A Beginner's Guide to Endings (2011)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Undescribable Perfection

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Duke White (Harvey Keitel) decides to end his crazy gambling life by hanging himself. When that fails, he jumps into Niagara Falls. He has 5 sons. He has three sons with Goldie (Wendy Crewson). Then came Juicebox (Jared Keeso) from showgirl Champaigne. There is Todd (Siam Yu) from the Siagon Incident and Goldie finally left him. Nevertheless she remained the boys' mother.In his will, Duke tells the three oldest that they are doom to die from drugs that they took for money along with him. The pharmaceutical company had paid each brother $100k as compensation for their impending death but Duke had lost it all betting on horses. The three brothers are sent into a spiral to find some kind of meaning in it all. Uncle Pal (J.K. Simmons) tries to help each one in his own way.Eddie 'Nuts' White (Jason Jones) is a failed undefeated boxer who wins only because everybody keeps punching him in the junk. Cal (Scott Caan) is a womanizer who wants his teenage love Miranda (Tricia Helfer) back after sleeping with a waitress who also slept with dad. Jacob (Paulo Costanzo) is the responsible one and completely unhappy. He makes a bucket list to do.Jason Jones is so ill-fitting as a boxer. If anybody should be the boxer, it should be Scott Caan. The three guys don't look anything like brothers. They don't fit together and have no brotherly chemistry. Paulo Costanzo and Jason Jones could be brothers but there is no chance for Scott Caan. The movie is so quirky that it makes it hard to follow and lacking in flow. Newcomer Jonathan Sobol is the writer/director. I think he has a lot to say and a lot of style. He just needs to rein it in and control it better. The other problem is that the three brothers go off on their own. It would help with the brotherly chemistry if they face their challenges together. I'm all for quirky comedies. It would help if the family is more together.

I found this one on Netflix streaming movies. Quirky and funny, great entertainment for an afternoon with nothing better to do in the hot Texas summer. Harvey Keitel is Duke White, he hasn't been a very good man and father. He has three grown sons by his original wife, then one more via an affair, for which his wife probably would have forgiven him. But when the next son came along, after a brief affair with a Vietnamese woman, that was enough. Duke is in the process of killing himself as the movie opens, we are not quite sure why, but more details come out during the reading of the will, but Duke's brother, played well by J.K. Simmons. One of the reasons involves money that his sons were supposed to get, but Duke wasted it all on his gambling habit. The other was even bigger!The writing is very clever and the acting spot-on most of the time. Anyone who enjoys a quirky and clever comedy should enjoy this movie.SPOILERS: The second big surprise was Duke had enrolled his adult sons in a paid drug-testing program 10 years earlier, when the drug company found out the medicine causes thinning of the heart walls, they paid each one $100,000 in compensation and terminated the program. But Duke cashed all the checks for himself, and gambled the money away. He couldn't face the boys, so killed himself with a noose, a branch, and jumping in the river to go over Niagara Falls. So the boys make bucket lists of the things they want to do in the few weeks they have to live. But near the end mom shows up, reveals that the boys never took any drugs, she had switched the medicine for Tic-Tacs. And right before each boy was to make a big mistake in life, Duke's karma as he died going through the Falls helps to save each one. Too complicated to explain, one has to see the movie.

