The tragic death of novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace has brought to my attention this video of the 1996 interview on Charlie Rose. He mostly talked, with bright insights and a clear passion, about movies, and his non-interview with David Lynch.

But on minute 16 of the video below he fleetingly mentions “Up Close and Personal”, the teaming of Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer in a movie directed by then-producer-turned-director Jon Avnet. “It’s so bad it doesn’t even have charm. Some films are bad but you can still enjoy them, this was worst than that”, he said of the movie, based on a notoriously botched script. Flash forward 12 years: on Friday, the day of Wallace’s suicide, a new Jon Avnet was released in theaters. Amazingly this consistently bad director still gets work. This time he again fuses two legends into one movie - Al Pacino and Robert De Niro - and again brings out the worst in them in a movie stuck in limbo, bad enough to be dismissed, not bad enough to even become awful. Wallace’s words ring true. He’s gone, Avnet prevails. Sad.