All posts tagged: jesse eisenberg

‘A Real Pain’ gets achingly close to the real quandaries of Holocaust remembrance

‘A Real Pain’ gets achingly close to the real quandaries of Holocaust remembrance

Published by skeptic

(RNS) — After arriving in Poland for a weeklong Holocaust “roots” tour, Benji, one of two Jewish American cousins whose trip is depicted in the new movie “A Real Pain,” has a meltdown in the first-class section of the Warsaw-Lublin train. Benji (Kieran Culkan) wrestles with an eerie sense that as he walks in the footsteps of Jews put on cattle cars on the way to concentration camps, his privilege obscures the real horror of the Shoah. It’s a feeling many American Jews experience when they encounter Holocaust sites: the sense that their existence is an unintended consequence of this catastrophe and to return means to explore the violent rupture that destroyed the world that could have been. Benji’s cousin David (Jesse Eisenberg) watches this outburst and is horrified. But Benji is insistent: If a Holocaust tour isn’t the time to grieve, then when is? “A Real Pain,” about the cousins’ trip to Poland to honor their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, after her death, builds on a host of earlier movies about the Holocaust, adding …

‘A Real Pain’ is a real triumph

‘A Real Pain’ is a real triumph

Published by skeptic

(RNS) — You will go to see “A Real Pain” because of the all-star cast of Jesse Eisenberg (who also wrote and directed it), Kieran Culkin (whom many of us loved in “Succession”) and Jennifer Grey (welcoming her back to the big screen). You will go to see this movie because it is the story of the relationship between David Kaplan and Benji Kaplan, two Jewish cousins, each with their own quirks. If you had watched the series “Succession,” you will nod knowingly, as Kieran does a great job of reprising the personality traits of Roman Roy, his character from that show. You will go to see this movie (or, at least, I did) because it takes place in Poland and is the story of those two cousins and a tour group seeing various Jewish sites in Poland. During the tour, Benji and David take a side trip to a small town in Poland to find their late grandmother’s old house. (This is based on a trip that Jesse and his now-wife took to his …

Jennifer Grey discusses working with Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin

Jennifer Grey discusses working with Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin

Published by Sam

When Jennifer Grey received the script for A Real Pain, she was — like most of the country — deeply entrenched in the final episodes of Succession. The actress, who is best known for her work in movies like Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, was considering a role in the story (written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg) about two cousins who join a Jewish heritage tour in Poland to reconnect with their late grandmother and visit the town that she fled before the war. Kieran Culkin was already attached to star as the lead opposite Eisenberg, and Grey says she was excited about the possibility of working with the actor responsible for some of the show’s finest work. “And then I read the script, and I went from excited to elated,” she told THR during a panel at the St. Regis Deer Valley, sponsored by Screenvision. “It’s a very deep movie, about relationships and grief and loss and identity and resilience. Jesse’s tone is so human and accessible and vulnerable and funny. Immediately, …

Jesse Eisenberg Movie A Real Pain Sells to Searchlight Pictures

Jesse Eisenberg Movie A Real Pain Sells to Searchlight Pictures

Published by Sam

A Real Pain starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin has landed at Searchlight Pictures, with a theatrical release planned for this year. The deal, which is for worldwide, is pegged at $10 million. The film stars Eisenberg and Culkin (fresh of his win at the Emmys for the final season of Succession) as cousins who travel to their grandmother’s native Poland to partake in a Holocaust tour. Jennifer Grey and Will Sharpe also star. A Real Pain, which screened in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival, marked Eisenberg’s second time behind the camera on a feature and earned a standing ovation during its premiere screening. It has quickly become the go-to movie to see thus far. “It requires emotional acuity and generosity of spirit for a filmmaker to mine painful history while providing subtle access pathways for audiences from entirely different backgrounds to find their way in. Acknowledging the universality of his underlying themes, Eisenberg does that, with soulful maturity,” reads David Rooney’s review for The Hollywood Reporter. Eisenberg spoke to THR about the inspiration behind the film, …

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Explore Loss

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Explore Loss

Published by Sam

If you stick around for even part of some post-screening festival Q&As with directors, at times you can get the feeling they’re expounding on the film they intended to make rather than the one you’ve just seen. But Jesse Eisenberg is nothing if not hyper-articulate. He describes the essence of his delicate second feature, A Real Pain, as a consideration of “epic pain vs. more modern pain,” and how to reconcile the latter against something as monumental as genocide or historical trauma. What’s surprising is that he achieves this with a deft lightness of touch in a frequently laugh-out-loud funny odd couple road trip movie whose emotional wallop sneaks up and floors you. Eisenberg’s perceptive script — rooted in his family’s history — shares some thematic territory with the multihyphenate’s second play, The Revisionist, in which he starred off-Broadway with Vanessa Redgrave in 2013. It’s about the conflict of Americans grappling with their own troubles, however minor, while attempting to be mindful of the punishing experience endured by ancestors from traumatized cultures — a Holocaust …

