's going to bring to it. And then I saw, I think my favorite American film, the A and the F of the AFI that I saw at the festival was actually ‘Behemoth.’ It has nine credited composers, which sounds bizarre, but it’s because the movie is about a session cellist who works who ends up returning to work on movie scores. So, the lines blur between the fictions that he's scoring and what he's living outside of that, which is really cool.
Celine: I think this has been a big year of films that are about making art. The next two screenings I had that day were also very similar about this kind of self-reflective artistic process. I saw ‘Elsinore,’ which I have the most mixed opinions on. Andrew Scott is potentially one of my favorite performances this year. He's an incredible Shakespearean actor, so this is perfectly suited to his talents. This is a film that follows the true story of Ian Charleson, who was in ‘Chariots of Fire.’ He died of AIDS in 1990 and this is the true story of him performing Hamlet at the National Theater in London before he died. Andrew Scott isn’t just performing Shakespeare, but he's performing as a performer playing Shakespeare, which is not an easy feat. With some incredible weight to it, too. But it’s dragged down by nearly every single scene being a montage. It's so frustrating because the whole film is building up to his final performance of to be or not to be. His read of the monologue is incredible. But, even when he's reading it, the film cuts between three or four moments. That completely sucks so much of the weight of the performance out. It's a film that also I think does fall into some negative stereotypes of making a spectacle of AIDS. I think this is going to be a film that works for a lot of people. Again, Andrew Scott is phenomenal, but as a whole, I just really wish that any other aspect of the film making was even close to his level.
Ben: I got to say, I think you're probably going to be hearing (Andrew Scott) a lot the next couple months in the Best Actor category; someone else I think you'll be hearing is Anthony Ippolito in ‘I Play Rocky,’ which I also saw at the festival. I think it's a very strange concept for a movie given it's so directly about the making of a really famous movie, and at a certain point you're just watching that movie take place with new actors. As much as it is a true story, it basically becomes a remake. I think by the end it won me over, which is very fitting given what it's pulling from. Hollywood loves to reward itself on its own terms, and I think Ippolito does become Sylvester Stallone to the best of his ability, a lot of monosyllabic grunts. It's from the same director as ‘Green Book.’ I saw that film under similar terms at a different film festival way back when, this to me felt about the same in terms of how it played in the room. Just a lot of the elderly rocking out like it's a Jimmy Buffett concert, you know?
Celine: “‘I Play Rocky’ is such a classic film festival pick — but on the other side, I watched some really interesting global cinema at AFI Fest. I watched ‘The Friends House is Here,’ which is an Iranian film. I wasn't the biggest fan of it, but it was an interesting play on the coming of age genre. It felt a lot like ‘Frances Ha’ but within the setting of contemporary Iranian censorship. Like any Iranian film, I'm just kind of really impressed that something like this was able to be made. Sometimes I feel like that's almost overshadowing the quality of the film itself, for better or worse. I also watched two short films from one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, Céline Sciamma, who’s behind ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire.’ I rewatched ‘This is How a Child Becomes a Poet,’ which I originally saw last year. This is a rare short film, she hasn't actually really been releasing it anywhere. This film follows Sciamma clearing out the home of Patrizia Cavalli, and it's interspersing Sciamma's reflections on cinema as language with these little artifacts that she finds in this home. It's slow, only 12 minutes long, but exactly my kind of thing. This was a double bill with her new, almost feature length, ‘Tutti Frutti.’ I guess the best way to describe this is as Sciamma’s take on ‘Bo Burnham's inside.’ It's similarly a visual essay style self-reflective narrative, chronicling her four years since she's made a narrative feature. What starts as this deeply intimate, vulnerable self-portrait spirals into this dystopian speculative future. While I didn't like it quite as much as the short, I'm really impressed by how Sciamma is always going in new directions with her stuff. I also watched ‘Tender Loving Care,’ the new Mike Leigh film, which was at Ben's recommendation.
Ben: Because it was mannered and British and at 11:30 in the morning.
