SPOILER WARNING FOLLOWS!

Jesse Eisenberg‘s A Real Pain (Searchlight, 11.1), a quirky, shifty dudes-travelling-through-Poland thing, is going to connect because of Kieran Culkin‘s richly eccentric and occasionally unhinged character, Benji Kaplan…one of those hyper, live-wire guys whose irreverent, unfiltered energy most of us can’t help but enjoy or even get off on in short bursts.

But Culkin’s stoned-jumping-bean manner is also a bit much after repeated exposures. And knowing that Benji is doomed to some kind of arduous instability later in life…a poet who’s fated to “die in the gutter,” as Bob Dylan might put it…is, of course, quite sad.

Everyone has encountered a Benji or two in their life, and this is the film’s big irresistable draw. A Real Pain has to be seen for the Culkin effect. I had heard quite a lot about his firecracker turn, and yet Culkin didn’t disappoint in the least. God, what an amazing, infectious asshole…love his shpiel! And I adore the fact that he loves to sit in airline terminals and study the travellers.

Pic is basically about a pair of tristate-area Jewish cousins, crazy Benji and anxious, straightlaced, somewhat dull David (Eisenberg, who is strangely being campaigned for Best Actor with Culkin going for a Best Supporting nom) embarked on a group holocaust tour in Poland. The usual intrigues and complications ensue.

On top of which Dirty Dancing‘s Jennifer Grey, 63 years young when the film was shot in mid ’23, is also a participant. (The others are like lumps of mashed potatoes.)

This, trust me, is an excellent trailer:

From Owen Gleiberman’s excellent 1.21.24 Variety review, posted nine months ago during Sundance ’24:

“David is a sweet but conventional middle-class drone, whereas Benji is a loose cannon — a bro who never grew up, the kind of dude who says ‘fuck’ every fifth word, who advance-mails a parcel of weed to his hotel in Poland, and who has no filter when it comes to his thoughts and feelings. He’ll blare it all right out there. Since he’s a brilliant and funny guy who sees more than a lot of other people do, and processes it about 10 times as fast, he can (sort of) get away with the running monologue of hair-trigger nihilist superiority that’s his form of interaction. He can also be quite nice, and knows how to play people.

“Benji is a hellacious man-child the world should shun, only he turns out to be the life of the party. But at heart he’s an anti-social misfit, one who’s clinging to the recklessness of youth just at the moment he should be leaving it behind.

“[And] yet Culkin, for all his crack timing, is not giving a ‘comedy’ performance. He’s doing a sensational piece of acting as a compulsive wiseacre addicted to the ways of one-upmanship. Benji has the personality of a hipster slacker crossed with that of a corporate dick. He’s funny, he’s rude, he’s charming, he’s manipulative, and he will suck the life out of you. Yet Culkin makes him real, and the movie, which Eisenberg has scripted with an ear for the music of ideas and for contrasting voices, presents the story of these two cousins — how they interact, what they mean to each other, how their past intersects with the present — in a way that’s so supple you can touch their reality.

“To put it as Benji might: This, people, is what fucking filmmaking is about.”

…but a friend has heard that Team Sundance has firmly decided on a new location. As of early 2027 the fest will have pulled out of Park City, Utah and moved to Boulder, Colorado. You read it here first, unconfirmed-wise.

…and then watching the screen shrink to the size of an envelope during the last few seconds…sacrilege!

Physical media will always be better than this abomination!!! @Apple @iTunes @AppleTV pic.twitter.com/MZIx5Xi8VS

— It Came From The VCR (@VHSdude) September 11, 2024

It’s a serious tragedy that India’s Oscar Committee has decided against submitting Payal Kapadia‘s All We Imagine As Light, a truly masterful piece of feminist social portraiture that I went apeshit for during last May’s Cannes Film Festival, in favor of Kiran Rao‘s Laapataa Ladies, a seemingly lightweight comedy about young marrieds.

The first Indian film to play in competition at Cannes in 30 years, All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Jury Prize last May while putting Kapadia on the map as a major, auteur-grade director.

Choosing Laapataa Ladies as India’s official submission for 2024’s Best Int’l Feature Oscar is like….there are 100 analogies I could mention. It would be like a 1961 scenario in which Richard Thorpe‘s The Honeymoon Machine is officially submitted to a major international film festival instead of, say, Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler

The people who chose Laapataa Ladies instead of Kapadia’s film are obviously taste-free serfs, and probably corrupt ones at that.

In the view of Vanity Fair‘s Dominick Dunne and God knows many Menendez murder trial watchers the world over, the sexual abuse defense advanced by Lyle and Erik Menendez (i.e., my dad made me blow him repeatedly plus he fucked me in the ass a few times) and exploited to the hilt by attorney Leslie Abramson was — obviously, c’mon — something the boys cooked up in order to gain jury sympathy.

