FILM REVIEW: THE END OF THE TOUR

David Lipsky (Jessie Eisenberg) and David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) in The End of the Tour.

A tale of two Davids, talking, a lot

By Ed Rampell

I enjoyed the first hour of James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour, which consists mostly of two 30-something men talking to each other. As an author, interviewer and journalist I was interested in the real life premise: In 1996, staff writer David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) convinces his Rolling Stone editor (Ron Livingston in a cameo) to dispatch him from Manhattan to the Midwest to cover, all expenses paid, the latest literary phenom, David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), and his book tour promoting the tome. Infinite Jest.

As in Louis Malle’s 1981 My Dinner with Andre, Tour’s pair of writers are, but of course, full of words. The repartee between the reporter and novelist is initially entertaining and engaging. Discourses on the literary life and creative process absorb me and the actors, especially Segel, do creditable jobs.

Lipsky arguably breaks journalistic standards by accepting Wallace’s hospitality and moves in with him, although there’s a motel nearby at this rural Illinois outpost. Lipsky is likely too close to his subject to remain objective, balanced and fair. He also does some pretty sneaky things behind the author’s back. For instance, in what may be another breach of journalistic ethics, the unsuccessful novelist-turned-reporter takes advantage of Wallace’s generously offering him a roof over his head by snooping in his host’s medicine cabinet to see what kind of prescription drugs Wallace is taking. (Wallace was reportedly on anti-depressants.) These possible violations of journalism’s code of ethics may indicate that Rolling Stone was reportage-challenged long before its current rape story brouhaha.

After what seems like a few days the not-so-dynamic duo fly to Minneapolis for the film’s titular tour. Joan Cusack is her quirky self as Patty, the author’s escort who shepherds the literati around town when they are in the Twin Cities’ vicinity. One of Cusack’s cracks is among the film’s best lines. Although Cusack’s role is too small it was good to see a screen depiction of minders -- interesting characters working in an overlooked avocation. I once had a minder when I was on a book tour in Hawaii who was such a malihini (newcomer) that she had no idea how to get around the islands, so I had to give her directions everywhere we went to sign books.

Anyway, after Wallace’s tour is over he and Lipsky return to the middle of nowhere in Illinois. It’s downhill from here, devolving into a blabfest that does not really capture one’s attention. Their male egos begin to clash. Lipsky, who has published a minor novel, is envious of Wallace’s fame and success after his Infinite Jest hits the bestseller list. They compete over women, and so on.

Nothing much really happens - no wonder Rolling Stone decided not to publish an article based on Lipsky’s dull misadventures in the Midwest after spending a wad of Jann Wenner’s loot. (Lipsky ain’t exactly a Hunter S. Thompson; or Matt Taibbi, for that matter.) The magazine was clearly exercising better journalistic judgment in the 1990s than it has in more recent times, caught up in scandals and lawsuits as it is now over allegedly bogus reporting about gang rape on a college campus.

Lipsky did, however, keep his extensive audiotapes, which he turned into a 2010 book after Wallace’s demise at the age of only 46. Did Lipsky cash in on Wallace and attain a measure of the fame and fortune he envied the Infinite Jest author for having? Although given Wallace’s ending, recognition and money don’t necessarily the happy one maketh and aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Eisenberg is pretentiously cerebral here, similar to his role as a guy who could only relate to humans virtually so he supposedly invented Facebook in 2010’s The Social Network. I’ve never been a fan of Segel’s buffoonish sexual loser shtick in flicks like 2012’s This is Forty and 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall (which at least had the virtue of being shot in Hawaii). Seriously, has anyone ever seen Segel in a room with Seth Rogen at the same time? Having said that, in The End of the Tour, Segel probably delivers his best performance to date and he is a dead ringer for the misbegotten Wallace at a certain period of his all too short life.

The film could have used more of the idiosyncratic Cusack to jazz it up. Ponsoldt’s 2013 coming of age drama, The Spectacular Now, was better than this snoozefest that screenwriter Donald Margulies based on Lipsky’s tell-all. Really, whose idea was it to film a blabfest about a guy purportedly on anti-depressants? This movie barely moved, feeling more infinite than jest. Although the first sixty minutes or so of The End of the Tour was good, after 106 minutes, when the curtain fell, I felt as if it was the end of the snore.

