Uh-oh. Another of those kinds of movie that I like but I bet most people didn’t: the entire film is a group of people having a conversation. It takes place almost entirely in one room. A college professor, reluctantly attending his own going-away party before moving on to his next job, confesses to a group of colleagues that he is immortal and has lived for 14,000. Cue 90 minutes of cerebral and, to me, well-done and interesting conversation among academic types of varying degrees of skepticism (and one unfortunate cliched religious zealot, my sole gripe with the film, only because, as here, they’re all too often a cheap way of perfunctorily adding conflict), exploring all the different angles of this. For a completely unrealistic premise, I think the conversation, and the main character’s takes on things, are very realistic and well thought-out along the lines of what an actual, realistic human who may or may not actually have lived for 14,000 years might think and say. I liked it, I wouldn’t say it’s a great movie but it’s unique, memorable, and it treats the audience with respect, which I think are the next-best things for a movie to be. Curious to see if everybody else hated it. (Hey, hey! 7.8 on IMDB, 85% Rotten Tomatoes audience score, and 100% critic concensus on the Tomatometer. Sometimes my fellow fantastic cinema buffs pleasantly surprise me.)
