(For Day 13 of NaPoWriMo, the prompt was for a poem in the same unique stanza/rhyme form as Donald Justice’s “There is a gold light in certain old paintings.”)

Truth is beauty and beauty is truth, said Keats,
Yet beauty is beloved and truth is hard.
If truths were as easy on the eyes as beauty,
They wouldn’t be hidden and hated and hard,
            Veiled under changing subjects and yelling and smiles.
            Truth is pain, and nothing hides pain as well as smiles.

Horrors happen, in countries and eras far-flung
And houses next door, just out of earshot.
Tragedies are nothing new, so must they all hurt?
Every life snuffed, innocence scarred, or errant shot?
            If I don’t care when strangers shed their distant tears,
            Why would anyone share my own predestined tears?

There’s something rare in a tragedy endured,
Like insight begotten by blindness run amok.
A lack of tragedy is apathy’s recipe,
And the world hates apathy running amok.
            Pain cycles, cloaked in smiles and history lessons,
            Wondering when there will be no need for lessons.
__________________________

MPA rating: R (for frequent language)

The sophomore directorial effort of Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain doesn’t live up to its name, in that it’s actually quite a pleasure. This familial dramedy pairs Eisenberg as David Kaplan with Kieran Culkin as his maverick of a cousin Benji, both of whom join a Jewish heritage tour in Poland to see where their late grandmother once lived before the Holocaust. While David is reserved and slightly neurotic, Benji is an unfiltered free spirit bordering on bipolar, attentive to strangers yet generally inconsiderate, the life of the party yet quick to complain if something rubs him the wrong way. (Having just been on a European tour several months ago, I’m grateful that my group didn’t include a Benji.) 

With good reason, Culkin received universal acclaim for his layered performance, though I think Eisenberg deserved some of that love as well, more than just for the Oscar-nominated screenplay he also wrote. Benji is easily the most memorable character, both of the film and in the minds of his fellow tourgoers, but I found Eisenberg’s more understated role to be more relatable, always trying to keep up and apologize for his cousin’s eccentricities yet loving him despite it, a dichotomy that bubbles to the surface in an especially emotional dinner scene.

As a writer-director, Eisenberg also handles the tone with skilled sensitivity. The banter between David and Benji is frequently funny yet can easily segue to latent grief or lingering anxiety, and the visit to the Majdanek concentration camp plays out in near silence, as their tour guide (Will Sharpe) says, letting the haunting location speak for itself. Realistic in its open-ended return to “normal life,” A Real Pain is a testament to generational trauma and strained family dynamics, both of which are sadly all too common.

Best line: (Marcia, on their tour) “David, we numb ourselves to avoid thinking about our impact.”
(Eloge, another tourist) “Ignoring the proverbial slaughterhouse to enjoy the steak, as it were.”
(Benji) “Yes, Eloge! Damn, that’s a good analogy.”
(David) “No, and I get that, I get all that. It just seems like maybe there’s, like, a time and a place to grieve, and maybe it’s not…”
(Benji) “Yo, Dave.”
(David) “What?”
(Benji) “We’re on a f***ing Holocaust tour. If now is not the time and place to grieve, to open up, I don’t know what to tell you, man.”

Rank: List Runner-Up

© 2025 S.G. Liput
805 Followers and Counting

(For Day 22 of NaPoWriMo, the prompt was for a fight between two unlikely combatants, like a good pair of metaphors perhaps.)

Age got into a fight with Youth,
For the hundredth time,
For the thousandth time.
What’s worthwhile, fun or truth?
For the millionth time,
But who knows?

Youth protested banal Age,
Was upset again,
Saying yet again
“You’re time-tested as a cage.”
Age said again,
“The cage grows.”

Youth and Age both craved command
For the hundredth time,
For the thousandth time,
But given time, they’ll understand.
For the millionth time,
So it goes.
___________________________

MPA rating:  R (mainly for language)

Alexander Payne is a much-lauded director, though I’ve only seen The Descendants and Nebraska from his filmography, both of which are good but nothing overly special in my view. I’ve heard that I ought to see Election and Sideways to really be impressed by his award-winning satiric wit, but I’m plenty impressed by The Holdovers. Oppenheimer may be the more spectacular Oscar contender from last year, but The Holdovers provided the relatable charm of an indie and a trio of pitch-perfect performances.

