Thoughts on A Real Pain

   At the Angelika Film Center in New York City, I went to see A Real Pain, a 2024 film written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. It stars Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as cousins David and Benji, who take a trip to Poland to both go on a Holocaust group tour, as well as to visit the childhood home of their recently deceased grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor. The cousins grew up together like brothers, but have drifted apart in recent years, not having spoken for six months. David works in digital marketing and lives in Manhattan with his wife and toddler son, and is reserved and pragmatic, while Benji lives in Binghamton and is more eccentric and charismatic, but without a career direction in his life. 

    The tour is led by James (Will Sharpe), a British polite and genteel man who largely sticks to the script when delivering monologues about the tour sites. The group includes a middle-aged couple named Mark and Diane (Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy), Marcia (Jennifer Grey), a recently divorced woman who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s and a converted Jew. The group get to know each other at dinners and train rides, visiting the sites, while Benji is thinking more about sneaking away to smoke weed on hotel rooftops, agitating David with his spontaneity (like neglecting to wake him when they are on the train, intentionally missing their stop), and giving constructive feedback to the tour guide to not give so much information overload when they are visiting the Old Jewish Cemetery and trying to read the gravestones.

    The cousins contrast with each other a lot, and David does confess to Benji that he wishes he could be more charismatic like him, lighting up a room, but also resents how erratic he is and how he can blow up a room just as easily. Culkin portrays this nervous energy as Benji that is more of a cover for his own anxieties, especially missing his grandmother and how she would snap back at him when she felt he was self-destructing with substance abuse and a lack of direction. He's really great in this film, and I wanted to learn more about his character, especially as more about his mental health struggles gets revealed, and I felt like Eisenberg was pulling his punches as a director, not digging deep enough, and leaving the finale more open-ended with Benji's story.

    The film is a tight 90 minutes, and it balances comedy and drama well, especially in a sequence where the group visits the Madjanek concentration camp, and Eisenberg lets the scene be largely silent with sparse commentary from James as the guide, and it is this still moment in the film that lets the action take a break, and lets the audience sit with the characters in their sadness and grief upon visiting the gas chambers.

    The film was co-produced by Emma Stone and her husband Dave McCrary, and it's an interesting movie that feels more like a road trip/buddy movie, a good mix of grief and comedy, and I recommend it as an interesting watch.

Thoughts on Stone Pillow

    On Tubi, I watched the 1985 TV movie Stone Pillow, directed by George Schaefer, written by Rose Leiman Goldemberg, and starring Lucille Ball as an unhoused woman named Florabelle, living on the streets of New York City for an unspecified amount of years, pushing her cart around full of her prized possessions. Daphne Zuniga played Carrie, a young social worker who just started her job in a shelter, and wants to know firsthand what life is like for homeless people. She meets Flora by chance, and Flora is stingy and doesn't want pity or any help from anyone. She thinks Carrie is a runaway, and Carrie doesn't correct her, essentially lying by omission. 

    Flora takes her under her wing, showing her around the streets, instructing her on how to eat fruits and vegetables out of the garbage, avoiding the cops when looking for a public place to sleep at night, and navigating the bureaucracy of shelters. She warns Carrie that her pretty looks will make her a target for predators, and instructs her to cover her hair up with a knit cap to hide her beauty so she wouldn't be taken advantage of. 

    The film's story goes through a whole 24 hours of Flora and Carrie moving from the streets to Port Authority to Grand Central Station, including finding a hidden underground at Grand Central where a lot of homeless people hide out, and a young man named Max, who is an accountant who volunteers to help people, is suspicious of Carrie, telling her about the troubles the other people have gone through and saying to her "You look like you slept in a bed last night." He also tries to warn Flora that Carrie may not be who she seems, as Flora confides in her a lot and sees her as a young girl to protect, but Flora brushes him off.

   It was an interesting movie to watch, as Lucille Ball hadn't done much drama through her career, and this would be one of her last screen roles, aside from her 1986 show Life with Lucy, before she passed away in 1989. She is charismatic to watch, even not feeling totally convincing in the role because of her Hollywood celebrity preceding her, but it's still a good performance. When she tells Carrie about her past and how she became homeless, some of the story felt like it had some holes missing, but I could imagine that she may not be telling Carrie the whole truth and omitting some details to seem more sympathetic. 

    Daphne Zuniga was a rising star at the time, having been in The Sure Thing (1985) with John Cusack, and Modern Girls (1986) with Virginia Madsen, and would go on to greater fame with Spaceballs (1987) and her run on Melrose Place in the 1990s. She's fine in this, especially as a relative newcomer opposite a veteran star, and it's nice watching them act together onscreen and form a bond over one long day and night.

