Currently browsing the "Mickey Sumner" tag.

The End of the Tour

The End of the Tour is not a biopic so much as an homage to a great writer who killed himself relatively young. In the film David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel of How I Met Your Mother) is the biggest writer of 1996, and David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) is a new reporter at Rolling Stone who talks his editor into sending him on a book tour with him. It is the first time Rolling Stone has done an author piece, but Wallace’s latest book, Infinite Jest, is earning him comparisons to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Lipsky, a novelist himself, is jealously in awe of Wallace. What transpires is mostly a road trip interview. Yes, it is an interesting conversation, particularly so for other writers, and it is pretty much all talk and nearly no drama, but as Lipsky notes at the end of the film, “It was the best conversation I ever had.” And it surely is one of the better ones I have listened to in a while.

Frances Ha

Poor Frances. At the ripe old age of 27, nothing in her life is going right. Her boyfriend wants her to move in, but she can’t run out on her roommate, so they split. Then her absolute favorite person in the world, her roomie Sophie, moves out on her despite their promise to stick together until the lease is up. Plus she is still apprenticing in a dance troupe and her future there is in doubt. And she’s not getting any younger, as she is constantly reminded. But she’s no late-20s slacker either. She just can’t seem to get things to work the way she knows they are supposed to. In this indie comedy from director Noah Baumbach (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Margot at the Wedding), Greta Gerwig animates the hapless but lovable Frances and takes you along on her journey as she figures it all out in her own goofy fashion.