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The Gunman

Opens Fri., March 20 at Sundance and other theaters. Rated R. 115 minutes.

Well, someone’s been hitting the gym. Since Liam Neeson announced his looming retirement from AARP action movies, Sean Penn and his bulging, hairless pecs are well prepared to work with Taken maestro Pierre Morel. Together they’ve updated a 1981 French novel to our present age of African strife: mercenaries and aid workers mixing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, conflict minerals, covert assassinations, and—after an eight-year surfing safari from that dirty game—a U.S. congressional subpoena that pulls shirtless Jim Terrier (Penn) back in. You know the rest: Jim’s mad killing skills are wrenched back into service; the baddies nab the only woman he ever loved (no, not Madonna); and we hear weary professions of disgust at the whole sordid business (mercenary-dom, not movies). Though The Gunman does offer one genre twist: Jim’s a TBI concussion case, brain-addled almost to the point of Still Alice, who must write everything down in notebooks.

As ever, Penn is the grim, humorless professional, squinting out each line like a kidney stone. What elevates The Gunman slightly above the median Taken are the supporting players. (Neeson never has any beyond Albanian Gangster 1, 2, and 3.) There’s a bit of pleasure in watching Javier Bardem, Ray Winstone, and Mark Rylance tick off scenes before their characters’ inevitable demise. I will bet you they had a backstage bet as to who could do the least amount of acting for the biggest paycheck. (Winstone wins; though Bardem is the most giggly fun, his performance wobbling like a teacup in a cracked saucer.)

Action doesn’t fully erupt until minute 60, and Morel is competent enough in that department. (The script, however, sounds like it was run through the beta version of Google Translate.) Through London, Barcelona, and Gibraltar, Penn serviceably kills dozens of flak-jacketed rejects from the Bourne movies’ Operation Treadstone. Here one must note that Matt Damon is leaving such muscular super-agent roles behind. But Penn is a proudly fit-looking 54, his Milk and Mystic River Oscars on the mantle and fellow Oscar winner Charlize Theron on his arm. There’s no reason to begrudge him a simple money role, though The Gunman won’t make much coin. To sop Penn’s conscience, and Jim’s (“I did some bad things!”), there are many scenes of noble NGO workers helping cheerful Africans—which to the pure-action demo will feel like unwanted moral prodding. (Bro, isn’t it enough that I buy sustainably grown coffee beans?)

The Cialis-revenge genre isn’t built around such fine ethical sentiments. If Penn wants to do more of these movies, Jim and his g.f. need to adopt an adorable African orphan ASAP! Because there’s an evil gang of Albanian kidnappers Morel would like to introduce to them very soon. Brian Miller

PAn Honest Liar

Runs Fri., March 20–Thurs., March 26 
at Northwest Film Forum. 
Not rated. 90 minutes.

For people of a certain age, these names may act as a time machine back to the 1970s: The Amazing Randi, Uri Geller, Peter Popoff. All come tumbling back to life in An Honest Liar, an unexpectedly fun (but sneakily forceful) portrait of a rationalist.

That’s not the way James Randi would have been described when he started out. He was a magician—the Amazing Randi, a modern Houdini with a slightly ’50s beatnik vibe—who transformed himself into a full-time debunker of spiritualists, faith healers, and other charlatans. This documentary’s got a clever through-line about deception as regards Randi’s private life and his longtime partner, artist Jose Alvarez. But its main appeal is in demonstrating how skepticism and reason can be rewarding philosophies for passing through life. Randi seems to have taken great joy in exposing flim-flam artists, but there’s a mission there, too, in showing how dangerous it is for individuals, and cultures, to cling to fraudulence. Directors Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein concentrate on two of Randi’s favorite targets to illustrate his methods. One is Geller, the Israeli mentalist whose great heyday involved bending spoons “with his mind” and other feats of misdirection. We see a choice clip from The

Tonight Show as Geller fails to execute an ESP gag—unbeknownst to him, Johnny Carson’s staff had earlier consulted with Randi to safeguard the set against Geller’s routine.

And then there’s the Reverend Peter Popoff, whose shtick consisted of divining the names and addresses of his believers, thus priming them for the faith-healing part of his act. (He also encouraged followers to throw away their prescription medicine, making him a precursor of the anti-vaccination movement.) Randi went public after an investigation (again Carson acts as the benign enabler of Randi’s work) to reveal how Popoff’s wife was feeding him information through an earpiece. The only shadow across the delightful film is that Geller and Popoff are thriving again, along with more current purveyors of magical thinking and science denial. This must be the cause of much forehead-smacking in Randi’s life, but he soldiers on against human nature’s need to believe. All this, and Randi’s puckish, bouncy bearing (he’s 86), make a nice argument that a life of skepticism need not translate into wet-blanketry. Robert Horton

PIt Follows

Opens Fri., March 20 at SIFF Cinema Egyptian and Lincoln Square. 
Rated R. 100 minutes.

One measure of a good horror movie is not how often you jump when the monster bangs out from behind a door, but how often you find yourself nervously peering at dark corners of the screen. It takes only a few minutes of John Carpenter’s Halloween or Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse to make you dread what might be lurking in every unlighted nook or out-of-focus background. It’s been a while since a movie made me feel that way, but David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows creates that kind of constant anxiety. Even the startling opening shot—a 360-degree pan around a normal suburban street, no monsters in sight—instills the idea that something might be there, threatening, even if we can’t see it at the moment.

