Friday evening we went to Regal Oakwood in Hollywood to see A Real Pain. Numerous commercials preceded the coming attractions, including the longest car commercial I had ever seen. It began with a woman informing her husband that she was pregnant and ended with her nearly getting run over by a car, on a strangely empty street. Finally, the coming attractions began – that dismaying, de rigueur montage of shootings and crashes – though in the middle of them a commercial was thrown in.
I was in a very bad mood when the movie began. My spirits lifted when the two protagonists arrived in Poland, then they plummeted again as it became clear that this was not a road movie, it was a buddy picture. It’s not about cultural differences, it’s about relationships. Of course it is; who in today's Hollywood would make a movie about the former?
