When the L.A. Film Festival shuttered in 2018, it left a void that no one in the city seemed eager to fill.
Despite its name, LAFF had long played second fiddle to AFI Fest due to a weaker slate of movies and muddled identity. Last year finally saw the emergence of, if not a replacement, then at least a spiritual successor: the Los Angeles Festival of Movies, which quickly established its own niche via a less-is-more approach that applies to both its schedule (one Thursday-to-Sunday long weekend) and program (just 12 feature films). Even the movies themselves didn’t overstay their welcome: two of the films I saw were under 80 minutes, and the longest was less than two hours.
This year’s edition, which took place from April 3rd through 6th at venues like Vidiots and 2200 Arts & Archives, was my first. It won’t be the last.
A movie that lives up to its title, Invention vibrates at a strange frequency all its own. Callie Hernandez, whose prior credits include everything from La La Land to Alien: Covenant, proves as capable behind the camera of this micro-budget meta fiction as she is in front of it. In addition to co-writing the script with director Courtney Stephens, she stars as a fictionalized version of herself named Carrie in the wake of her father’s death, learning from the executor of his estate that she’s inheriting neither money nor property but the patent for an electromagnetic healing device. Interspersed with the main action are actual television appearances the elder Hernandez made in the ‘90s, presumably captured on VHS when they originally aired and providing context for the kind of man and doctor he was: competent but a little (or a lot) kooky. He also bequeathed his next of kin a prototype of the unnamed device, and watching it operate is somewhere between soothing and hallucinatory as its red and lights pulsate inside glass tubes. Literally everything vibrates on an atomic level, one of Carrie’s dad’s business associates reminds her, which might explain why everyone she meets is a little off. Whether that’s because they tried the device or need to try it is left to us to determine.
100,000,000,000,000 is a long title for a 79-minute movie, albeit one in which numbers feature prominently. Afine (Zakaria Bouti), a sex worker living in Monaco who serves both male and female clients, receives text messages inquiring as to his prices; the camera focuses on digital clocks at such make-a-wish moments as 21:21, 22:22, and 23:23. The emptied-out city as Christmas approaches makes for a strange, oddly beautiful backdrop in co-writer/director Virgil Vernier’s take on the gig economy. Afine spends most of the film tagging along with a Serbian friend (Mina Gajovic) as she babysits a 12-year-old named Julia (Victoire Song) whose extremely wealthy parents have left her behind while working on a massive construction project expanding the city-state. She has something of a premonition: that something bad will happen in the next year but that she and Afine will be among the few survivors because they’ll be on the manmade island her parents are building. It’s both an endtime vision and a pipe dream, either sinister or comforting depending on how hopeful you are for the future in general.
Half a century after the murders themselves and 18 years after David Fincher made the definitive movie about them, the Zodiac Killer and his exploits have yet to leave the popular imagination. And though interest in the never-caught serial killer predates our algorithm-driven excess of true crime, what writer/director Charlie Shackleton describes as the genre’s “gravitational pull” keeps bringing us back to him. Really a movie about a movie that doesn’t exist, Zodiac Killer Project describes the documentary Shackleton would have made had he successfully landed the rights to Lyndon E. Lafferty’s The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge — something he was in the process of doing before the author’s family changed their minds for reasons he never learned.
The result works best as a genuinely funny sendup of an increasingly exploitative, omnipresent style of filmmaking that Shackleton has conflicted feelings about. He mocks the “evocative B-roll” they all use when showing footage of tape recorders, lit cigarettes in ash trays, and swinging lamps in interrogation rooms while bemoaning the fact that he never got to employ these go-to techniques himself. This naturally leads to tough questions the movie never fully investigates, the most important of which is: if these movies are so interchangeable, why should we think his would have been any different?
Is Tim Robinson the funniest person alive?
That isn’t a rhetorical question, and it’s one I’ve thought a lot about over the last few years. His closest competition, at least in my headcanon, are fellow cringe-comedy maestros Larry David and Nathan Fielder. As much as I love Curb Your Enthusiasm and Nathan for You, though, I don’t rewatch them as often as I do Coffin Flop. Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship — essentially a feature-length ITYSL skit co-starring Paul Rudd — is another point in Robinson’s favor. It plays like a demented update to the bromances of the late aughts and early 2010s, not to mention an insightful look at the so-called male loneliness epidemic. I’ll be writing about it at length when it arrives in theaters next month, but for now I’ll say it’s the funniest movie I’ve seen in years and leave you with an appetite-whetting quote: “My name’s Tony, but when my hair’s down people call me T-Boy.”
