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Posted: 10/7/2011
Feature trailer for A Beginner's Guide to Endings.
Duke White (Harvey Keitel) hasn t been an ideal father to his five boys. An inveterate gambler who never experienced a windfall he couldn t blow within twenty-four hours, he has come to the end of his rope, literally. Years ago, he signed up his three eldest sons for unsafe drug tests that turned out to have dire consequences: the boys life expectancy have been substantially reduced. Upon receiving the news after their father s funeral, the sons return to their family home in Niagara Falls, where they respond to their eminent demises in different yet equally hilarious ways.
Womanizing Cal (Scott Caan) is determined to hook up with Miranda (Tricia Helfer), the one girl who got away. Cautious Jacob (Paulo Costanzo), the only son with a real job, is determined to take every risk he didn t take earlier, usually accompanied by Duke s youngest son, Todd (Siam Yu). And finally there s his eldest, Nuts (Jason Jones), a boxer turned promoter who seems to have inherited his father s love of the calamitous long shot.
Written and directed with a keen sense of father-son awareness, Jonathan Sobol s A Beginners Guide to Endings features crackling dialogue and bravura performances. Keitel is hilarious and affecting as a man who can t even broach a subject without calculating the odds. Caan is perfect as the cocksure Cal, who s never experienced self-doubt and is now forced to wrestle with it. Costanzo is endearing as a man who never pursued excitement and now can t get enough of it. Finally, Jason Jones delivers a letter-perfect incarnation of a man who finally realizes that his actions have an impact on others as well as himself. Rounding out the stellar cast are Wendy Crewson as Duke s first wife and the always reliable J.K. Simmons as Uncle Pal, a preacher in a roadside chapel who tries to counsel the boys (usually to no avail).
A Beginners Guide to Endings is a bawdy paean to those of us who have never entirely worked o