THE REEL LESS TRAVELED

A film festival is a lot like a circus coming to town. It arrives amid much fanfare and ballyhoo, sets up temporary shop offering exotic entertainment and beguilements and then, as quickly as it arrived, it’s gone.

And there is a necessary wistfulness to its departure, with films left unseen, ephemeral acquaintances made and the aftereffects of visual overload settling in. AFI Fest at the ArcLight packs up its tents this weekend, sending its fare on to other festivals, obscurity or, for a lucky few, theatrical distribution, but attendees may be looking for that one last spectacle to savor.

If ever a film belonged under a big top, it’s “The Living Wake” (9:15 p.m. Fri., 1 p.m. Sat.). Directed by Sol Tryon, it is a supremely goofy and self-aware romp co-written by and starring comic Mike O’Connell as aggrandizing artist K. Roth Binew.

Introduced via a mock newsreel, Binew is a larger-than-life creation diagnosed with an incurable ailment that will kill him this very day. With his aide-de-camp and official biographer Mills (Jesse Eisenberg) in tow -- actually, Mills tows Binew, in a bicycle-powered rickshaw -- the self-anointed genius sets out to plan and executes the title soiree in as grand a fashion as possible.

O’Connell and Eisenberg make an absurdist tag team, putting Binew’s affairs in order with aplomb -- a study in going out in style.

-- Kevin.Crust@latimes.com