The ‘School of Rock’ and ‘Boyhood’ director talks to Patrick Smith about the fascination behind his Netflix movie ‘Hit Man’, sexy films, the ‘reduction of the male’ and why ‘Dazed and Confused’ wouldn’t get made now
Linklater, today all in black, his hair long and greying, is fascinated by our obsession with hired killers, and the way they spill over from the big screen and the pages of crime fiction into real life.
Loosely based on a 2001 true-crime article in Texas Monthly, it stars Glen Powell as Gary Johnson, a nebbishy college professor who has a side hustle with the local police department, setting up stings by posing as different hit men.
After all, this is a man who first came to attention in 1990 for the quiet, Generation X existentialism of Slacker, before leaving an indelible mark with his ambling paean to Seventies high school in Dazed and Confused (1993); alienation, meanwhile, pervades his 2001 animation Waking Life.
But slowly, fastidiously, Hit Man reveals unforeseen depths: by finding profundity in the everyday, it unites much of what we’ve come to expect from Linklater’s output.
Easily Linklater’s best work in a decade, it’s confident and stylish, with noirish shades of Double Indemnity and a classic Hollywood leading-man performance from a never-better Powell, who also co-wrote the screenplay.
Back when he was coming of age, an injury put paid to his college baseball career and led to him working on an oil rig, before he made his 1988 film debut, the existential tone-poem of a movie It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books.
The original article contains 1,836 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Linklater, today all in black, his hair long and greying, is fascinated by our obsession with hired killers, and the way they spill over from the big screen and the pages of crime fiction into real life.
Loosely based on a 2001 true-crime article in Texas Monthly, it stars Glen Powell as Gary Johnson, a nebbishy college professor who has a side hustle with the local police department, setting up stings by posing as different hit men.
After all, this is a man who first came to attention in 1990 for the quiet, Generation X existentialism of Slacker, before leaving an indelible mark with his ambling paean to Seventies high school in Dazed and Confused (1993); alienation, meanwhile, pervades his 2001 animation Waking Life.
But slowly, fastidiously, Hit Man reveals unforeseen depths: by finding profundity in the everyday, it unites much of what we’ve come to expect from Linklater’s output.
Easily Linklater’s best work in a decade, it’s confident and stylish, with noirish shades of Double Indemnity and a classic Hollywood leading-man performance from a never-better Powell, who also co-wrote the screenplay.
Back when he was coming of age, an injury put paid to his college baseball career and led to him working on an oil rig, before he made his 1988 film debut, the existential tone-poem of a movie It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books.
The original article contains 1,836 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!