It’s one thing when a cynical, manipulative attorney attempts a bullshit defense strategy in court, but it’s something else when a nine-part Netflix series about the crime in question devotes most of an episode, directed by Michael Uppendahl and titled “The Hurt Man”, to a notably long and uncut single-slow-zoom-shot confession scene in which Erik recalls the lurid details of his father’s sexual abuse when he was a younger lad…a scene that zooms in ever so slowly upon Erik (I was vaguely reminded of that extra slow tracking, barren-hotel-room shot that Michelangelo Antonioni‘s The Passenger ends with) until it finally ends with a medium close-up…a prolonged scene in which Abramson’s back is facing the camera for the whole time.

And Erik’s bullshit sexual abuse fantasies are presented very seriously and solemnly…we’re meant to take Erik’s slowly unfolding recollections to heart…we’re meant to accept them as truthful and quite painful. This is quite a surreal strategy on the part of co-showrunners Ryan Murphy and Ian Brannen. You’re sitting there and wondering “why the hell is this bullshit fantasy being presented as a credible scenario?”

Consider these Vanity Fair Dominick Dunne links…they detail the whole lurid story. Here’s a good summary page with all the necessary links.

I was extremely keen to catch several episodes of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Disclaimer in Telluride. To get the full plate Telluriders had to commit to two separate screening sessions. I just couldn’t figure it out, and so I didn’t attend. Partly because a voice was telling me that Disclaimer didn’t have to be seen and absorbed all that quickly. I could take my time, the voice said.

Comeuppance! The past is waiting to pounce, and you will pay for your many buried sins and one sin in particular. All journalists are guilty in one way or another, and they all have to pay. Your enemies will see to that.

Is this a Nicole Kidman extended series? It’s not? Thank God! Wait…is it Gone Girl 2?

Cate Blanchett‘s Catherine Ravenscroft, a hotshot journalist, receives a novel from an unknown author and discovers she is the main character. “The novel exposes her darkest secrets, forcing her to confront her past,” etc. You did it, spirit of Beelzebub! And therefore you must die.

Georgeapp, 2.10.21: “A common trope in the crime fiction genre is various characters building something up, normally something they have done in the past, making it out to be absolutely awful when it just isn’t.

“The entire premise of Disclaimer leans upon Catherine’s secret. [But] the secret isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, certainly not to warrant the publishing of a book or the families’ extreme reactions. Maybe it’s because I’m not a parent but I personally don’t think Catherine was entirely to blame, and so the book felt a bit flat in this regard.”

Robocop is slightly more than 37 years old…37!

The greatest thing about the Robocop finale is that when this moment unspooled during my July ’87 viewing at Mann’s Chinese, a guy sitting next to me knew Peter Weller‘s final line before he said it. As soon as Dan O’Herlihy said “nice-shootin’, son…what’s your name?”, the audience guy said “Murphy” a second before Weller. Everyone in the theatre knew it! That‘s when a movie is really working.

One quibble: The adjective “old” isn’t necessary when using the term “geezer.”

…in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story (Netflix, 9.19).

Within a soiled demimonde of selfish, calculating characters, Dunne is pretty much the only one you can relax with…the only fellow who charms and soothes by speaking plainly, candidly, wittily. I sat up in my seat when Lane finally appeared late in episode #3 (or was it #4?). The nectar of human relatability…finally!

Murphy and Brennan, by the way, have totally fallen for the Menendez brothers’ imaginative legal defense, a claim that Javier Bardem’s Jose Menendez was not just a domineering tyrant but also a sexual abuser of his younger son, Erik. And yet Bardem’s performance leaps right over this — it feels as furious and complex and honestly pained as it gets; ditto Chloe Sevigny’s performance as Kitty, Jose’s anguished, alcoholic wife.

During last May’s Cannes Film Festival I paid no attention to Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson‘s Rumours, and I didn’t hear zip about it from anyone who attended…sorry. Not that this signifies anything in particular.

“Serious NXNW Letdown at Village East,” posted on 6.13.24:

I’ve been waiting a long time to see the much-promoted 4K restoration of North by Northwest, and so I couldn’t resist attending yesterday’s Tribeca Film Festival screening at the Village East Angelika.

I had a reasonable expectation that the restorationists had enhanced Alfred Hitchock’s 1959 classic with a distinct visual bump effect (as in “whoa, this looks better than ever before!”).

This would have been due, I figured, to their having sourced the original 8-perf 35mm VistaVision camera negative with all restoration work completed in 6.5k, and then overseeing the creation of a 65mm negative and finally having Fotokem create a 70mm film print.

That 70mm print was what was shown at the Village East last night, and I have to be honest — it looked very nice but it didn’t blow me away, and it certainly didn’t make my eyeballs go “boinnnggg!” There was absolutely no “bump” effect, and I was sitting there going “what the fuck?” and “why am I not looking at the very best NXNW ever created or projected…not since the waning days of the Eisenhower administration but ever, especially given the 8K VistaVision negative scan?”

What I saw yesterday evening was just…very nice. Approvable. Agreeable but nothing to bounce up and down about on a trampoline.

Denzel Washington hasn’t really looked what most of us would call “slender” or “svelte” in a good 30 years or thereabouts, or roughly since his costarring performance in Tony Scott‘s Crimson Tide (’95).

But now he suddenly looks like he’s been cutting out the carbs.

Magnificent digital recreations of ancient Rome…love ’em all.