The premise itself is simple, if faintly absurd. A teenager, Jay (Maika Monroe, excellent in The Guest), sleeps with her handsome new crush; he then informs her that she is now the target of a relentless, shape-shifting ghoul, which will pursue her to death. Her only escape is to have sex with someone else, who will then become the target. A few wrinkles provide extra horror: Nobody else can see the approaching monster, which could look like a normal person, even someone you know. Also, these things move slowly, and they never stop. A slow-moving monster is more chilling than it might sound, but then most of our demons—the psychological kind, anyway—are slow but steady.

Still a young filmmaker, the Michigan-bred Mitchell (this film and his previous The

Myth of the American Sleepover were shot around Detroit) is already canny about using the camera to evoke mystery. Every time someone drifts into the background of a shot, we have to wonder: Is that just a random passerby, or is that, you know, “It”? There’s also a wild musical score by Disasterpeace that provides an aggressive—at times maybe too aggressive—accompaniment to the film’s eerie mood. If the use of teen sex as a horror convention seems tired, rest assured that Mitchell seems less interested in a morality play than in sketching the in-between world of suburban adolescence—the way Jay and nerd-friend Paul (Keir Gilchrist) recall a childhood kiss, or the oddly sad presence of a portable swimming pool in the backyard. It’s also an inspired touch that although Jay’s friends share a warm, tribal bond, there are virtually no parents around (although a couple of instances of parental manifestation are horrifying). Parents have little place in the hothouse world of teenage melodrama—supernatural or otherwise. Robert Horton

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

Opens Fri., March 20 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Not rated. 105 minutes.

The setup here might promise routine road comedy: A sad and lonely Japanese woman, who somehow believes the 1996 Coen brothers movie Fargo is a documentary, ventures from Japan to the frozen Midwest to find the cash Steve Buscemi buried in the featureless snow. So—a comic series of cultural misunderstandings ending with vindication for the determined Kumiko? Just the opposite, and indie filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner have no interest in obvious gags. Half their movie is scene-setting in Tokyo, where dejected Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) is considered an old maid (at 29) by her office mates. Her mother exists only as a nagging voice on the phone. Her only friend is a pet rabbit. And her Eleanor Rigby-like solitude is given purpose only by the magical discovery of a Fargo VHS tape that she obsessively studies, making notes and tracing diagrams, for what she hopes will be a triumphant adventure. (Later we’ll have cause to doubt the origin of that tape and to question Kumiko’s grasp of reality.)

Oscar-nominated for her bare-all performance in 2006’s Babel, Kikuchi turns her soul to lead for this role. Kumiko can barely make eye contact or sustain a conversation (she speaks limited English). More than shyness or defeat, an ever-widening distance separates her from the world beyond her imagination. Kindly strangers, including a widowed Minnesota farm wife and a sympathetic cop (David Zellner), barely register. The lights go on only when Kumiko is planning her quest. Kikuchi gives her an Asperger’s-like focus and detachment, another reason this isn’t comedy. (Fargo had far more laughs and humanity—for better and worse.)

Unseen in Seattle, the Zellners’ prior two features, Kid-Thing and Goliath, also dealt with alienated loners. Kumiko can likewise be seen as a character study; though, like her supposed treasure, it’s not certain if that character actually exists. A stubborn obstinacy lies at Kumiko’s core, but also delusion (and possibly mental illness). With its careful widescreen framing and often-unsettling score (by The Octopus Project), Kumiko sometimes put me in mind of Kubrick. It’s a very composed and controlled picture, with a heroine who believes she’s on the cusp of something transformative, even cosmic. The ending achieves a kind of 2001-like apotheosis that leaves you wondering if Kumiko ever truly belonged on this planet. Brian Miller

PSeymour: An Introduction

Opens Fri., March 20 at GUild 45th. 
Rated PG. 81 minutes.

Right from the first scene, in which pianist Seymour Bernstein talks his way through his thought process for fingering a passage in a Scarlatti sonata, it’s gratifyingly clear that Ethan Hawke’s documentary portrait isn’t going to be afraid to dig seriously into music. Hawke’s own search for artistic purpose (why acting?) led him to examine the life of the pianist, a casual acquaintance who became a role model for a life devoted to art, not to the trappings of art.

“I’m not so sure that a major career is a healthy thing to embark on,” says the 88-year-old Bernstein, who, despite acclaim, retired from public performance at age 50 thanks to stage fright and a disdain for the showbiz side of the classical-music world. The concertgoer’s loss was the aspiring pianist’s gain; from the onscreen evidence here, scenes with private pupils and master classes, he’s a fantastic teacher—able to convey, graciously and encouragingly, just how details of technique (tiny dynamic nuances, articulations, weighting and voicing chords) build emotional arcs.

All in all, Bernstein is terrific company—a captivating raconteur (wait until he starts talking about his time in the army in Korea, playing recitals for soldiers on the front) and a fount of aphorisms (“Every piano is like a person. They build them the same way; they never come out the same way”). There’s plenty of music, from Bach through Rachmaninoff, in generous chunks, and you have to admire Hawke’s patience (courage, even) just to stand back, point his camera, and let the man play. Gavin Borchert

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