    The film has some notable actors in small roles, like Anna Maria Horsford (Friday, The Wayans Brothers) as a fellow social worker; Stephen Lang (Avatar; Last Exit to Brooklyn) in a bit role; Victor Raider-Wexler (The King of Queens) as a delivery man who sneaks fruit and vegetables to Flora; Raymond Serra (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) as a shop owner, and Mike Starr (Dumber & Dumber) as a man in the alley who warns the women about the threat of rapists.

    The movie makes good points when others who can see through Carrie's deceit that her trying to pretend to be homeless is insulting to actually homeless people, and twice they explain to her that they aren't different from her, and a few missed paychecks or a run of bad luck could put her in the same situation, as others she meets had lost their homes due to fires, missed welfare checks, medical issues, and being kicked out of rooming houses and not having an address to collect Social Security checks. As this film was made during the Reagan era, it's likely that many did become unhoused due to economic changes, a butterfly effect still being felt today, So even if the film is wrapped up with a happy ending that feels a little forced, it's still a decent movie about unhoused people with both an up and coming actress and a Hollywood veteran paired together.

Thoughts on You and Me

    On Criterion, I watched You and Me, a 1938 romantic comedy/crime drama directed by Fritz Lang, written by Virginia van Upp and Norman Krasna. It was an odd mix of genres, as part of it is a romantic comedy set in a department store where the owner has hired several ex-cons to work as salespeople, wanting to give them a chance at rehabilitation after prison, and how a robber named Joe (George Raft) falls for his coworker Helen (Sylvia Sidney). They end up getting into a quickie marriage, and while he was honest with her about his past, despite feeling like he didn't deserve a sweet innocent like her, she doesn't tell him that she too is an ex-con, and that she isn't allowed to marry while on parole, jeopardizing them both.

    The other part of the movie is a crime drama where Joe meets up with his old prison buddies, and they sit around reminiscing about their time in prison, like how they only had a good chicken meal once a year on Christmas, and while they can have chicken anytime as free men, it doesn't taste as good as when they had to wait for it. Then, because the film was directed by Lang and featured a score by Kurt Weill, goes into this Brechtian experimental musical number, with the men tapping metal instruments to create atonal sounds, chanting a cappella, coded knocking, and it's this genuinely strange but interesting moment in the film of the men singing about being in prison, then the film moves on from this musical moment and, aside from an opening song over cash registers about how everything costs money and consumerism and capitalism, doesn't do another musical number again.

    Sidney was very cute and charming to watch, and given that I had initially heard of her from her much later films in her senior years like Beetlejuice (1988) and Mars Attacks! (1996), it's fun to compare the adorable 1930s starlet she was with the tiny old woman with the smoker's voice she became later in life. George Raft was decent to watch, and he often starred in 1930s gangster films and had alleged real-life connections with gangsters, too.

    It is an interesting movie, and I liked the odd blend of genres and how it both felt like a typical Hollywood film in the Hayes Code era and an anticapitalistic critique from German experimental artists.

Thoughts on Thelma

  On Hulu, I watched the 2024 comedy Thelma, written and directed by Josh Margolin, starring June Squibb as the titular character, a woman in her nineties who gets scammed out of $10,000 by a caller pretending to be her grandson, and she goes on a mission to track down the scammers and get her money back.

    I really liked how the film is a mix of being a comedy about an elderly widow who borrows her friend Ben's (Richard Roundtree, in his final film role before his death in 2023) scooter, with her family panicking and trying to find her and driving around L.A., but mixing in serious issues about the realities of being old, the body hurting and breaking down, and needing to ask for help despite priding oneself on being independent. 

    Thelma doesn't like to be patronized or talked down to, and isn't going to let this money loss go, because she wants justice and her money back. She doesn't like that her grandson worries about her, wanting him to focus on his own life, and refusing to wear the medic alert bracelet that he had given her. When he tries to guide her in using a computer and talks down to her, she gives a sarcastic reply that seems to go over his head.

    Parker Posey and Clark Gregg are decent in supporting roles as Thelma's daughter Gail and son in-law Alan, and Fred Hechinger gives a nice performance as Thelma's grandson Danny, a young man who feels aimless in his life and empty after his recent breakup with his girlfriend.

    The finale with the scammers halfway plays out like a climax to an action film, but as it involves two elderly people with health issues, it doesn't go the way of a John Wick or Equalizer kind of gun battle finale. Rather, it's more like two people recognizing each other's desperation and mortality, but not having much sympathy for the other.

