If it’s hard to imagine that there once were only three television networks, it’s not hard to imagine that ratings were abysmal for their political coverage; disengagement has been the American Way for as long as this ’70s baby can recall. In 1968, even as public division around the Vietnam War reached its boiling point, ABC news executives were in such a panic about low audience numbers that they scheduled ten nightly televised debates between conservative commentator and National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. and essayist and novelist Gore Vidal to dovetail with the Democratic and Republican conventions. In their documentary, “The Best of Enemies,” directors Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon take an eagle-eyed look at those legendary events, including the cultural climate that spawned them and their unfortunate legacy in contemporary public discourse. Continue Reading →
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The Sneaky Rewards of ‘End of the Tour’
“The End of the Tour” may be easier to like if you’re not an ardent fan of David Foster Wallace. Adapted from David Lipsky’s eponymous book, a transcript of a five-day interview he conducted with the Infinite Jest author for a never-published Rolling Stone article, it stars Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky in a feat of casting that’s almost too on the nose. More to the point, it is directed by James Ponsoldt, who in his films “The Spectacular Now” and “Smashed” exposed the self-delusions of addiction with the gentlest of bedside manners. Working from a script by playwright Donald Margulies, Ponsoldt has crafted a portrait of the late author’s shadows that, while still too deferential, offers flashes of honesty that far outstrip the source material – including most personal statements from Wallace himself.
Since his “Social Network” turn as Mark Zuckerberg, Eisenberg has been the go-to guy for angry nerd roles, and he finds something new in each one. Here, with his turtle posture and twitchy features, Eisenberg nails the nervy shock of this Manhattan kid encountering his first major roadblock: Lipsky was assigned to profile Wallace’s meteoric 1996 ascent just as his own debut novel was receiving a tepid response. The unfairness of it all seems to visibly descend upon Lipsky’s already-hunched shoulders, especially when he enters Wallace’s modest Bloomington, Illinois, home – shabby rather than hipster vintage and piled high with homilies, books (mostly his own), and, rather improbably, an Alanis Morissette poster. “A lot of women in magazines are pretty but not erotic because they don’t look like anyone you know,” Wallace says to explain his crush, adding that, even now that he’s famous, he could never try to contact Morissette, not even for an innocent tea. We can see Lipsky deciding whether to buy this line. Continue Reading →
