This article first appeared on Reel Time with Richard.

When Jesse Eisenberg made his debut as a writer/director with 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, some found its depiction of familial squabbles heavy-handed and its characters insufferable.

Now Eisenberg is back with another comedy-drama about family relations, and he seems to have taken the criticisms to heart. A Real Pain’s two leading characters are flawed but likable, and its depiction of their squabbles is hardly heavy-handed. To the contrary, Eisenberg makes us work to figure out just what is behind them.

David Kaplan (played by Eisenberg himself) is a successful New Yorker with a wife and young son. His cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) is single, jobless and lives in his mother’s upstate home.

Friday, November 29, 2-24, 7:00 – 8:30 PM
 Maple Grove United Methodist Church, 7 W. Henderson Road, Columbus.  Free parking is available in the parking lot just South of the church.  It’s accessible from Aldrich Road, one street south of Henderson, off north High Street.

Friends. Family. Freedom. Food. Music. Pets. Laughter. Nature. And dozens of other things. Despite political turmoil and a divided nation, we have so much to be thankful for.  Playing piano and guitar, Bill will sing songs linked to a wide variety of folks --- John Denver, Bing Crosby, Phil Ochs, Louis Armstrong, and Don McLean. Even Johnny Appleseed, Jiminy Cricket, and the TV show, “Golden Girls.” 

On several songs, Ann Fisher will add beautiful flute accompaniment, David Maywhoor will add percussion, and Joe Lambert and Joanne Blum will add soothing vocal harmonies. 

This is a free concert, but if people appreciate the songs and the message, Bill will welcome donations for a non-profit charity, International Medical Alliance of Tennessee. That’s the group that his wife Randi goes with to the Dominican Republic every February. 

As Christian nationalism, the political right and Trump-mania seem to tighten their grip on the country, maybe now is the time for me to take a deep dig into the complex preciousness of . . . life itself.

Hey, guess what? I’m “pro-life” — by which I mean, you know, pro-life in a deep, soul-gripping, planet-loving, war-hating way. By which I mean: Let us reclaim Roe v. Wade from the smug, bureaucratic moral certainty — “your body, my choice” — of the anti-choicers, who apparently could care less about the impact Roe’s overturning has had on medical care and the safety, both physical and spiritual, of women.

But I want to put my words into the paradoxical context of life itself. As a man, I am writing, of course, from the perimeter of the process. I am a dad. I’m also a journal-keeper. The other day I happened to dig back nearly 40 years into an old notebook and reread, for the first time in decades, the journal entry I wrote the day after my daughter was born. Mom and newborn were still in the hospital. That evening, when I came home, I had to let my words flow.

Friends,

It was announced recently that it appears the final count may now be in — and Trump has FAILED to win a majority of the popular vote. His final total, as of now, will be under 50% — or 49.83%.

This was no landslide. It was the smallest percentage of a popular vote victory in a Presidential election since Richard Nixon in 1968.

Here’s how little we lost by:

Just 12 votes per precinct across the entire United States!

That’s it. With Harris behind by just 2.4 million votes out of the 152 million who voted, that’s an average of just 12 votes per precinct across the nearly 200,000 precincts in the U.S.