Joey’s Home Movies For the Week of February 3rd – ‘A Real Pain’ and ‘Wicked’ Come Home with ‘Juror #2’ While ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ Joins the Criterion Collection

Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, we have two of last year’s notable Oscar players hitting shelves in A Real Pain and Wicked, plus the potentially final Clint Eastwood film in Juror #2. Today also brings a modern classic in Punch-Drunk Love to the Criterion Collection (in 4K), making for a pretty full slate. What gets top honors? Read on to find out…

Joey’s Top Pick

A Real Pain

Jesse Eisenberg establishes himself as a true top tier filmmaker with A Real Pain, which almost universally has blown audiences away. Now, a big part of that is the work of Kieran Culkin, who is about to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. However, Eisenberg’s filmmaking, as well as his performance, is tremendous as well. My review from back at last year’s Sundance Film Festival here began like so:

A few Sundance Film Festival installments ago, Jesse Eisenberg unveiled his filmmaking debut, When You Finish Saving the World. That was a touching work, though it really only set the stage for his sophomore feature, A Real Pain. This movie mixes very funny travel humor with some truly empathetic emotions. Considering the material, it would be easy to fumble this, but Eisenberg is more than up to the challenge. This is the best work I saw during my Sundance viewing this year.

A Real Pain continues to show how Eisenberg is a talented filmmaker, in addition to a gifted actor. He’s got a sense of how to make a dramedy, knowing when to be funny, when to be serious, and how to mix it all. The fact that it also intertwines grief, the Holocaust, and even suicide, that just means the degree of difficulty here is pretty large. The fact that he’s able to ace it so easily makes you very excited for what he has planned behind the camera in the future.

Recommended Viewing

Juror #2

If this is it for Clint Eastwood, Juror #2 has him going out towards the top of his game. It’s a crackerjack thriller, the kind we just don’t get anymore. Legal movies in general are a dying breed, so Eastwood helping to bring one back is worth a bit of kudos all on its own. I spoke to screenwriter Jonathan Abrams here, which was an enjoyable chat. My review here includes the following:

For years now, it has been diminishing returns with Clint Eastwood. The past twenty years has seen his directorial efforts go from hotly anticipated A-list works for adults to, at best, a mixed bag, with some awful films to boot. Especially lately, the movies have appeared like signs that his time behind the camera is over. So, color me surprised that Juror #2 is a largely terrific flick. Is it occasionally flawed? Yes. Is it also massively entertaining? Oh yes. Warner Bros. is dropping the ball by not putting more efforts behind this one. It has got the goods.

Juror #2 is a crackerjack legal/moral thriller. They don’t make them like this anymore, both in terms of courtroom tales and also just this sort of mainstream entertainment for adults. Eastwood himself used to do this sort of thing, if not usually with this setting. Not only has it refreshed him, it works as a very satisfying potential swan song for the man.

Also Available This Week

Joan Baez I Am a Noise

Jujutsu Kaisen: Season 2 – Hidden Inventory/Premature Death (TV)

Oh, Canada (Interview here with Paul Schrader)

Quantum Leap: The Complete Series (TV)

Twin Peaks: From Z to A (TV)

V/H/S/Beyond

Werewolves

Wicked

Criterion Corner

Punch-Drunk Love

From The Criterion Collection: “Chaos lurks in every corner of this giddily off-kilter foray into romantic comedy by Paul Thomas Anderson. Struggling to cope with his erratic temper, novelty-toilet-plunger salesman Barry Egan (Adam Sandler, demonstrating remarkable versatility in his first dramatic role) spends his days collecting frequent-flier-mile coupons and dodging the insults of his seven sisters. The promise of a new life emerges when Barry inadvertently attracts the affection of a mysterious woman named Lena (Emily Watson), but their budding relationship is threatened when he falls prey to the swindling operator of a phone sex line and her deranged boss (played with maniacal brio by Philip Seymour Hoffman). Fueled by the careening momentum of a baroque-futurist score by Jon Brion, the Cannes-award-winning Punch-Drunk Love channels the spirit of classic Hollywood and the whimsy of Jacques Tati into an idiosyncratic ode to the delirium of new romance.”

Stay tuned for more next week…