Sol Tryon's "The Living Wake" seems but a protracted act of stultifying self-indulgence — but then maybe that's the point. It stars stand-up comic Mike O'Connell, who looks like a shorter, stockier Conan O'Brien, as an incessantly eccentric would-be literary lion who, convinced by his doctor he is soon to die from a grave but unidentified disease, gathers his neighbors to put on a show that is to end with him dropping dead. (O'Connell and co-producer Peter Kline co-wrote the script.)
O'Connell's K. Roth Binew speaks with unstinting grandiloquence and is transported everywhere in a rickshaw attached to a bicycle ridden by his adoring manservant Mills Joquin (Jesse Eisenberg). Binew remains enraged at having been abandoned in childhood by his father, spouts off on this and that and drinks a lot. None of this seems amusing or enlightening or even all that original, but Binew and his hijinks, it should be reported, have found admirers among serious critics and film festival audiences.
