LA Weekly: AFI Fest 2005

Scott Foundas writes,

"Yet, the impulse remains — the lust to be the festival that discovers the next Sex, Lies and Videotape or Pulp Fiction — no matter how compelling the evidence that there simply aren’t that many good films to go around. From Fresno to Frankfurt, the world is now saturated with film festivals, but the most meaningful discoveries continue to be made by Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Venice and Toronto, as well as a vital secondary tier of festivals that includes Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary and Locarno.

"The others, to the extent that they insist on premieres, serve mainly to give false hope to filmmakers who should probably consider other career paths. AFI Fest might do well to take a page (or two) from the playbooks of the New York, Chicago and San Francisco film festivals, which long ago resolved to service their hometown crowds with the best films available at that particular moment — no strings attached — resulting in a festival-of-festivals atmosphere to which no single film event in Los Angeles can lay claim. (And I include the Los Angeles Film Festival in that assessment, despite the leaps and bounds by which it has improved in recent ears.)"

And Eric Khoo's Be With Me gets another positive mention by Scott Foundas in LA Weekly.