Kieran Culkin on Being Directed by Jesse Eisenberg for ‘A Real Pain’

Kieran Culkin on Being Directed by Jesse Eisenberg for ‘A Real Pain’

Published by Sam

Kieran Culkin is in Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival, but he’s still delivering mic drop moments on stage much like he did when he cleaned up at the recent Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards and Emmys. Culkin joined his A Real Pain collaborators at the Eccles Theater on Saturday afternoon for the world premiere of the film, directed by Jesse Eisenberg and starring the filmmaker alongside Culkin, Will Sharpe and Jennifer Grey. The plot follows mismatched cousins David and Benji who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. After the credits rolled, the film got a standing ovation and the energy kept flowing through the Q&A with a slew of amusing moments. Top of the list is when Culkin described what it was like to work with and for Eisenberg. “There was a pretty good rapport right away,” said the Succession star. “But right after the first scene, he’d be like, ‘Cut,’ and start giving me notes. And my first thought is, like, bitch, I got notes for …

Riley Keough & Jesse Eisenberg as Bigfoots

Riley Keough & Jesse Eisenberg as Bigfoots

Published by Sam

David and Nathan Zellner, the fraternal directing duo of offbeat films, have been captivated by Bigfoot since they were children. To them, Bob Gimlin and Robert Patterson’s roughly one-minute 1967 short — jerky and grainy footage of an ape-like creature strolling the banks of Bluff Creek in Northern California — is as legendary as the mythic figure it claims to capture. In 2011, the Zellners premiered Sasquatch Birth Journal No. 2, a four-minute film that feels inspired by Gimlin-Patterson’s offering, at Sundance. Now, at the same festival, more than a decade later, the brothers have taken their obsession one step farther with a film that imagines the life of a mythic humanoid.  Who is the Sasquatch to herself? To others? How does she love, fight, play and survive? How about travel? Can she communicate? What are her rituals? Sasquatch Sunset is built on these curiosities and sustained by striking formal choices. The sometimes tender but often trying film chronicles a year in the life of a Sasquatch family. The four members of this small tribe of …

Jesse Eisenberg on ‘A Real Pain,’ Wanting to Director One Movie a Year

Jesse Eisenberg on ‘A Real Pain,’ Wanting to Director One Movie a Year

Published by Sam

A Real Pain stars Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as cousins who travel to their grandmother’s native Poland to partake in a Holocaust tour. The film, which is screening in U.S. Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival, marks Eisenberg’s second time behind the camera on a feature. Eisenberg, who is also in Park City with title Sasquatch Sunset, talked to The Hollywood Reporter about casting Culkin, filming at a concentration camp and his future directing aspirations, including his next gig that is already gearing up. What inspired A Real Pain? I’ve always been interested in in Poland. My family comes from Poland. I was very close with my dad’s aunt who was born in 1912 and was in Poland until she was 9. She always told me stories about how she had this wonderful relationship with the Polish people. It was a little counter to things I had heard growing up about Polish-Jewish relations. I was really interested in exploring that in the first play I wrote [that] was called The Revisionist and starred …

How Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg Bickered and Grieved Their Way Through ‘A Real Pain’

How Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg Bickered and Grieved Their Way Through ‘A Real Pain’

Published by skeptic

As he got to filming his new movie A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg realized that he and his co-star, Kieran Culkin, didn’t exactly work the same way. Eisenberg was embarking on his second feature as a director, and the first in which he would also act; Culkin was playing his first role since wrapping a four-season run on HBO’s Succession, fresh off that creative high. Eisenberg had spent months working on a shot list for their expansive Poland shoot with cinematographer Michal Dymek (EO). He’d exactingly planned out each scene’s marks and blocking. A lot of that ended up scrapped. “Kieran is an unusual actor—he works really, really well as a spontaneous performer,” Eisenberg says. “On Succession we’d do the whole scene maybe seven or eight times, and then that was it. This was set-up 12 and take 40-something. I’m like, ‘What is this?’” Culkin adds with a laugh. “I felt like I was just making a fuss of nothing. He put me in the left seat and I’m like, ‘Why’d you choose that for …