Lifestyle
As a fake 'Hit Man,' Glen Powell shows off his real star power
Glen Powell finds a star-making turn as Gary Johnson/”Ron” in Hit Man.
Matt Lankes/Netflix
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Matt Lankes/Netflix
It seems the film industry’s reputation is in a perpetual state of lament. They don’t make them like they used to can be and often is applied to movie stars, special effects, non-franchise screenplays, erotic thrillers, rom-coms.
There’s validity to these concerns, though every now and then a new movie comes along with a strong whiff of throwback energy – deliberate yet breezy pacing, crackling banter that’s at once contemporary and timeless, and a performance that convinces you a star’s been born right here in this moment on screen. And with it comes the warm reminder that they still can make them like they used to, and sometimes still do. Richard Linklater’s sexy, nihilistic comedy Hit Man is one of those movies.
Glen Powell is Gary Johnson, a conventionally attractive yet aggressively plain psych and philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans. He’s the type of unassuming jean shorts-wearing guy who blends easily into the background and is perfectly content being boring; he lives alone in the suburbs with two cats named Ego and Id, drives a Honda Civic, and appears to have no social life to speak of.
His sole quirk, if we’re going to call it that, is that he moonlights with the New Orleans Police Department, and as the movie begins, that part-time gig suddenly kicks into overdrive. When dirtbag undercover detective Jasper (Austin Amelio) is suspended for a police brutality case, Gary replaces him as the department’s go-to fake hit man, meeting with – and arresting – all varieties of disgruntled recruiters as “Ron.” It turns out Gary relishes convincing unsuspecting strangers he’s a cold-blooded assassin. He researches his would-be “clients” to tailor his persona to their hit man fantasies, using an array of elaborate costumes, wigs, and fake makeup. For one suspect, he eerily resembles Patrick Bateman.
Hit Man sounds wacky in premise, but it’s loosely based on a Texas Monthly profile of a real Gary Johnson, who worked on-call for the Houston Police Department and was dubbed the “Laurence Olivier” of undercover murder-for-hire investigations. Linklater and Powell, who co-wrote the screenplay, take the bones of Johnson’s story and embellish it for cinematic effect, slipping from a slick, lightly comical procedural in the first act to an erotic cat-and-mouse game by the film’s climax. Like the private detective archetype in film noir, Gary is eventually hired by a gorgeous young woman, except in this case, she’s looking to off her controlling husband. Maddy (Adria Arjona) is, of course, pouty and flirty and femme fatale-y, and gets him entangled in quite a compromising pickle.
Adria Arjona as Madison and Glen Powell as Gary Johnson in Hit Man.
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Brian Roedel/Netflix
The story stays grounded by avoiding a few present-day pop culture clichés – thankfully there are no obvious needle-drops here – and the clear, electric chemistry between Powell and Arjona, whose dynamic evokes Jack and Karen’s frenetic dalliance in Out of Sight.
But above all, this is Powell’s movie. It’s almost too easy to draw direct parallels between him and Gary, but sometimes the most obvious thing is also the most correct. The actor’s been kicking around Hollywood for some time now, more recently playing an antagonist in Top Gun: Maverick and whipping gossip blogs into a frenzy with his Anyone But You co-star Sydney Sweeney. Yet like Gary the professor, he’s been more of a side salad than an entrée, inoffensive and fine, not exactly memorable. Ron the fake-contract-killer affords Gary the chance to tap into a part of himself that’s far more fascinating, and Powell plays this uber-confident side to the hilt. When Ron utters a corny catchphrase about pie with a straight face or goes off on a smooth tangent in great detail about how he’ll “dispose” of a body, Glen Powell, capital-M Movie Star suddenly makes sense as a concept.
Hit Man’s final act is the kind you either go with or get frustrated by. It’s a big swing that tests the limits of suspending disbelief. But the movie’s driving theme reflects curiosity about the human capacity for change and self-creation, a struggle to decipher where the “real” essence of you begins and/or ends. In Gary, Linklater and Powell find a character who cleverly demonstrates how anyone, especially a movie actor, can mold the persona they wish to have – with the right tools.
Sunday Puzzle
NPR
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NPR
On-air challenge
Today’s theme is “hot.” Every answer is a familiar two-word phrase in which the first word starts HO- and the second word starts with T-.
Ex. Rowdy bar with country music, in slang –> HONKY TONK
1. Guided walkthrough of a property
2. Any member of the N.H.L.
3. Lone Star State metropolis that’s the fourth-largest city in the U.S.
4. Like an animal with its four legs bound (hyph.)
5. Instruction manual (hyph.)
6. A little pompous and arrogant, informally (hyph.)
7. Punny greeting from a magician
8. Someone who steals animals from a stable
9. Congestion that drivers encounter around July 4th, say
10. Acquisition of a company against its will.
11. Exclamation for “wow!” on TV’s “Batman”
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Evan Kalish, of Bayside, N.Y. Take the name of a nocturnal creature, in two words. The first word is a spooky sound. Move the last letter of the first word to the start of the second word and you’ll get another spooky, nocturnal sound. What is the creature and what are the sounds?
