An American Pickle (2020)

This lightweight comedy, with Seth Rogen playing both a man born in the 1880s and his great-great-grandson, has a fair number of jokes and isn't a total waste of time. Rogen's Herschel falls into a Brooklyn pickle vat in 1919 and is preserved for a hundred years, where he meets Ben and they try, with little success, to understand each other's ways of life. Sort of a buddy comedy with one actor playing both buddies. Among the dozens of credited and uncredited roles, Sarah Snook has a nice bit as Herschel's wife in Russia.

Directed by Brandon Trost from Simon Rich's screenplay, adapted from his own short story Sell Out.

Marc Maron interviewed Rogen on his WTF podcast last summer and that piqued our interest. Jack and I love Maron's work. Here's the link to the Rogen segment but be careful, the WTF free links expire and go behind a paywall after a while.

The klezmer-influenced soundtrack by Michael Giacchino and Nami Melumad is available on Apple Music and YouTube, among others.

Rogen was last blogged for Long Shot. I've enjoyed much of Snook's work, including The Dressmaker and The Glass Castle, but she may be best known to you for her Emmy-nominated 21 episodes of Succession. Trost has a long list of credits as cinematographer, including The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and he co-directed one feature. This is his solo feature debut as director. Rich, the son of New York Times editor Frank Rich, is a Saturday Night Live writer making his feature screenplay debut here.

Rotten Tomatoes' audiences, averaging 48%, are saltier than its critics at 73. We're more in line with the critics.

We saw it on HBO in mid-August. Check ReelGood for other streaming possibilities.