A couple of years ago I posted a rant about an egregious form of road-ignoring in James Ponsoldt‘s The Spectacular Now. For years I’ve been twitching in my seat during car-chat scenes in which a driver mainly looks at the person riding shotgun and only glances at the road sporadically. (Roughly five or six seconds of eye-contact for every one or two seconds of road-watching.) But Ponsoldt and Miles Teller doubled down on this in a Spectacular scene in which Teller, bold as brass, totally ignores the road for ten or twelve seconds as he chats with some girls in a car that’s cruising alongside. I almost threw my shoe at the screen.

Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Segel in James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour. Obviously not the scene I’m referring to the piece as Segel is behind the wheel.

And now Ponsoldt has crossed the line again in The End of The Tour. In a second act scene Jesse Eisenberg (playing Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky) is driving and talking to Jason Segel (as David Foster Wallace) and doing the usual “I don’t really need to look at the road…well, okay, I do every so often but c’mon…I’m actor and I need to make eye contact…this is what I do and I can’t just stare at the road and read lines.”

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I’m sorry to say I wasn’t all that taken with James Ponsoldt‘s The End of the Tour (A24, 7.31), which I saw last night at the Aero. It’s a dialogue-driven thing with not enough going on underneath. The basic focus is the renowned David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), author of “Infinite Jest” and other respected works, and particularly a five-day-long interview he did in ’96 with Rolling Stone correspondent David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), when Foster was 34. (Wallace offed himself at age 46.) It’s largely set in Wallace’s grungy, cluttered home in rural Illinois, which seems like a horrid, barren, show-covered gulag. I’ll get into this in a subsequent post but I wouldn’t want The End of the Tour to get in the way of anyone enjoying (or listening to for the first time) Wallace’s “This Is Water” commencement address, which he delivered a decade ago at Kenyon College. Here’s the whole thing and here’s a video that conveys a portion:

I was afraid there might be some kind of inability to suspend disbelief with Michael Fassbender playing Steve Jobs because he looks nothing like the guy. But he sure seems to behave like Walter Isaacson’s version of Jobs in this trailer and the film (or at least this hinting of it) seems to have its ducks in order so I’m starting to feel more relaxed. On top of which I’ve read a draft of Aaron Sorkin‘s script and it’s a strong, riveting, rat-a-tat-tat deal, let me tell you.

Again, that hacked Sony email written by Sony marketing exec Michael Pavlic about the script: “It’s brilliant. It’s perfect. There are marketing liabilities. It’s long, it’s claustrophobic, it’s talky, it could be a play, it risks being all one medium close-up, it’s periody…a mediation on Jobs himself. It’s insistent upon itself, it’s relentless. I kept begging for someone to walk outside, for some daylight, for an opening…

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Anything that seriously threatens the family unit tends to result in serious difficulty and quite often divorce court. In my experience people break up over three things — not enough money, infidelity and a refusal to deal seriously with an addiction problem (alcohol, drugs, gambling). One of these three, mostly on the part of a husband, will usually persuade the wife that she can do better alone or with someone else. Honest question: Affleck-Garner were called Bennifer, which is what Affleck Lopez were also called, or so I recall. My preferred Affleck-Lopez term was B.Lo — did anybody at all use that or was it just me and five other guys?

At the very least, Maryse Alberti‘s cinematography makes Creed (Warner Bros., 11.25) look better than half decent. Directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station). Starring Michael B. Jordan, costarring Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Tony Bellew and Graham McTavish. If you want to get technical you could call it the seventh Rocky film but it looks more like a cousin than part of the immediate family.

I regard all raves of all films shown at South by Southwest as highly suspect. Way too many easy-lay geeks attend this Austin-based festival, and when they see something half-decent they all go “wheee!…we’re totally in love with the film and the filmmakers and distributors who allowed us to see it early because this makes us look necessary and important in the overall scheme!” So when Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer‘s Trainwreck (Universal, 7.17) was cheered in Austin last March, I said to myself, “Oh, yeah?…we’ll see about that.”

