7.5 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
In 1996, shortly after the publication of his groundbreaking novel Infinite Jest, acclaimed author David Foster Wallace sets off on a five-day interview with Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky. The interview is never published. Five days of audio tapes are packed away in Lipsky’s closet, and the two men never meet again.
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Segel, Anna Chlumsky, Joan Cusack, Mamie GummerBiography | 100% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (locked)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Though the quote has been reported in various slightly different forms, sometime in the 1970s the inimitable Gore Vidal said something along the lines of, “Every time a friend of mine succeeds, a little bit of me dies inside.” It was a funny take on what might also be thought of as the “flip side” to Schadenfreude. (The wonderful Amanda Green later musicalized Vidal’s quote in a humorous quasi country and western tune.) There’s a somewhat similar sensibility going on in The End of the Tour, though it actually begins with “mere” jealousy, letting the friendship evolve later, albeit under conditions where one "friend" looks longingly at the other "friend"'s success. Christopher Guest’s delicious send up of regional theater, Waiting for Guffman, had a great little vignette where one of the characters was attempting to market “action figures” based on My Dinner with André, an obviously ridiculous approach given that film's static environment. In a way The End of the Tour could be thought of as Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky’s dinners with noted author David Foster Wallace, with a similar emphasis on talky dialetics and a similar deficit in the ostensible “action” department, despite director James Ponsoldt's attempts to open things up by having the conversation move to other environments like cars. This real life tale is told in flashback, after Wallace has died and Lipsky begins thinking back to an eventful few days Lipsky spent with Wallace in the wake of Wallace’s immense success with his novel Infinite Jest. And that’s where the green eyed monster of envy first rears its ugly head— Lipsky is a struggling novelist himself, and he is both enticed and perplexed by Wallace’s overwhelming good fortune. While Lipsky may wonder about the karma of it all, one thing he can’t deny is Wallace’s formidable writing talent, and that at least offers Lipsky an entrée into interviewing Wallace, a man who for various reasons isn’t particularly interested in being interviewed.
The End of the Tour is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. While the film isn't quite a verité in the strictest sense of the term, the lo-fi on the fly ambience that director James Ponsoldt and cinematographer Jakob Ihre go for often gives the film a quasi-documentary feel, and as such the image here rarely rises to the pristine, razor sharp precision that some fans of contemporary cinema have come to expect. The palette is perhaps intentionally muted throughout the presentation, and quite often Ponsoldt and Ihre shoot either directly into light or at least toward it, something that when combined with somewhat anemic contrast tends to make some scenes look fairly washed out and at least relatively lacking in detail (see screenshots 10 and 14 for two examples). In relatively normal lighting conditions, detail is very good to excellent, and the image, while not incredibly sharp, is precise and natural looking. There are occasional very slight compression problems, perhaps due to the frequency of low lighting, where grain resolves a bit wonkily, including taking on a multicolored edge at times.
Much as with the video component, The End of the Tour's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix isn't showy by any stretch of the imagination, but gets the job done, and in fact opens up considerably when some of the source cues give the soundtrack some force (Wallace was a big Alanis Morissette fan, and her music figures somewhat prominently at key points). Otherwise, though, the film plays out in intimate dialogue scenes, rarely if ever featuring more than two people at a time, and as such surround activity is at least relatively restrained. Fidelity is excellent, while dynamic range is pretty narrow aside from some of the musical elements. Danny Elfman's surprisingly lyrical score, something decidedly different than some of his whimsically minor keyed outings for Tim Burton, is quite evocative and sounds great in this lossless presentation.
I'm frankly not quite sure that The End of the Tour is as profound as it seems to think it is, but it's a generally compelling short form "road movie" that's compressed to just a handful of days. The interplay between Lipsky and Wallace is intellectually fascinating, but emotional content tends to be subtextual a lot of the time, meaning some viewers are going to have to work for a little bit to attain any catharsis. Technical merits are generally very good to excellent, and The End of the Tour comes Recommended.
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