The emphasis is on "pain." And what's with modern parents?

A Real Pain is of those movies that is absorbing simply by dint of its characters. In this case it would be director Jesse Eisenberg who plays David and Kieran Culkin as Benji. They’re American Jewish cousins on a Holocaust Remembrance tour of Poland. Sounds sad? Not really. And you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy it, if enjoy is quite the right word. But this film is more fun than drama though leaves a poignant message, to the point my eyes welled up at the end. Benji and David are as different as chalk and cheddar, David the responsible family man and Benji the anarchic wild one. Benji is yin to David’s yang – you know. Both actors are at top of their game as the characters first meet for their flight to Poland. Benji loves to hang out in the air terminal hours ahead of time simply because it’s cool he can meet the weirdest people. Kind of like him. So wild is he that he picks up a pre-mailed package of marijuana he had sent to the Warsaw hotel, then finagles their way on to the roof top for a little relaxed toking. On the tour, Benji becomes enraged with the tour guide for being too sterile in his description of Holocaust facts. And he demands that David “feel” the loss or the “pain” of the Nazi horrors. “If now is not the time to grieve I don’t know what to tell you.”  On a train they evade the conductor by not paying fares and joke that’s the reason “our people” were kicked out of Poland for being too cheap. The title? Well, the guide (Will Sharpe) does say it’s “a tour about pain.” But is Benji the real pain? Is he psychotic? Manic depressive? The burning of the personal into the historical is what charges this movie, regardless of what he is.  

What is it about modern parents they don’t know how to bring up their kids? Two recent movies or TV series made me shake my head and scream at the doofuses who were portrayed as mothers and fathers. The first is Let Go (Josephine Bornebusch) on Netflix where the punk daughter constantly berates her parents including with obscenities like “You argue all the f---- time” and “What the f---were you thinking? The whole point of coming here is my f--- competition.” The dour compliant parents only talk softly and try to appease. Same with the new hit series A Man on the Inside (created by Michael Schur) with Ted Danson, and his grandkids being the utterly most desultory teens. I don’t believe in corporal punishment, but it just made me want to slap them - and the parents.