Make it through this year
If it kills you.
I’ll be honest with you: shit’s fucked. Elon Musk is orchestrating a coup of the financial levels of our country, Trump is rubber stamping highly illegal executive orders in accordance with the Project 2025 game plan, and the Democrats are doing what they do best: sitting around with their thumbs up their asses.
Today’s email will be a grab bag of a few little things, but up top I want to acknowledge both how much this all sucks right now unless you’re very rich or very racist/transphobic, and that we can get a lot of enjoyment through noncompliance. Take a lesson from Kendrick Lamar and let that hate fuel you. Become emboldened by spite. In other words:
Live to see them die. That’s a slogan I can get behind! And if you want to buy a very cool pro-trans sticker of that sentiment, check out this very good Etsy link.
And now, on to whatever it is that I do.
A Real Pain
A Real Pain is on Hulu/Disney+ now, and if you may allow me to channel my inner Gene Shalit, “A Real Pain is Real Good.” Worth watching for a lot of reasons, not just because the Best Supporting Actor Oscar this year is shaping up to be a two-horse race between Kieran Culkin and Edward Norton (in A Complete Unknown). (It’s very amusing to me that if he wins, Kieran Culkin will be halfway to an EGOT … and is about to begin starring in a production of Glengarry Glen Ross.)
It’s really a tremendous film, and Jesse Eisenberg is really rounding into an extremely good writer/director in only his second such effort. He’s a triple threat! The movie, about two cousins who take a Holocaust tour in Poland during a time of tragedy in their lives, deals with a whole lot of subjects and is funny, poignant, moving and original. It also deals with some of what I spoke about when I told my story of my own Jewishness (such that it is) when I reviewed A Serious Man: the idea of Jewish tourism.
A Real Pain features a number of people of the Jewish faith, all with different levels of dedication or familiarity with Judaism. Eisenberg and Culkin’s characters are non-religious, but closely connected to Jewishness. There is a Rwandan genocide survivor who converted to Judaism after emigrating to Canada and practices his faith quite seriously. There are some older tourists who have endless stories about their parents and grandparents. And there is their tour guide: an English expert on the Holocaust and the Jewish faith, who himself is not Jewish. Also very important to this calculus: Culkin himself is not Jewish, but is portraying a Jewish man who is going through a very difficult reckoning with his own self and his own identity — and specifically, his Jewish identity.
Paid subscribers get to see me finish my thoughts on A Real Pain, and also Dog Man!
