jfo-95056

The movie kids, tho great in many ways, is an emotionless affair. Literally characters who find out they have aids don't cry, they just kinda panic. Nobody seems to, or is depicted to, feel anything in that world.

We Were Once Kids is like the photo negative of that. It's emotionally raw, very vulnerable, pathetic even, embarrassing. And I mean all that as a compliment. Here we see young men grappling honestly with regrets, unrealized dreams, friendships, and new realities, they aren't too cool to walk us through the process of finding adult perspectives on hard childhoods, lost childhoods, opportunities - particularly one stinging reveal that was and is forever lost. Even cast wise: the side characters are the stars, the stars mostly absent.

It's a great depiction of the chance to be in the moons orbit and never getting to land there. The filmmakers are in tremendous company.

In What is a Woman Matt Walsh played Matt Walsh, the everyman, whose sarcasm is neatly wrapped in pretend curiosity. And it works. In Am I Racist, he changes the formula. Now he's playing a character: a do-gooder numbskull klutz. (The dumb version of those he means to satirize).

Like Borat before him, he's embodying the very joke he means to expose. Even the film's voiceover is in-character, guiding us through this imbecile's faux arc. Unfortunately for him and us - and I don't think he'd be too offended by this point - Matt Walsh is not Sasha Baron Cohen. All politics aside. SBC is an extremely funny dude. And comedically savvy enough to appeal to both sides of the isle. I'm not sure why Walsh decided to go explicitly for laughs - particularly ones that stem from his character's mild antics - being clumsy, unremarkably awkward, interrupting - whereas any viewer of his knows that the laughs he creates most often come from him pointing out the antics of his targets. And he does so by being a strong and relentless arguer, not a brilliant satirist. Throughout the film Walsh's usually dependable practicality and occasional wit seem stifled by a nagging sense that he should try to be funny.

There are moments: shout out to the carjacking the next car joke.

I wonder why the argument of this film had to be anchored in satire? I understand his targets are probably worthy, maybe even deserving of it, but unfortunately they - like Walsh - never do anything particularly outrageous or funny. And because it's going for laughs, its thesis and insight (and entertainment value) are only highlighted if the scenarios they create are in fact funny. Surely just as many (or more) laughs (and insights!) could've come from playing it straight - which is resoundingly and on many levels Walsh's wheelhouse.

Even in his piece de la resistance interview with RDA I found myself wishing he'd release himself from the chains of this character, the burden of going for laughs, and just have a pointed conversation (or interrogation) with her. I expect that would've been hysterical.

The Brutalist is full of surprises. The characters are not who you expect - not in the Scooby Doo ending kinda way, but in the more subtle, incremental ways that real people reveal themselves - they unfurl over time, in new context, or when forced by circumstance.

Here the circumstance is post-WWII-horror. Adrien Brody's Laszlo, a jewish architect who escaped the clutches of bloody Europe, ekes into the welcoming arms of America - or is confronted by them - in a frenetic opening sequence that evokes being literally birthed by the Statue of Liberty. His becomes a journey of perpetually navigating life's variety of horrors: existential, professional, familial, intimate - never taking his eyes off the prize of grand achievement, and never assessing the value of that prize to begin with. What's the lesson?

Is it the shameful discovery that his success wasn't born in spite of his trauma, but because of it? Do we owe a debt to abuse? To the forces of culture, country, power and those who wield it, in the building of our brutal legacies (and homelands)? Are our lives gasoline that gets burned up en route to some place more meaningful?

The movie is charming, cool looking, and not boring (did you hear it was long?). It feels like it's based on an old novel - a mysterious tome that I would love to mine for some of the details the movie refuses to share. But there is no novel. This aging Man's search for meaning becomes ours as well. And any greater understanding of Laszlo's arrival, his families' machinations, his country and rootlessness, or the evolution of his very feelings on the subjects, for better or worse, feels up to us to construct.