“The End of the Tour” is the exact kind of movie that people like to claim never get made anymore. Folks like to complain about superhero movies and blockbusters and spectacles and studios cranking out product instead of art, and the best is when they insist that nothing original gets made, oh woe is us, why can’t we get movies made for adults anymore, just people talking about ideas and the inherent drama that comes from different people coming together, why oh why can’t we get more movies like this? And then this movie comes along, and everyone is like “The End of the what? David Foster who? What Stone magazine? Just pass the Cheetos, will ya?” People, please, put down the fucking snack foods, shut off the reality television, get in your shitty car and go to the nearest theater showing “The End of the Tour” and do your part to support solid, well made, adult-minded entertainment.

Funny enough, “The End of the Tour” even goes a little into “good seductive entertainment,” the type of movies that DO involve action and spectacle and aren’t meant to change the world or even the way you look at the world (“Die Hard” gets specifically name dropped as an example) and this gets compared to eating candy and junk food and drinking soda, which is indeed pleasurable albeit not nutritious. We can consume this kind of middle of the road, for-entertainment-only type of movie (and television and music and literature and so on) but we can’t make it the basis of our diets, we can’t subsist on this alone and expect any sort of personal growth; on the contrary, we can only expect to die a very real death in a very meaningful way, which is how this movie describes what happens to a person when their primary sexual relationship is with their own hand and images on a computer screen as opposed to with an actual person. It all ties together in a way that asks basically what is this life all about and how can we all navigate this thing in the best way possible.Continue Reading …