As with any good film, it's always important to start things off the right way in order to spark your viewer's interest. How funny that a film entitled "A Beginner's Guide To Endings" absolutely mastered the art of an opening scene. The striking image of Oscar-Nominee Harvey Keitel walking through a brightly lit carnival at night with a noose around his neck immediately hooked my interest in this movie. When Harvey Keitel started speaking, his voice over setting the movie's tone, it just pulled me in even further. "The events leading up to my death were a lot like the rest of my life," Keitel says. "Things didn't go exactly as planned."Keitel, playing Duke White, sets up the scene quickly, talking about all of the regrets in his life and introducing the few things he doesn't regret: bringing his five great boys into the world. Three of the boys are now adults and are introduced along with the rest of Duke's family via a nicely crafted "family scrapbook" sequence. Between Keitel's opening sequences and the animated credit sequence that immediately followed, I fell in love with this movie about five minutes in.The main storyline begins in a local church, where his brother (J.K. Simmons of "Spiderman" and "Juno" fame) is the priest residing over Duke's funeral. But in traditional Duke fashion, there is no body since it appears Duke went over Niagara Falls. Simmons plays the character superbly, and builds up the films offbeat humor. He explains that Duke was never much for the Bible, so he instead reads the lyrics to Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird." The dysfunctional funeral continues in great fashion when one of Duke's sons (Scott Caan of the "Oceans Eleven" film series) shows up late, just in time to get in a brawl with his brothers in front of their father's casket. The fight is so bad that Simmons has to break out his first aid kit, which the family has used so many times the kit has been given the nickname, "Old Rusty." It is just a tiny detail that makes this oddball family feel real and made me like them more and more.That is why the news they get at the reading of Duke's will hit me like a sucker punch. It's the crux of the plot and even the synopsis for the movie, so I don't feel bad revealing this, but writer/director Jonathan Sobol turns up the heat, revealing that Duke had the three oldest boys involved in an experimental drug treatment program that has now cut their life expectancy down to nothing and they'll be dead in a brief matter of time. While many of them find this rather hard to believe, one of the boys, Jacob (Paulo Costanzo of "Road Trip" and "Royal Pains") goes to his doctor in an attempt to find out the truth. The doctor tells him about the drug tested on them and is blunt when he asks if there is ever anything he wanted to do, followed by suggesting that he goes and does them.Before long we see each brother handle their mortality in different ways. Scott Caan is a womanizer who is afraid of being like his dad who had a bunch of boys from different mothers, so he goes on a quest to find the one woman who got his motor going and who he feels he can commit to, a total psychopath named Miranda. His brother "Nuts" (a former boxer) is just trying to wrap things up with training his younger brother "Juicebox" for a boxing match, before realizing he's gotten his brother involved in something he has no business being a part of. And Jacob creates a bucket list of things he wants to do, taking his youngest brother along for the ride, as they go from one insane item on the checklist to the next. Their three stories build into a glorious crescendo, and the editing pulls their stories together with some wonderful cuts that tighten the tension and milk the humor. What is fantastic is this could have been a dreary movie about regret and people facing their mortality, but Sobol injects a little dark humor in every scene and keeps the viewer wanting more.Overall, "A Beginners Guide To Endings" is a beautifully paced movie that unfolds the plot quickly, and makes excellent use of the Niagara Falls setting. For a film that could have easily been too morbid or morose, it really makes for an entertaining and uplifting story in general. Definitely one of the best narrative movies I have seen in quite a while, and one I will be recommending to everyone I know.

A favorite movie of mine, Magnolia, is introduced with a narrator talking about odds and the unlikelihood of certain things happening and A Beginner's Guide to Endings starts in a very similar fashion. The credits for this Jonathon Sobol film are cleverly presented as parts of games of chance and from the outset there is that feeling that unlikely things are going to happen and this will be an unpredictable and unusual comedy. The Beginner's Guide was one of more than a dozen options available at the Domestic Arrivals Film Festival in London Ontario and it is one that I almost missed. When so many quality films are offered in such a short time frame sometimes difficult choices have to be made. This film was one of the best decisions I made and everything about it impressed me. The award winning screenplay gave the ensemble cast plenty of material to work with and their performances were all pitch perfect.J.K. Simmons serves as an adviser to the White brothers, a family so dysfunctional that they could lower the property values in any neighborhood they chose to call home. Siam Yu manages to deliver up some laughs as a very credible Todd, the youngest product of Duke White's many misadventures. While Harvey Keitel doesn't need a lot of screen time as the Duke White character his presence is felt throughout the full 92 minutes. Any casting changes would have made this a different film and it likely wouldn't have been a better different. Everybody needed to be who they were to make it work as well as it did. The shooting locations in Niagara Falls are very familiar to most people, but because of the close proximity to London there may have been a stronger connection for the audience here. This isn't a film for everyone but it is one that l will go out of my way to see again.