In one of his most tailor-made roles, Paul Giamatti plays the stringent Paul Hunham, the classics teacher at Barton Academy, where he is expected to babysit the few unlucky boys who cannot return to their families during the Christmas break of 1970. In the same boat is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the campus cook who recently lost her son in the Vietnam War. None of the students are happy to be stranded at their snowy school, least of all disgruntled punk Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sessa). Nevertheless, the three misfits make the most of their outcast holiday.

I can’t begrudge Cillian Murphy his well-deserved Best Actor win for playing Oppenheimer, but there is a part of me that really wishes Giamatti could have won that award. His character’s idiosyncrasies border on caricature, yet he always manages to make Mr. Hunham feel real, like a scholarly but flawed mentor remembered years later, as is likely the case since screenwriter David Hemingson drew inspiration from his own uncle and prep school experiences. Sessa does fine work with his bitter schoolboy, while Randolph (rising above any of my expectations after seeing her in Only Murders in the Building) is the most quietly tortured of them all (despite less development), well deserving her Best Supporting Actress win.

All three main characters are damaged, the layers of their grief gradually peeled back for us to see, and the ways they manage to support each other amid snipes and gripes make for both entertaining and empathetic viewing. With a brilliantly trenchant script and feeling like it was displaced from the ‘70s, The Holdovers is an instant Christmas classic.

Best line: (Paul Hunham, in a museum) “There’s nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man’s every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.”

Rank:  List-Worthy

© 2024 S.G. Liput
793 Followers and Counting

(For Day 16 of NaPoWriMo, the prompt was for a close description of an object or place that ends with a surprising or seemingly unrelated line.)

There’s a woman ‘cross the way
Who halloos me every day,
Says she hopes I’m feeling better than I did the day before.
There’s a jogger every morning,
Even when it’s dark and storming,
Who declares a strong routine can win a footrace or a war.

There’s a kid who hates his chores
Throwing papers at our doors,
But he stops to extricate them if they land within a bush.
There’s a neighbor, just moved in,
Treats me like her next of kin,
And she has a way of knowing when to give a gentle push.

There’s a lady who cajoles
Me to try her casseroles,
Verifying if I’m sensitive to dairy, wheat, or nuts.

What idiots….
____________________

MPA rating:  PG-13

Tom Hanks had his heyday back in the 1990s, but his more recent films don’t seem to get the attention they deserve. Bridge of Spies, Greyhound, and News of the World were all outstanding roles for him, but I feel like his always reliable performances rarely get critical love, notwithstanding his Oscar-nominated supporting role in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Whatever character he embodies, audiences are used to seeing Tom Hanks as a nice and honorable guy, so it was a bit of a departure for him to play the crotchety Otto Andersen in this remake of the Swedish dramedy A Man Called Ove.

Otto is a man with little patience for anything that annoys him, and more things annoy him than don’t. A cynical widower, Otto patrols his row of apartments each day, barely tolerating his neighbors, and as he retires from his factory job, he has little to live for except planning his own suicide. That is until a friendly Hispanic family (Maria Treviño, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) moves in across the street, adding to Otto’s list of nuisances and conspiring with fate to foil his self-destructive plans.

Obviously, it’s a fine line when a film combines suicide with comedy. Some like Better Off Dead take the screwball route, whereas A Man Called Otto walks it tactfully, putting the proper weight to the scenes of Otto’s self-harm and keeping the humor of their repeated failure subtle. Hanks is a perfect curmudgeon here, yet his good nature comes out when needed, exemplifying how we don’t need to necessarily like someone or the world at large in order to act decently toward them. Treviño also does an excellent job as his pregnant neighbor Marisol intruding on his solitude and offering him something beyond his own grief. From its droll yet still likable main character to its tearjerking moments, A Man Called Otto is a winner of an American adaptation that makes me curious to see the Swedish original.

Best line: (Otto, teaching Marisol to drive) “You have given birth to two children. Soon it will be three. You have come here from a country very far away. You learned a new language, you got yourself an education and a nitwit husband, and you are holding that family together. You will have no problem learning how to drive. My God, the world is full of complete idiots who have managed to figure it out, and you are not a complete idiot. So, clutch, shift, gas, drive.”

Rank:  List Runner-Up (may go up with a rewatch)

© 2024 S.G. Liput
792 Followers and Counting