Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!
I’ve decided to be a little more proactive on watching Oscar films (and 2024 films in general) this year, so I figured diving head-first into A Real Pain would be a good place to start. I tend to like Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg. A running joke I have is that the easiest way to tell the difference between Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera is to remember that Eisenberg is the one with talent. A Real Pain is evidence of this, even if you haven’t liked his previous work; in addition to starring in it, he also wrote and directed it.
The film tells the story of David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), a pair of cousins born less than a month apart. David is a fairly normal, responsible person with a wife and child, and a job selling advertising banners online. He is very concerned with appearance, and with being on time for things, correct and not causing a scene. Benji is the complete opposite, someone with strong ideas and opinions, but who is otherwise aimless. They are wildly different, and have decided to take a trip together to Poland to visit their heritage, the house where their grandmother grew up, and the concentration camp that she survived.
