Through a Glass Darkly

A Real Pain (2024): Last night my dad asked if I wanted to watch a movie, to which I answered, "no." He then put this on without saying anything. I'm not sure if he picked it for himself because of my answer, or if he just ignored me and wanted me to watch it. I stayed for all of it and neither of us liked it. It is written by, directed by, and stars Jesse Eisenberg, who, as you can tell by watching 10 seconds of the film, is an acolyte of Woody Allen (To Rome With Love, Café Society). Many of the worst symptoms of the Allen virus are present in this story of two Jewish cousins, the bottled-up David (Eisenberg) and the gregarious yet troubled Benji (Kieran Culkin), touring Poland's Jewish history to pay respects to their late grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor: the neurotic middlebrow banter, the lack of a visual imagination beyond pretentious selected "art shots," the complacency with bourgeois New York wine-drinker culture, the film-as-Instagram-travel-reel. Even its runtime is obnoxious hipsterism – close your eyes and watch flashes of a hundred Letterboxd reviews with 15 likes saying "More movies should be 90 minutes." The film's theme of a kind of generational Holocaust Syndrome, with the two main characters' prosaic American wounds of life being traced back across decades and continents to the concentration camps, smacks of yet more neurotic self-importance. Score: 2/5

Goyangireul Butakhae (2001): Korean coming-of-age about five high school friends, now graduated and trying to negotiate their anxious passages from adolescence to adulthood. Formally, the film is divided between work and play: every month the friends get back together as a brief respite from their lives, until eventually they must split for good, either migrating overseas or continuing life in Korea. The highly quotidian manner of the story, emulating our failure to perceive the organizing fate of our lives in-the-moment, is successfully melancholy; the cold backdrop of urban Korea, all concrete and variegated electrical signs, imbues the friends’ carefree escapades with a poignant ephemerality. On the other hand, the film's script sullies this subtlety by being overlong and overly academic, too eager to demonstrate some ‘point’ in each scene. Jeong Jae-eun's mise-en-scene is also rather ordinary. Score: 2.5/5.