 

 

 

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FILM REVIEW: FUTURO BEACH

A scene from Futuro Beach.

Drowning by numbers

 

By Don Simpson

 

Fueled by Suicide’s dissonant electro-punk anthem “Ghost Rider,” two motorcyclists speed across the dunes of the idyllic Brazilian coastline. They disembark their bikes at the titular Futuro Beach to immerse themselves in the dangerous surf. Heiko (Fred Lima) and Konrad (Clemens Schick) find themselves dragged underwater by an insatiable undertow, attracting the attention of two lifeguards. Heiko falls prey to an accidental drowning, leaving Konrad, his close friend and former brother-in-arms, directionless and alone in a foreign land.

 

Riddled by the heroic guilt of his inability to save Heiko, Donato (Wagner Moura), the lifeguard, offers to comfort Konrad; a relationship transpires, eventually convincing Donato to abandon his family — including 10-year-old brother, Ayrton (Savio Ygor Ramos) — and relocate to the landlocked city of Berlin. It is not long before Donato begins to feel, quite literally, like a fish out of water. Gone are his days of being a heroic lifeguard at Brazil’s most dangerous beach, as are his days of playing Aquaman for his aquaphobic younger brother; now Donato is an utter nobody in a concrete jungle. Rather than basking in the Brazilian sunlight, Donato is reduced to soaking in the dance floor lights of underground nightclubs.

 

Many years later, in the final third of this clearly defined three-act narrative, a much older Ayrton (Jesuíta Barbosa) appears in Berlin to scold Donato for abandoning him. It is the classic trope of a hero destined for disappointment. In his submissive attempt to comfort Konrad after Heiko’s death, Donato devastated Ayrton, the one person who admired him unconditionally; thus, Karim Aïnouz’s Futuro Beach contemplates the age-old choice between family and love.

 

Playing with the obvious metaphors of drowning and being lost at sea, Aïnouz presents Donato as a powerful swimmer in Brazil who can barely tread water in Germany. After submerging himself into a tumultuous relationship with Konrad, Donato becomes a lifeless body, completely overwhelmed by life’s rough currents. If there is one common theme throughout Futuro Beach, it is the loss of control, or the human inability to remain buoyant. There are ups and downs in life, the secret is to not let those evil undercurrents overcome you.

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FILM REVIEW: THE INTERNET'S OWN BOY THE STORY OF AARON SWARTZ

A scene from The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. Photo by Quinn Norton.

A real transformer 

By Ed Rampell

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is required viewing for anyone who values free speech and justice. Brian Knappenberger’s riveting documentary is also a case study in Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s selective prosecution. As liberal commentator/columnist/radio talk show host David Sirota points out in an onscreen interview, the Obama administration has not prosecuted the financial sector for basically wrecking much of the world economy.

While Big Brother and the Holder Company gave the Wall Street banksters (and Bush mass murderers a pass), at the same time, as Matt Taibbi points out in The Divide, American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, “Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization.” But who does the Department of Justice (DOJ) decide to throw the book at? Internet whiz kid Aaron Swartz, who in 2000, at the age of 14, helped develop RSS, which has been called “Really Simple Syndication,” as it enables automatic summarization of online information, among other things. The Chicago-born child prodigy went on to cofound the social networking and news website Reddit, a platform for Net communities.

Swartz attended (but did not graduate from) Stanford and became a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics. The passionate advocate of Internet freedom and free access to information became an off- and online activist, harnessing the power of the Web to monitor the powers that be. In 2008 he founded Watchdog.net to aggregate data about politicians and helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. In 2010, Swartz founded the nonprofit Demand Progress, which spearheaded Net roots resistance that helped defeat Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Like a sort of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden of academia, from September 2010 to January 2011 Swartz is believed to have mass downloaded documents from MIT’s JSTOR database, a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources. Although it’s not certain what Swartz’s motivation was for allegedly doing so, it appears that the hacktivist was attempting to thwart efforts to profiteer off of human knowledge by making this information available free of charge to the general public, which is a recurring theme of The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.

