It's a real pain in the ass to blog about seeing a movie every week, I'll tell you that. I wish it were easier for me. For the first few months of the year, it seemed to be. I still see a movie at least once a week at the beautiful Regal on Delancey—once in awhile I'll see something at the AMC if I happen to be in CT that week—but I still make my way to the Essex-Market-Theater.
I was hoping to write a lengthy review on Anora last week, which I ended up liking more than I ever would have expected based on my reaction from the red band trailer that I saw a dozen times. That was one of my favorite movies this year, and I had a lot to say about it. I suppose if they make an Anora 2 in 2027 I can do a little recap on the first one.
Tonight I was more or less stuck with A Real Pain at 7:10. Sometimes that's how it lines up. I went skating at LES park from 3 to 5, and then made plans to get Spicy Village with Tiff, which would have to be before 7, as she made plans to eat an apple tart of sorts with some of her friends. I opted out of enjoying the tart with them, as it was all women, and I didn't want to be the odd man out. Best of luck to them and the tart.
I had a great session at LES, btw. I've been going several times a week and it's always wonderful. It's been my local for half a year now, but I really haven't made skating a high priority the last couple years. Lately it's been nice skating over at 9 in the morning with a coffee, taking it easy and doing pivot fakies and things like that, the kind of skating I like. I had a few hours to kill in the evening and it was warm enough, so to hell with it. I've been making it a point to relearn a few things every time I go.
Anywhost. Around 6:30 we finished dinner at Spicy Village. The original one, just to state. We prefer New Spicy Village at this point, it's only a few blocks away and it's just less... Tiktok-y? The original one is great but it's just one of those places that people go to from Tiktok videos or something. No diss to that kind of stuff, it has it's place and I think it's good in bringing business to cool little places like that. I've found places like that too, can't lie. But the central vibe at the New SV is just a little more quiet. There's never been any kind of line that I've seen there, and the thing that we always get at that one is just better. We normally go there twice a month. But when we got there it was closed; I forget they are closed on Tuesdays for no reason. So we went to the Tiktok-y original one. It was good, just a little more loud. We got the Big Tray Chicken and I had a Diet Coke.
Tiff left dinner early to meet her friends at home, and I began to check the Regal app for showtimes that link with my 7PM timeframe. It seems like that would be the ultimate movie showtime, but there wasn't much. I wasn't eager to see Wicked, and I already tried to see Gladiator 2 last week (presented in a Regal Secret Movie Monday—something I've been wanting to attend for awhile, and I was hoping it was something I wanted to watch, but I am not wanting to see a 150-plus minute movie always). A Real Pain was playing at 7:10, so I figured I would see that. It's 90-minute runtime was also alluring. I figured I would be getting out of the theater around 9, just in time to walk back home to avoid a cluster of ladies eating dessert.
I walked towards Regal, with a detour to the Trader Joe's/Target mall behind the theater. I had ten minutes to kill before the movie started, so I got this little bag of chocolate almonds from TJ's and peach rings from Target. I got a small bag of popcorn from the theater, which I paid for with Regal points, so the movie and popcorn total was 50 cents. Not bad.
But of course, the 7:10 showtime is all an illusion. We didn't even get real trailers until 7:20. This is bullshit to me. They should have the trailers going at 7:10. And I don't mean all those commercials for joining the army and M&M's and movie trivia and all that. That should be for the folks who get there before the showtime. THE SHOWTIME SHOULD INDICATE THAT TRAILERS COME ON AT THAT TIME. But I digress.
The trailers were OK. Wolfman looks crappy all to hell. There is a wolfman-adjacent movie with Amy Adams that looks watchable from an adulting-millenial-humor standpoint and I will probably see that. I like her a lot. I just re-watched The Fighter last night and she just kicks ass in that thing. I watch that movie almost every year.
On to A Real Pain. I had seen the trailer for this a few times, and I thought it just looked so stupid. I posted publicly to my Instagram that I would not be seeing this. I shouldn't have done that, because I saw it. But I have no regrets. The movie is written and directed allegedly by Jesse Eisenberg, who I always immediately think is the Facebook guy. Of course, he just played him in a movie, but there is something so naturally rigid about him that he actually seems like he would have invented Facebook. He plays a rigid guy like that in this movie too, a neurotic socially-anxious NYC tech bro type with a wife and kid in NYC. His name is even David, for godssake. Him and his cousin, played by Kieran Culkin, take a week-long historic tour of Poland, in a WW2 type of context... If that makes sense. It's to commemorate their dead grandmother, and also to re-connect as siblings, kind of (Kieran's character, Benji introduces them to the tour group as pretty-much-brothers, which... Idk why they couldn't have just been written as brother's in the movie? fukit). They visit historical sites like gravesites and concentration camps. David, who has a pretty stable home life, job, money, probably, has trouble connecting with the other tour-goers in their group, while Benji has no trouble warming up to people while wearing salmon-colored cotton shorts. And the folks like him back, which is cool because I'm fairly certain he's an actual homeless guy. But money and all that crap doesn't matter (Benji says to one of his new friends, "Money is like heroin to boring people" or something silly like that). He's kind of a corn ball type, an unkempt, weed-smoking guy who likes to dwell on the past. But he is, in spite of all of that, a likeable guy, and everyone he meets feels that way. With Jesse E's character, though, he's pretty much nobody, and never tries to talk to any of the other people. I haven't named any of the other people because they all feel so minor, and really it seems like very little happens in terms of conflict, besides that the two cousins have some disconnect due to their growing apart over the years. Benji causes much of the conflict, finding irony in things like a group of Jewish people riding first-class on a train in Poland, and saying things like "People shouldn't be happy all the time." And also apparently he tried to kill his own self six months prior but it's only mentioned once at a dinner about an hour into the movie and then that's all we really get from that. The two connect some, smoke weed together, ride trains for free, and have a fractional amount of fun on their tour. And then they go back home, and part ways, and we can assume that Benji's character lives at the airport after they land, for the rest of his life.
The movie is... OK. It's ok. This and Anora both surpassed my expectations, but this one by a far smaller margin. It's the second best movie about the Holocaust that I've seen this year (I've seen two). I probably wouldn't recommend seeing it at a regular NYC movie ticket price, but if you have the Regal Unlimited, or it's a Regal Tuesday, you could give it a shot. It's a really light movie, both in tone and humor, with a small break to give us a tour of a concentration camp and have the entire cast of the movie break the fourth wall and stare at the audience. Kieran Culkan plays Benji nice. I like him in a lot, really. It's funny to think his older bro was so much bigger thirty years ago, and now we're lucky if we see him make a cameo in an Angry Video Game Nerd episode. Jesse plays this type of fumbly character well, and I figured he would be doing that here, but it was self-aware enough, like obviously he's supposed to come off as annoying neurotic type, like the kind that Orson Welles used to talk shit about. But he wishes he were more like his funny-cringe-y cousin. And that's pretty much the damn movie! The only person I would not recommend it to is a holocaust-denier, because they are known to get uppity about this kind of stuff.
Credits rolled at 9 and I walked home, happy that the credits rolled at 9. I like when it's not so late. I walked home. My feet were sore from skating and walking. It was warm out for a late-November night, which was a silver lining. I love the walk home from Regal. Watching movies in the cinema is probably my 7th biggest hobby. My 8th is probably reviewing them.