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Posts Tagged ‘Kieran Culkin’

“A REAL PAIN”: Family. Neurosis. Holocaust.

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on December 31, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin

“A REAL PAIN” My rating: B (Available on demand)

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Family. Neuroses. The Holocaust.

When it comes to his second film as a writer/director Jesse Eisenberg doesn’t shy from the big issues.

What’s amazing about  “A Real Pain” is the way he deftly balances the comedic and the dramatic (even the tragic).  It’s a nifty trick that has eluded even veteran filmmakers.

Moreover, Eisenberg also stars in the film…though he’s magnanimous enough to give the really showy material to co-star Kieran Culkin.

David (Eisenberg) is a New Yorker with a wife and young son who has invited his black sheep cousin Benji (Culkin) on a guided tour of Poland, the birthplace of their dearly beloved and recently departed grandmother.

It’ll be a chance for the boyhood buds to reconnect, not only with each other but with their family history.  

They’ve signed on for a Holocaust tour (their comrades on the journey will be American Jews);  at some point David plans to leave the tour so he and Benji can visit the house in which their grandmother lived.

From their first meeting in an American airport it’s obvious that they’re oil and water.  

David is uptight, OCD, emotionally muted. He has everything planned down to the minute.

Benji is an unkempt man child —garrulous, charming, spontaneous, He’s  the sort of guy unafraid to ask intensely personal questions of strangers, to nudge you out of your comfort zone. He has prepared for the trip by mailing a parcel  of marijuana to their Warsaw hotel.

Eisenberg’s script follows two tracks. First there’s the cousins’ experiences with the other members of the tour. 

Jennifer Gray has a nice turn as a middle-aged divorcee from LA; Kurt Egylawan plays an African convert to Judaism.  Will Sharpe has some good moments as the tour leader, whose running commentary of canned observations may be designed to mask the pain of regularly visiting sites where thousands of innocents were slaughtered.

Throughout, though, there’s a canny dissection of the young men’s relationship, the shared love often threatened by Benji’s barely-hidden manic depression. Still mourning his grandmother, Benji tries to mask his pain by playing a cocky hipster…but the facade is cracking.

I said Eisenberg gave the showy material to Culkin, and that’s true. But late in the proceedings David has a an absolutely wonderful monologue about family and responsibility that gives the film a transcendent moral core.

| Robert W. Butler

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“WEINER DOG”: A dog’s life

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 14, 2016| Leave a Comment »

WIENER-DOG-01“WEINER-DOG” My rating: B+

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

A new Todd Solondz movie should be approached with equal parts anticipation and trepidation.

Trepidation because Solondz’s take on the human condition is a grimly amusing collision of the tender and the terrifying. And because while other American filmmakers cannily hedge their bets, diluting the astringent bite of their messages (or avoiding messages altogether), Solondz appears incapable of delivering his shocking assessments at anything less than full strength.

Oh, he’s got a sense of humor. But it’s a comic vision so dark that many won’t find it comic at all.

His latest, “Wiener-Dog,” follows a format most famously established by the great French director Robert Bresson in 1966’s “Au Hasard Balthazar,” the story of a hard-laboring donkey who passes through the hands of various cruel or indifferent human beings.

But “Weiner-Dog” is also a sequel of sorts to Solondz’s debut feature, 1995’s “Welcome to the Doll House,” which followed the unhappy adolescence of outsider geek Dawn Wiener.

The canine of the title is a female dachshund bought from a pet store by a middle-aged man (the playwright/actor Tracy Letts) as a gift for his son, Remi, who has only recently beat a cancer diagnosis.  Mom (Julie Delpy) is furious — one look at her sterile, uber-modern home tells us she has enough issues with a messy little boy, much less a shedding, shitting animal.

Little Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Heather Matarrazo, the star of “Dollhouse…” back in the day) lives an isolated life and is thrilled with his new pet, whom he dubs “Wiener-Dog.” The pooch is the one touch of spontaneous joy in his chilly world and his love for Wiener-Dog only intensifies with his parents’ growing irritation with this latest member of the household.

For Wiener-Dog whines and barks all night from her cage, refuses to be house trained and cannot obey Dad’s frustrated commands (“Heel, motherfucker!”). And when Remi objects to his  pet being spayed, Mom delivers a ghastly story from her own childhood about how her pet dog  was “raped” by a neighborhood cur named Muhammud and died giving birth to stillborn puppies. (Like so many memorable moments from the Solondz canon, you don’t know whether to recoil in horror or collapse in bitter laughter.)

Following an epic case of canine diarrhea — recorded by Solondz in a long tracking shot that feels like a nod to the traffic jam in Godard’s “Weekend” — the dog is sent to the vet’s to be destroyed.  But a lonely veterinary aide (Greta Gerwig) adopts Weiner-Dog, aptly renaming her Doody.

(more…)

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