Cool Story, Bro

 

THEY CALLED HIM MOSTLY HARMLESS (C+) - This HBO Max true-crime documentary might have made a pretty good 20-minute story on "60 Minutes" or "Dateline NBC." But padded out to more than an hour and a half, it becomes the tedious story of the crowd-sourced hunt for a mysterious hiker found dead on the Appalachian Trail back in 2018.

The most annoying aspect is the repetitive arty B-roll shots, mostly re-creations of internet nerds typing on their keyboards with their chubby fingers, or of overhead drone shots looking down past the tops of trees to hikers retracing steps from years ago. The film also takes needless detours. At one point, the group is convinced that a cancer-sufferer's blog from that time is that of the missing hiker, known to most as Mostly Harmless. But that wasn't him; the cancer guy is still very much alive and totally someone else. Why bother with such distractions?

The filmmakers drag out the mystery to an interminable degree. I was ready to either bail out or fast forward to the end, but I was patient. I had a strong hunch that the reveal would be anti-climactic. (The most logical theories posited at the beginning of the documentary are either that Mostly Harmless was ill or was on the run from the law.) I was not rewarded for my generous devotion of precious time.

THE END OF THE TOUR (C) - Boring doesn't begin to describe this two-man acting exercise between miscast and mismatched actors reliving the time back in the 1990s when a Rolling Stone reporter spent days with author David Foster Wallace during the initial craze over Wallace's notorious novel "Infinite Jest."

Two talented actors are miscast and wildly mismatched. Jason Segel has stoner eyes and the patented bandanna to replicate Wallace's look, and he interprets the author as a mild-mannered, almost Jesus-like broken soul. Jesse Eisenberg plays dress-up as the nerdy reporter. Emo director James Ponsoldt ("The Spectacular Now") thought it would be a good idea to have Eisenberg chain-smoke and snack throughout the movie, someone's idea of humanizing him as a regular working joe, perhaps. I'd bet a crisp 20-dollar bill that Eisenberg has never been a regular smoker in his life. The attempt at millennial Method acting is quite distracting. The two actors occasionally look almost surprised to realize they're actually in the same movie together.

Put these two misguided duds together and watch them drone on about nothing interesting for an hour and 45 minutes. We know from the beginning of the movie that Wallace has gone on to take his own life, and the script (from two writers with scant resumes) renders this entirely in melancholy flashback. The tone is off right from the start, and it never gets interesting.

BONUS TRACK

"The End of the Tour" is the only film in the past 11 years that I previously watched but didn't review. It was a simple oversight. My partner rented it this time, and after 20 minutes I half-watched it, and I remembered why it had such little impact on me. And, for the record, I once made it about 150 pages into Wallace's tome, "Infinite Jest." Probably about average among all human attempts.