The Living Wake (2007)

I'm so glad I was obsessed with Jesse Eisenberg back in 2010, or else I may never have discovered this little gem of a film. It's been a while since I watched this, at least six years, and the last twenty minutes or so still make me veer wildly from crying to laughing and back again. Mostly crying, though. I love the weird little world that this movie exists in, and I didn't want to leave. I love the random musical numbers, and all the oddball characters. K. Roth Binew is such a obnoxious, rude, strange character, but at his core he's a just a man dealing with abandonment issues from an absentee father, family that doesn't understand or even like him, and the fear of dying unfulfilled. In that way he's such a relatable and sympathetic character, and I find myself so unexpectedly fond of him each time I watch this. The Living Wake is an absurd movie, yet weirdly touching. It's one of my all time favorites, and I wish more people knew about it.

There are good movies and there are bad movies. There are movies that are so much worse than bad movies that they're entertaining to watch than something that's just plain bad. Then, there's "The Living Wake", which is so much worse than movies that are so bad that they're entertaining that it reaches an undiscovered depth of awfulness so unspeakably deplorable that I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I didn't even want to give this movie one star. I wanted to give it negative stars to offset any stars it did receive, because I can only imagine people who ranked this highly assumed that the stars they gave to this movie were the number of ninja stars they wanted to throw at their screens while viewing this movie.The movie centers around the flawed notion held by everyone involved in the creation and making of The Living Wake that weirdness and quirkiness are inseparably bound to genius. K. Roth Binew, diagnosed with some punctual terminal illness, uses his last day to search for, I don't know, meaning or whatever, while Jesse Eisenberg pedals him around in a rickshaw. There was nothing funny about this movie. I have never scowled so hard while watching a movie or doing anything. The urge to stop watching this movie was overwhelming as I spent the longest 90 minutes of my life wishing that dude would just die already. Then, after those 90 minutes of needlessly endless quirk, he did die, and it brought me no joy.If you're thinking of watching this movie, I implore you to stare at a wall or a blank screen for 90 minutes. It'll be a much better use of your time. Whoever put money into this disaster should never be allowed to have money again. When I think of how many starving children could've been fed for the money that went into this movie, it would make me sad, but due to the complete artlessness of this movie and my iron-minded ability to watch it in its entirety, I'm wholly convinced that I have no feelings and that I know no such thing as empathy anymore. My balls are huge. A lesser, smarter man would've stopped watching this movie.I could pick apart the acting or the writing or the "pee"-poor emulation of certain elements of Wes Anderson films, but why bother? Why bother doing anything? The movie was dedicated "in loving memory" to someone with the same last name of the director. I can only imagine this was a revenge plot. Maybe the director's brother slept with the director's wife or something. I don't know. It's like when a horrible tragedy happens and you look somewhere, anywhere, for answers, but there aren't any.Please do not see this movie. It was worse than the Holocaust.

If Leon Redbone made movies instead of music, this would be it! This movie is kooky, funny, and just plain out there. It has the feelings of 1920s slap-stick with a dark humor that comes off being incredibly enjoyable (think of those piano playing guys from Family Guy). The script is incredibly witty and outrageous situations are portrayed as regular mundanely regular occurrences for our main character. The movie is really a slice of Americana and experiments with artistic expression in a multitude of ways.At its heart, The Living Wake is a story about a man trying to find his way in the world as he comes to terms with death. We see K. Roth Binew go through his final day on Earth as he tries to figure out the "short, powerful monologue" - his way of trying to reconcile with the memory of his father walking out on him as a child. Really, though, it is about exploring who we are and how we see ourselves versus how we want people and the world to remember us after we pass.

I saw The Living Wake when it screened at the Austin Film Festival in October of 2007. It was a rather amusing story of a man preparing for what he believes to be his final day of life. He wants everyone he's ever come to know throughout his life to be there to witness his wake where he will perform and then die on the spot. To say this film is offbeat would be a pretty fair way to judge it. The humor had a lot of people howling in the audience (my friend, a fellow aspiring screenwriter, was one of the many howling). I thought it reminded me in a sense of some of the work of Wes Anderson, but my friend (who is not a fan of Anderson) disagreed. After all was said and done, the film was quite enjoyable even though there were moments that were a little awkward to say the least. I hope it finds a distributor (whether it be on DVD or in the theater). It deserves it.