Celine: This was actually kind of a fitting double feature with ‘All of a Sudden,’ this musing on our failing social systems. This film is funny, it's sad but it has a social commentary that's really biting. It's remarkably socialist for something that's made by an 83-year-old British man. There's a turn at the end of this that I think is probably my favorite ending to a film this year. It was absolutely wonderful. This is absolutely one to look out for. It's not going to be everyone's thing, but it certainly was mine. That is also true of ‘All of a Sudden’ by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, who made ‘Drive My Car’ most famously a few years back. The best way to describe this is that it's almost like a Richard Linklater movie in the sense that it's kind of a hangout movie following these two highly educated women discussing ethics of care.
Ben: I guess right the charm of Linklater’s movies is it's always people you would walk past and not consider the depths of their intelligence talking at their most articulate and intelligent. The two lead performances in this are going to get talked about a lot, and they're both pretty experienced international actresses in their respective countries, too.
Celine: Oh, absolutely. And I think it's really incredible to see them both getting so much recognition here. Both Virginia Efira and Tao Okamoto are fantastic. It's very Hamaguchi too, there's a play within the film which is seen three different times, which I think it's fun. I love theater. It may deter some people that this movie is three and a half hours long, which is fair, but I think if you are at all interested in slow cinema, Hamaguchi is one of the contemporary masters of it. It's worth seeing, if nothing else, just to let these big ideas wash over you, it was a very meditative experience for me.
Ben: You know what's fast cinema?
Celine: Is it Raymond Gun?
Ben: I was charmed by ‘Ray Gunn’ at points, and sort of admired its larger mission, which is essentially like combining an old-fashioned detective noir with this heightened sci-fi metropolis. This is like literally if you shoved those two opposites together. Sure, there's black and white TVs, but there's flying cars, you know? I think a lot of what it has going on is more interesting in concept than it is in execution, but I will say it has two really excellent sequences. One involving an elevator and some goo and then another involving a gun that can store someone's molecular structure and shoot it back out. In both live action and animation, Brad Bird is really inventive when it comes to action sequences. Even something that is set in the future, set in another world, still felt like it was living off the fumes of other Hollywood products. I felt that my experience at AFI Fest was very much tied to and even kind of smothered by the notion of American film.
Celine: I think this Americanness and more traditional sense of film making kind of also culminated in my last film with ‘14th,’ which is the new Ava DuVernay documentary. This is one I was mixed on. The film that's very socially relevant, very pressing as well, enlightening even regarding how the 14th Amendment is kind of at the root of what contemporary conservative politics are attacking. However, as many have pointed out already, this film does have a somewhat egregious use of AI that is really unnecessary and comes out of left field. All these like old photos of the reconstruction era are animated and brought to life and these characters are really uncannily, waving and looking at the camera, it's so disturbing. There's also a really weird framing in this where they position Ronald Reagan as being in support against what Donald Trump would be doing, which I think is a really weird and radical decision.
Ben: I think the notion of a sequel to a documentary is tricky.
Celine: It makes sense just because this is all about the 14th amendment in the sense that the ‘13th’ was all about the 13th. It kind of ended the festival on a whimper for me, but overall I really enjoyed the festival.
Ben: As with all festivals there's definitely a culture built around badges, and as much as this is available to people, it can feel very exclusive. But the fact that every October, even watching ‘I Play Rocky,’ which was a movie that didn't totally win me over with its sentimentality, getting to watch a movie and be moved by it in a room full of people was really kind of touching to me. That was probably the most moving part of my festival experience.
Celine: A lot of Chapman students don't always recognize the opportunities that we have to watch these types of movies. For filmmakers and film watchers alike, it's really important to involve ourselves in these big communal experiences. I ended up having so many interesting conversations with people in the seats next to me at all the screenings I watched. To me, that's always the highlight of the festival experience. Even when you're watching a film that you may be more lukewarm on, or even one that you're over the moon about, the dialogue that these types of films open up is kind of at the heart of what makes movies interesting.