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Hit Man ***1/2 [Spotlight]
Richard Linklater has spent more than 30 years being so good at making risk-taking indie cinema that it’s easy to forget how great he can also be at pure pop entertainment. Wildly fictionalized from the story of a real person, it follows Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), a philosophy professor who moonlights as an audio technician for New Orleans Police Department sting operations—until he’s called into undercover duty himself to pose as a contract killer, trying to nab those attempting to "hire" him. The job gives the mild-mannered Gary an opportunity to dig into alternate facets of his personality, and Powell has an absolute blast playing the different variations on an assassin-for-hire he concocts for his would-be clients (including one that feels like he's doing Tilda Swinton). Things go a bit sideways when he gets personally involved in the case of a woman (Adria Arjona) trying to get rid of her emotionally abusive boyfriend, and the two leads have such a great chemistry that it’s easy to forget how improbable it seems that Gary so effortlessly leaves behind his Clark Kent persona (complete with glasses) to become a badass Superman. And that’s really the bottom line for how effective Linklater and Powell (who co-wrote the screenplay) are at making this an effervescent blast to watch, no matter how convoluted the completely manufactured portions of the plot get. Sometimes, you just want to watch a filmmaking team commit completely to a crazy premise—and like Linklater did with Jack Black in
School of Rock, find the perfect delivery system for a star’s charisma.
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Sasquatch Sunset *** [Premieres]
David and Nathan Zellner have played around in plenty of genres over the years, often swinging between sneaky emotion, sly social messaging and deadpan humor, and this high-concept dramedy allows them to play around with all of the above and then some. It follows a year in the life of a troop of four sasquatches (Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christophe Zajac-Denek and Nathan Zellner) as they make their way through their Pacific Northwest habitat, foraging for food and dealing with various existential threats, both natural and man-made. It would be easy to get hung up on the bodily-function humor in the dialogue-free script, as our protagonists pee, poop, vomit, lactate, sniff themselves and wave their sasquatch penises about. And while it’s true that a little of that can go a long way,
Sasquatch Sunset also gives the performers the opportunity for evocative pantomimed performances. Most significantly, it’s a surprisingly effective story of an endangered species dealing with loneliness, as we watch the sasquatches attempt to make contact with any others of their kind who might still be around, and the young sasquatch resorts to playing with an imaginary friend consisting of his talking hand, Señor Wences-style. The Zellners do solid work at making it clear that these creatures have a culture and an intelligence, facing the intrusion of human culture with a mix of awe at things like music (specifically Erasure’s “Love to Hate You”) and terror where the only answer they can think of is peeing on it to try to re-claim the territory.
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Eternal You *** [World Documentary]
On a certain level, once you know the premise of Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s documentary, you could probably predict exactly where it’s going to go—but that doesn’t mean some of the details aren’t likely to stick with you. The filmmakers dive into the way generative AI is being used as a way to “re-create” the dead, in ways that allow their loved ones to interact with their digital shadows virtually: via text exchanges, listening to voice simulations, chatting with VR avatars, etc. Naturally, there are plenty of talking heads on hand to explain the perils of this technology, both in stunting the grieving process, and in creating a capitalist incentive for manipulative behavior. It’s yet another exploration of Ian Malcolm’s infamous
Jurassic Park line about “if we could” vs. “if we should” where tech ethics are concerned, but it’s still occasionally riveting watching the specifics of these new technologies play out. There are rueful chuckles aplenty in the juxtaposition of one entrepreneur’s insistence that his work is about “the thing that matters most, which is relationships” shortly after he explains that he chose his company over his marriage. And you can’t not be horrified when one user of a chat-based program flips out after the AI version of her dead partner asserts that he’s “in hell.” While it’s possible that a better film might result from a focus on one specific version of this phenomenon, rather than a broad overview, what we do get is still provocative at asking what we really want when we want those who have died to remain with us.
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Handling the Undead ** [World Dramatic]
There’s such a rich vein of subtext to tap into by turning a zombie movie into a meditation on grief and acceptance, but this frustrating adaptation of a novel John Ajvide Lindqvist—co-written by the novelist and director Thea Hvistendahl—keeps wandering ever so deliberately on the surface. Three individual narratives explore the consequences after a mysterious electrical phenomenon in Oslo results in the recently-deceased coming back to life: Anna (Renate Reinsve) is reunited with her young son; comedian David (Anders Danielsen Lie) wrestles with uncertainty regarding the condition of his wife; and an older woman (Bente Børsum) finds that her dead long-time partner has returned home. Hvistendahl takes her sweet time setting up the premise, with lingering tracking shots and ominous music setting a tone long before the first corpse has re-drawn a breath. But the problem isn’t so much the pacing as the lack of any real insight to hold interest between the few real shocking moments, and how ridiculously long it takes our protagonists to grasp that, whatever it is that has come back from the other side, it ain’t their loved ones. Even if the point is the irrational degree to which folks might cling to the hope that the impossible has become possible, it’s simply too abstracted here to link to a genuine human emotion. You can grant a movie its wild premise, and still expect that something interesting can be done with it.
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Love Machina **1/2 [U.S. Documentary]
I’m not sure whether there would be an easy way to make
Love Machina either more clearly about its primary human subjects, or about the social/ethical questions raised by one of their most significant projects; it just feels at times like director Peter Sillen needed to pick a lane. He explores the world of Martine and Bina Rothblatt, futurists whose “Terasem” project is devoted to the idea of extending human consciousness indefinitely, including creating a robotic AI duplicate of Bina named “Bina48” from interviews and other “mindfile” data. They both emphasize how this particular project emerged from their desire to be together for eternity, and Sillen does provide a foundation for their unique personal relationship, as well as Martine’s fascinating history as a forward-thinking entrepreneur (founder of Sirius satellite radio) and advocate for fluid gender concepts as a trans woman. But eventually there are issues to explore involving the personhood of Bina48, as well as questions raised by artist/scholar Stephanie Dinkins about what it means when a robot presenting as a Black woman is programmed almost exclusively by white men. We also get detours into Martine’s pioneering work in artificial organs and a visit to a cryonics facility, which extends the question of where reasonable lines can be drawn in terms of prolonging life. It’s all potentially interesting stuff, but also becomes a bit of a distraction when, every time the focus returns to Martine and Bina, that there’s more than enough material in their own lives to make for a documentary.