In early 2011 the Secret Service and Cambridge Police Department starting investigating and the US Attorney’s office opened a criminal investigation into the hacking of MIT’s network. By the end of January Swartz’s office and home were raided and grand jury and subpoena actions commenced. As the documentary meticulously reveals, although JSTOR declined to press charges and MIT proclaimed its “neutrality” in the legal matter (while Jamie Dimon and Dick Cheney skated) federal prosecutor Stephen P. Heymann, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, who had a background in prosecuting computer hacking, pursued the case with Inspector Javert-like intensity, and on July 14, 2011 Swartz was charged with four felony counts, including theft of computer information. The 24-year-old was arrested days later.

It was the bulldog versus the watchdog, and during the zigzagging trajectory of Swartz’s case, the number of felony counts against him rose to 13, and Aaron pled not guilty. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange may have been beyond Washington’s long arm of the law and members of the underground collective Anonymous (Knappenberger previously directed the 2012 doc We Are Legion: The Story of the Hactivists) too cagey to be caught, but Swartz was within the U.S. judicial system’s grasp, and it appears that the DOJ was determined to make an example of him. Faced with economic ruin and imprisonment for years by a vengeful administration -- the Obama regime has been extraordinarily vindictive towards whistleblowers, charging more people with the Espionage Act than all previous U.S. administrations combined -- the free spirited Swartz appears to have been pushed over the edge on Jan. 11, 2013.

The 26-year-old’s death prompted protest, including from Congress -- within days California’s U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren announced she’d introduce “Aaron’s Law” to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But on March 6, 2013 an unrepentant Attorney General Holder defended Swartz’s prosecution before a Senate committee.

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is a compelling, powerful, well put together work, combining archival footage and original interviews with notables such as academic/activist Lawrence Lessig, Sen. Ron Wyden, Rep. Lofgren, as well as with Aaron’s relatives, friends, lovers, etc., who provide an intimate look into the personal side of the film’s subject.  This gripping, must-see documentary -- especially relevant as the struggle for Net neutrality continues and the Snowden case unfolds -- is being released theatrically and on Amazon and Hulu.

R.I.P. Aaron Swartz -- aloha oe (farewell to thee): Your bulb burned briefly, but brightly.

  

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FILM REVIEW: MY PIECE OF THE PIE

France (Karin Viard) in My Piece of the Pie.

Sliced

By Don Simpson

Writer-director Cédric Klapisch's My Piece of the Pie  (Ma part du gateau) begins in Dunkirk with a birthday cake yet amidst the celebration, France (Karin Viard) attempts suicide. The quite purposefully named France is a single mother of three who is suffering from depression after the unexpected closure of the factory she had worked at for two decades.

Meanwhile in London, we learn that an evil power broker named Steve (Gilles Lellouche) recently closed a deal that prompted the shuttering of France’s employer. As a bonus, Steve accepts a job transfer that delivers him to Paris.

Meanwhile in Dunkirk, France — who is still recovering from her suicide attempt — cannot find another job; that is until she abandons her fellow factory workers and enters a housekeeper training program in Paris. The training program is designed for immigrants, so France must pretend that she is a foreigner so the other students do not get suspicious of national favoritism. (This could easily be interpreted as an anti-immigrant stance on behalf of Klapisch, as he “proves” to us that French Nationals actually want and deserve the lower class jobs that immigrants are stealing.)

Fate then rears its ugly hand and France is hired as Steve’s housekeeper. France — our working class heroine — is blinded by her income, especially as her salary multiplies upon becoming the nanny for Steve’s son (Lunis Sakji). France quickly learns that the millionaire lifestyle, however subservient her role may be, is not all that bad. Steve’s life, on the other hand, is devoted to the endless pursuit of profit at the expense of less privileged people, as My Piece of the Pie unspools into a cock-eyed message about how seemingly harmless business decisions have broader consequences than anyone could ever imagine. (Themes of financial accountability in this dog-eat-dog capitalist world come up again and again and again.)

And though she constantly ridicules Steve for not spending enough quality time with his son, France has all but abandoned her daughters in Dunkirk at the home of her sister (Audrey Lamy) in favor of spending more time with Steve’s son and thus making a lot more money. Nonetheless, we are supposed to believe that France is a decent, hard working woman who just so happens to have hit a lucky-yet-reckless streak. When France eventually sacrifices herself for her comrades at the factory back in Dunkirk, it is too little too late.

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