Last night I saw about that and all I can say is “holy shit.” Actually that’s not all I can say but it’ll do for starters. I guess I also need to say “fuck me” and “mea culpa” and all the rest of that hash. Then again I didn’t respond to the film last February — I merely shared a somewhat insensitive gut reaction to Schumer as a conceivable object of barroom desire within the prism of a trailer. But that’s all water under the bridge because Trainwreck, no lie, is dryly hilarious and smoothly brilliant and damn near perfect. It’s the finest, funniest, most confident, emotionally open-hearted and skillful film Apatow has ever made, hands down. I was feeling the chills plus a wonderful sense of comfort and assurance less than five minutes in. Wow, this is good…no, it’s better…God, what a relief…no moaning or leaning forward or covering my face with my hands…pleasure cruise.

I went to the Arclight hoping and praying that Trainwreck would at least be good enough so I could write “hey, Schumer’s not bad and the film is relatively decent.” Well, it’s much better than that, and Schumer’s performance is not only a revelation but an instant, locked-in Best Actress contender. I’m dead serious, and if the other know-it-alls don’t wake up to this they’re going to be strenuously argued with. Don’t even start in with the tiresome refrain of “oh, comedic performances never merit award-season attention.” Shut up. Great performances demand respect, applause and serious salutes…period.

I still think Schumer is a 7.5 or an 8 but it doesn’t matter because (and I know how ludicrous this is going to sound given my history) I fell in love in a sense — I saw past or through all that and the crap that’s still floating around even now. For it became more and more clear as I watched that Schumer’s personality and performance constitute a kind of cultural breakthrough — no actress has ever delivered this kind of attitude and energy before in a well-written, emotionally affecting comedy, and I really don’t see how anyone can argue that Schumer isn’t in the derby at this point. (A columnist friend doesn’t agree but said that Schumer’s Trainwreck screenplay is a surefire contender for Best Original Screenplay.)

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Billy Ray‘s Secrets In Their Eyes (STX, 10.23) is a remake of El secreto de sus ojos, a 2009 Argentine crime thriller film directed, produced and edited by Juan José Campanella. Pic was written by Eduardo Sacheri and Campanella, based on Sacheri’s novel La pregunta de sus ojos (The Question in Their Eyes). Roberts has bravely and respectably made no attempt to glam herself up — at 47 she’s the new Helen Mirren, and that’s cool.

A few days go Skydance honchos David Ellison and Dana Goldberg told Collider‘s Matt Goldberg that Tom Cruise will return as fucking Maverick in Top Gun 2: Danger Zone. Pic will apparently be some kind of fare-thee-well, classic-values tribute to ace fighter pilots along with an uh-oh thread about the growing dominance of killer drones, at least as far as killing Islamic fundies is concerned. Cruise will turn 53 next month, and will be 54 or 55 when the filming begins, when and if. Obviously no change in the basic plan. Cruise is committed to being the big-budget, action-flick energizer bunny until he can no longer keep it up. How much more dough does he need? What does he want that he can’t already afford? “The future, Mr. Gittes…the future.”

Oliver Stone was a directing-writing god from the mid ’80s to late ’90s (Platoon, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Nixon, Any Given Sunday) but he became and in-and-outer when the 21st Century rolled around. Documentary-wise he’s been on a brilliant roll (Comandante, Looking for Fidel, Persona Non Grata, South of the Border, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States) but his features…well, let’s just say that while Alexander was a highly respectable if somewhat laborious epic and W. was a ballsy, above-average biopic with a legendary Josh Brolin performance, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps and Savages felt insincere, slap-dashy and over-emphasized. I’d love it if Snowden (Open Road, 12.25) brings back some of that old Stone transcendence. I understand the concept of a slow reveal and the teaser focusing only on Old Glory and the slogan (“One Nation, Under Surveillance,” etc.) but I figured I’d be offered a taste of Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s performance as Edward Snowden…nope. (Note: This morning Snowden‘s Wiki page incorrectly named Warner Bros. as the U.S. distributor — it’s definitely Open Road.)

