Comedy

A Real Pain: The Mend of the Tour

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain

Priming his Holocaust tour group for the fraught experience that awaits them, the guide doesn’t mince words: “There’s going to be a lot of pain.” But he also advises his company not to wallow in despair, and to take heart in the stories of the many Jews who survived their horrific ordeal in 1940s Europe, even as countless more were exterminated. A Real Pain, the second directorial feature from Jesse Eisenberg, isn’t so clumsy or didactic as to trace the contours of this historical tragedy onto the map of its own, infinitesimally smaller story. But it does mirror the guide’s message in the sense that it traffics in solemn, heavy emotions while deploying a tone that’s light and even playful. It’s a comedy about grief, or perhaps a tearjerker about joy.

The movie’s title carries an obvious double meaning—maybe even triple. The more literal (if still intangible) connotation refers not just to the suffering of the Holocaust but to the depression of Benji (Kieran Culkin), the vibrant yet plainly wounded young man who’s still mourning the death of his beloved grandmother. Having rousted himself from his mother’s basement couch in Binghamton, Benji has traveled for an edifying vacation in Poland, where he immediately imposes his indefatigable will upon his fellow tourists. He’s charming but also exhausting—the kind of guy who, upon learning that a different group member (Kurt Egyiawan) once fled the Rwandan genocide, shouts “Oh snap!” then clarifies, “I meant that in a good way.” Benji is unfiltered and undeniable, a combustible mixture that makes him both the most effervescent person in the room and also—to return to the title—a genuine nuisance. Read More

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Anora: Visit Your Local Poling Place

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora

The opening shot of Sean Baker’s Anora finds the camera dollying along a row of champagne booths at a strip club, clinically observing a scene of stylish debauchery. The music is loud, the light is low, and the exotic dancers are gyrating with plastered smiles, pantomiming their pleasure while internally checking their watch. Given that this display is preceded by an austere title card informing audiences that the film has received one of the most prestigious prizes in cinema (the Palme d’Or at Cannes), you might think that the ensuing picture will be a squalid story of misery and disenchantment—an exposé revealing the predatory nature of the strip-club industry and the meager circumstances of the women whom it chews up and spits out. Surely this widely acclaimed and undoubtedly serious movie can’t be… fun?

But Baker, continuing his hot streak in the wake of The Florida Project and Red Rocket, demolishes his viewers’ assumptions as cannily as he develops his characters. It is true that Anora is a thoughtful and incisive work, exploring its drably decadent milieu with persuasive rigor. It is also, by and large, a blast—a ribald comedy that hums with playfulness and dynamism. It turns you on and pulls you in. Read More

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Saturday Night: Kvetch Comedy

Jeremy BeckReviews
Gabriel LaBelle in Saturday Night

Jason Reitman likes two things: chaos, and smart people overcoming it. Aaron Eckhart’s amoral lobbyist in Thank You For Smoking, Elliot Page’s arch teenager in Juno, George Clooney’s slick consultant in Up in the Air—they were all sharper than everyone else, and their superior intellect helped them navigate sticky situations. So it makes sense that Saturday Night, Reitman’s brisk and entertaining and somewhat dubious recreation of the inaugural production of Saturday Night Live, centers on a brilliant young man ensnared in a thicket of logistical complications. Can our clever and resourceful hero somehow beat the odds and get the show ready for air?

You surely know the answer to that question, even if the abbreviation “SNL” is somehow foreign to you. Reitman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Gil Kenan, has structured the movie as a ticking-clock thriller, but it really unfolds in the language of the underdog sports drama. The cast and crew of the show’s production resemble a ragtag batch of hotheaded athletes and quirky assistants, a fragmented bunch whose clashing egos and disparate abilities must be marshaled by the beleaguered head coach into a unified team. The putative suspense derives from whether this unruly squad can put aside their differences and assemble a functional variety hour—can score a goal, as it were—before the final buzzer that’s destined to go off half an hour before midnight. Read More

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Wolfs: Spurn After Reading

Jeremy BeckReviews
Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs

The first time we hear George Clooney’s voice in Wolfs, he’s on the other end of the phone, speaking in a clipped, measured tone that instantly conveys a sense of authority. A woman (Amy Ryan) has gotten herself into a spot of trouble—there’s a half-naked dead man in her hotel room, though he’s definitely “not a prostitute”—and she’s calling the mysterious number that somebody once gave her for existential emergencies. The man who answers is cool, confident, reassuring—the best in the business. When he arrives in person, hands shielded in blue latex gloves and ready to make her problem magically disappear, he insists that she’s found the right guy: “There’s nobody who can do what I do.”

The central joke of Wolfs is that exactly one other person can do what he does—and that person is played by Brad Pitt. It’s been 16 years since one of Hollywood’s most glamorous bromances shared the screen, when (spoiler alert) Clooney blasted a hole in Pitt’s head midway through Burn After Reading. Since then, they’ve both had solid careers independently—securing Oscar nominations (Up in the Air and The Descendants for Clooney, Moneyball and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for Pitt), headlining hits (Gravity and Ticket to Paradise, World War Z and Bullet Train), and appearing in a range of original pictures (Tomorrowland and Hail Caesar, Ad Astra and Babylon) that managed to exist outside the industry’s perpetual franchise machine. The promise of Wolfs is that it reunites these two A-listers—among the last vestiges of a bygone era when the audience’s level of interest in a new movie was directly correlated to the names on the marquee—and allows them to reignite the chic chemistry that once powered the Ocean’s films. Read More

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Speak No Evil, Beetlejuice 2, and Movies Nobody Asked For

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; James McAvoy in Speak No Evil

One of the most common rhetorical questions you’ll find on the internet, posed in response to the green-lighting of a new movie, is “Who asked for this?” It’s a derisive expression meant to impugn the upcoming film’s artistic integrity and belittle its commercial viability, even if it really functions as a statement of personal taste; the literal answer to the question is invariably, “Lots of people, just not you.” It’s also correlative of asking whether a picture is “necessary,” which is equally foolish. Strictly speaking, no work of art is necessary because we’re talking about entertainment, not food or shelter; philosophically speaking, art is absolutely necessary because it provides us with pleasure, anger, knowledge, and the opportunity to get mad at people online when they disagree with us. We may not need movies to survive, but to quote the captain from Wall-E, I don’t want to survive—I want to live.

And yet: In our era of perpetual IP churn, it’s occasionally worth pondering why certain pictures are made, and whether their cinematic execution can transcend their facially dubious justification (which is, of course, that studio executives hope they might make money). The two movies currently atop the domestic box office, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Speak No Evil, inspire this sort of metaphysical musing, given that they’re typal cousins: the long-delayed sequel to a beloved classic, and the English-language remake of an acclaimed foreign work. They both have their virtues; they both also raise questions about whether they should exist at all. Read More

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