    The director Josh Margolin based the movie on his 103-yr old grandma Thelma, who was almost duped by scammers in a similar scheme. The film ends with a cute clip of the real-life Thelma, as sassy and as funny as the fictional version.

    June Squibb is fantastic in this film, and it's great seeing her in a film where she isn't just playing someone's funny grandma with one-liners, but is the lead character and shows a lot of heart and lived life and emotional resonance in the role of Thelma, and was really captivating to watch.

Thoughts on Fear City

 

   On Criterion, I watched Fear City, a 1984 exploitation film written by Nichols St. John and directed by Abel Ferrara. They have collaborated on nine films together, including Ms. 45, China Girl, King of New York, Dangerous Game, Body Snatchers, The Addiction, and The Funeral. The film centers on two talent agents for adult entertainment performers, the agents being Matt (Tom Berenger) and Nicky (Jack Scalia), who provide strippers for Manhattan night clubs, specifically the seedy Times Square area. A serial killer begins targeting the dancers, knifing them, and his attacks later turn fatal, and Matt and Nicky are being pressed by a police detective (Billy Dee Williams) to help him find the killer.

    Matt is a former boxer who accidentally killed his opponent, and he is connected with the mob over witnessing a mob hit as a child and not telling anyone about it. His ex-girlfriend Loretta (Melanie Griffith) is one of the star dancers, and as her friends get attacked and murdered, Matt rekindles his relationship with her and is trying to protect her from the same fate.

    

    The killer, Pazzo (John Foster) practices martial arts in the nude in his barren loft, writes about his attacks, and stalks the women late at night. Some of the dancers are played by notable actresses in early roles, like Maria Conchita Alonso, Rae Dawn Chong, and Ola Ray (best known as Michael Jackson's girlfriend in the Thriller video). The scenes of the killer doing martial arts while naked feels like inspiration for Die Hard 2, with the scenes of a naked William Sadler practicing karate or kickboxing while nude in his home. There are also similarities to the 1983 Charles Bronson movie 10 to Midnight, focusing on a serial killer who performs his murders in the nude as to not get any blood on him, and that movie also had Ola Ray in a small part as a friend of Bronson's character's daughter.

   

    Melanie Griffith had been acting since she was a teen in the 1970s, and in her early roles as an adult, she did get typecast in sex worker parts, with roles showing off her body, sex appeal, and soft voice. In the same year, she had been in Brian de Palma's Body Double as an adult film actor, and would become more of a mainstream star with roles in Something Wild (1986) and Working Girl (1988). She was a lot of fun in Cherry 2000 (1988), where she played a tracker of sex doll robots to help a guy find a model of his robot to replace, crossing a dangerous post-apocalyptic wasteland of 2017.

    This movie definitely feels like everything that Abel Ferrara likes about 1980s New York City: strippers, gangsters, cliched Italian New Yorker stereotypes, street violence, and an overwhelming feeling of sleaziness in the nighttime. It's nice to watch as long as one knows what to expect, of a 1980s B-movie neon thriller, with a cool theme song by David Johansen and Joe Delia.

Thoughts on The Linguini Incident

 On Criterion, I watched The Linguini Incident, a 1991 indie film directed by Richard Shepard (Cool Blue), an offbeat forgotten movie where Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie work at a trendy SoHo restaurant with a pretentious hipness, and she’s a waitress named Lucy whose grandfather worked with Harry Houdini as his agent, and she’s trying to become an escape artist, practicing with a noose, a straitjacket, and being locked in a sack. He’s a British undocumented immigrant named Monte, who is a pathological liar and has a quietly psychotic edge, looking for someone to quickly marry for a green card before he gets sent back. And they both are plotting to rob the trendy restaurant because it rakes in cash every night.

It’s weird to watch a movie where David Bowie is trying to play a regular person, albeit an attractive non-violent psycho. He’s still handsome and charming, but his rock star icon status makes it hard to see him as a struggling immigrant in NYC. I could believe him as a vampire in The Hunger or as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, but not as a guy who works as a bartender.

I like how quirky and sexy and funny Rosanna Arquette is, she’s really charming in this. I see this movie as like a sequel to her character in 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan, after she as Roberta leaves her yuppie husband to live with boho Aidan Quinn in his barren loft and becomes a magician’s assistant in a downtown dive. I see her as Roberta having broken up with him, trying to become a magician of her own through the escape arts, and getting by on her waitress job while living with her roommate Vivian (Eszter Balint) in an old apartment. I much preferred the friend interactions of Lucy and Vivian, as they had a nice chemistry of downtown NYC girlfriends living together.

It’s an OK movie, more just interesting for the leads and depiction of early 90s downtown NYC in the indie movie boom.