Shari-Springer Berman and Robert Pucini‘s Ten Thousand Saints, a coming-of-age drama set in late ’80s Manhattan, is another Sundance film I missed last January. It has a 67% Rotten Tomatoes rating, which suggests an issue or two. JoBlo’s Chris Bumbray: “While the fact that Ethan Hawke [plays] an absentee father will likely draw comparisons to Boyhood, in reality this is more like a John Hughes movie than anything else, right down to the finely curated ’80s soundtrack and frequent lapses into heavy melodrama. The latter is not a criticism — I happen to like melodrama.”

Bumbray says it’s “set in Alphabet City right on the cusp of its gentrification”…bullshit. No way was Alphabet City about to be gentrified in 1987, which is the year that Eleanor Henderson’s book takes place. I roamed around Alphabet City a lot during the ’90s and even then it didn’t seem to be gentrifying very much. Maybe a tiny bit. When did the neighborhood really start to go bucks up? Try the early aughts. And it wasn’t really, really gentrified until 2010 or thereabouts. The ’80s were a fairly scuzzy time in Alphabet City. I used to scrape the scuzz off the soles of my boots so don’t tell me.

Earlier this month I asked a rhetorical question about the James Bond franchise. What would we lose as a community or a culture if a final, irrevocable pledge was made by producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli to never make another 007 film again, to just walk away and leave it forever? Allow me to ask the same question about the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. Suppose that director James Gunn and star Chris Pratt and all the producers suddenly said, “We don’t really need the money, and the audience doesn’t need another Guardians movie…admit it. The first Guardians was fine. Where is it written that we’re obliged to fuck things up with a sequel? Even if we made a half-decent film, who would really care at the end of the day? The crowd would pay to see it, eat their popcorn, have a good time, quietly fart a few times in their seats and go home. Can we be honest? We don’t have a single half-decent idea for the sequel yet. Not one. But we’re making it anyway because we all want second homes.”

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The other day a friend mentioned a pending high-school reunion. Okay, fine, I wanted to say, but if you were fundamentally unhappy and occasionally miserable in high school (as many of us were, and as I definitely was), you’ll need to stash that history in your locker and keep it there until the reunion is over.

Reunions tend to remind a lot of us what a regimented environment and cultural concentration camp high school was. Most of us only realize this after we’ve found our footing as adults. I was lost but now I’m free, or certainly a lot freer.

My high-school years didn’t feel “miserable” in an unmistakable, lemme-outta-here sense; the unhappiness I lived with seeped into my system in a hundred subtle ways. I wasn’t anti-social but I didn’t party and run around all that much until my senior year, and once that phase kicked in I became a madman. The truth is that on a certain level I was a kind of functioning alcoholic (no serious behavioral problems but a few serpents under the surface) from my late teens until I quit the hard stuff in the mid ’90s. The real healing didn’t begin until I went sober three years ago, or so I tell myself.

Before I socially flowered I watched a shitload of TV and listened to a lot of music and lived in my head. I was a secret genius who could potentially be persuaded to join the crowd, but no one ever asked. I know that my father’s alcoholism felt and smelled like mustard gas in our home, especially during dinner hour, and that my self-esteem was in the basement. I mostly felt apart, diminished and unworthy when it came to women. In school I didn’t do sports or join clubs or do anything extra-curricular except for detention.

My life didn’t really kick into gear until my mid 20s when the journalism started, and even that was agony until I became a half-decent writer and had learned the ropes and gotten to know people, etc.

Everyone has a look of excitement and anticipation in their eye after they’ve graduated high school and are about to start college. The great adventure! When I attended my 25th celebration most of my ex-classmates had either surrendered that gleam or put it into a bureau drawer somewhere. To me they looked sedate, staid, settled. All except for a small fraternity, which I estimated to be maybe 5% of the crowd. X-factor types with a semblance of life in their veins. Looking for action, adventure, the next discovery.

Sinclair Lewis said the following to his high-school class at a reunion in the ’20s: “When we were young most of you didn’t give a shit about me, and now that we’re older I don’t give a shit about you.”

That’s obviously not a very nice thing to say. While I would never go there, I understand the urge.