"A Real Pain": Cousins have wacky adventures or a Dark Night of the Soul in Poland. With Kieran Culkin's backside.

     Link to the n*de dudes

A Real Pain (2024), on Hulu, is advertised as a wacky buddy comedy with Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg, touring Poland, with a lot of exteriors.   No doubt they are both absurdly heterosexual and will meet The Girl of Their Dreams, but it will be fun to see how quickly their heterosexual identity is established. 

 Besides, I'd like to see some of the sights, like the Jewish Museum in Warsaw and the University of Krakow. .

Not to mention Kieran's backside.

Scene 1: Benji (Kieran Culkin, left) is sitting in the airport waiting for David (Jesse Eisenberg), who is just walking out the door of his Manhattan brownstone.  He keeps calling: heavy traffic...no, it lightened up...Ok, so David is the Stick-in-the-Mud, Benji the Free Spirit.

At the airport, Benji grabs him and makes him twirl so he can see his cousin's butt.  Um...an interested in a guy's butt is a sign of gay identity.

He brought yogurt, and some weed for when they reach Poland: "They're not going to arrest two Jews for a little weed."

He chats up the TSA lady: "Her Dad does security for the Knicks."  This annoys David. Doesn't count as heterosexualizing him.

Priya made some trail mix for them.  Doesn't count: she could be an aunt or a sister.

Scene 2: On the plane, David has to take the middle seat. Bummer.

They discuss their back story: David works in digital ad sales, and Benji is a deadbeat. They haven't seen each other for a while.  They're going on a Heritage Tour of Poland.. wait, they're Jewish...is this a tour of the sites of pograms and concentration camps? 

Naw, who would want to see those?  Poland has 1000 years of Jewish history.

Later, David takes his prescription meds and gazes at a video of his daughter. Heterosexualized at minute 6.30. 

It's actually Jesse Eisenberg's real-life son, Banner.  I was confused by his long blond hair.

Scene 3: At the Warsaw airport -- "Welcome to Warsaw" sign in English.  They meet their driver. Some nice location shots as they drive through the city, but David is still gazing at that video of his son.   Why the heck aren't you looking out the window at this major European capital that you've never been to before?

They check in, retrive a package of weed from the desk clerk, and head up to their room. When David kicks off his shoes, Benji complements him: "You have really nice feet.  Graceful as fuck. Reminds me of Grandma's feet."  Foot fetish? Benji is giving off some gay vibes.

Scene 4: Tour Guide James (Will Sharpe, top photo) introduces himself: Not actually Jewish, but a degree in Eastern European Studies from Oxford.

The others in the tour are:

1. Marcia Kramer, recently divorced, from New York.  Her mother survived the camps. One of the cousins is obviously going to fall in love with her, but I'm not sure which.  Maybe David is divorced, and Benji's interest in men's butts and feet is supposed to be wacky, not homoerotic.

2.-3. Diane and Mark (Daniel Oreskes), an elderly couple. 

Daniel Oreskes has 40 acting credits on the IMDB, including The Sopranos, Law & Order, Ray Donovan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Only Murderers in this Building.  He is heterosexual.

4. Eloge, from Rwanda, converted to Judaism.  He's a survivor of the Rwandan genocide.

The Cameroon-born Kurt Egyiawan is a British theatrical actor who has appeared in The Exorcist, House of the Dragon, Bodies, and Kaos.  No intel on whether he's heterosexual or not.

More after the break

Victor Rivera: Summa cum laude theater arts graduate, LARPer, D&D player, stunt d*ck. With bonus Jesse Eisenberg

 

Link to the stunt d*ck

Have you ever  you started off knowing nothing about a guy except what he had in his pants, and found out about the rest of him later?

Don't answer that.

In Righteous Gemstones Episodes 1.1 and 1.7, a video of Jesse's wild party shows Chad (James Dumont), visible from the belly down, walking to the foreground.  Victor Rivera is James Dumont's body double, actually playing the beneath-the-belt stuff.

So who is Victor Rivera?  I expected a Charleston-area amateur with no acting or minimal acting experience, displaying his stuff as a lark.

But Victor actually graduated from Appalachian State University in 2013, summa cum laude, with a 3.98 GPA, a major in theater and a minor in art.  

After performing in communitiy theater in North Carolina for two years, he moved to Atlanta in  2015  to start his career on screen.

The results: 

23 commercials

A lot of shorts: Safe Words (burglars get more than they bargained for),  Mob Rats (a Mafia informant), Acting Out (theater arts major meets the Girl of His Dreams).

 Guest spots on Swamp Murders, The Uncanny X-Men, Good Girls, and Creepshow

The Tomorrow's Monsters podcast

The tv series D&Me, featuring Victor playing Dungeons & Dragons by himself.

Ten movie roles. The most prominent is Civil War Bearded Guy in Zombieland Double Tap (2019), a sequel to the post-Apocalyptic Zombieland (2009), starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg (left), Luke Wilson, and Thomas Middleditch

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Here Victor notes that in one week he saw Zombieland: Double Tap by himself, twith a group of Atlanta friends, in North Carolina with his family, at the Zombieland Scare Zone at a haunted house in Orlando,  back to Atlanta to see it with Peter (a boyfriend?),  then to a Halloween party where he wore a Zombieland costume.

More after the break.