Answer: Screech owl –> howl
Winner
Dan Sadoff of St. Paul, Minnesota
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 2 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
If you’re struggling to use up leftovers like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, turn the assignment into a creative exercise, says chef Margaret Li. It’ll make the cooking process more fun and less guilt-driven.
Pulse/Getty Images/Corbis RF Stills
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Pulse/Getty Images/Corbis RF Stills
On a recent weeknight, I opened up my fridge and found an assortment of half-eaten or ignored food.
That included takeout that I didn’t find appetizing enough to eat for lunch. A rotisserie chicken with most of the meat picked off. A couple of raw vegetables from the farmers market that were starting to wilt.
“There’s nothing to eat,” I told myself. Yet even I knew that was ridiculous. There was plenty of food in my fridge. I just didn’t feel inspired to cook with it.
So I asked some chefs for guidance. How could I more consistently use leftovers and the other ingredients I tend to overlook?
Start with a mindset shift, says Margaret Li, chef and co-author of the cookbook Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Think about cooking with leftovers as a creative, experimental exercise, not a guilt-driven one.
“It ends up being this fun game where you are creating something from what seems like nothing and solving this puzzle, and then you get to eat it,” she says.
There are other good reasons to use up your food scraps. Nationally, about a quarter of food products go to waste, according to the nonprofit ReFED. In my own household, where we spend about $200 a week on groceries, that means I might be throwing out the equivalent of $50 of food — an unnecessary burden on my wallet, not to mention the environment.
The chefs I spoke to had some practical tips about using up more of the food we buy. Here are a few that I put to the test.
Find your “hero recipes”
Build up an arsenal of go-to recipes that are flexible enough to use up just about any ingredient. Li calls them “hero recipes.”
I tried one of these from her cookbook, called “Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry.” (Scroll down for the recipe.) It includes loose ingredients like “1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables” or “4 cups leafy greens.”
In the spirit of the recipe, I pulled vegetables out of my fridge at random and did not measure them out. The sauce was a simple mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and water. By the time I topped my bowl with chopped scallions, the dish looked like a gourmet meal, not an afterthought.
Other ideas: “You could put anything in a frittata, and it’ll be great,” says Tamar Adler, chef and author of The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z.
Or, if you have day-old rice on hand, cook it alongside other ingredients to make fried rice. “Saute some aromatics — ginger, garlic, onion — in oil,” Adler says. Then add your rice and whatever leftover bits you have, like the rotisserie chicken and older produce I had in my fridge.
“Just take the approach of making it more flavorful and crispy and then spicy, and then usually adding a squeeze of lemon,” Adler says.
Label your leftovers
Keep a permanent marker and painter’s tape in your kitchen to label and date your leftovers, Li says. “That is a classic chef’s method for knowing what something is and when it was made. That saves you the guessing game.”
Adler takes the concept a step further and labels her leftovers with their intended use. Leftover blueberries are labeled “muffins-to-be on Tuesday,” she says. “I really like doing that — assigning the destiny of the food.”
So after a night of Ethiopian takeout, when we ended up with an entire container of leftover injera, I followed Adler’s advice and thought about what it might become in the future.
I imagined scrambling the spongy, tangy bread with eggs, akin to scrambling matzo into matzo brei. “Injera for eggs,” I wrote on the container. Sure enough, their destiny was fulfilled the following morning.
Li keeps a dedicated bag in her freezer just for scraps from which to make chicken or vegetable stock. That bag houses carrot peels, the ends of onions, extra garlic cloves and chicken bones.
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Flavia Morlachetti/Getty Images/Moment RF
Don’t forget your odds and ends
Adler encouraged me to never, ever throw away the stems of herbs. Stems don’t get as much glory as tender, pretty leaves, but they still have the same herby taste.
“I’m going to chop these herbs up or stick them in a blender with a clove of garlic,” she says. Then add olive oil. “And then it’s just gonna be my base sauce for everything.”
So I foraged a few varieties of half-cut herbs from my refrigerator drawers, most of them sad looking and unidentifiable.
I threw out the stems that had turned brown and gooey and put the rest in a blender. I added garlic on Adler’s instructions, nuts and kale for bulk, and plenty of olive oil and salt. Then, on a whim, I added a splash of olive juice for brightness.
The result was somewhere between a pesto and a chimichurri, and it elevated that night’s otherwise routine dinner. And Adler was right: Once the stems were blended, it tasted exactly the same as the leaves. (The same idea applies for broccoli stems in a cheesy broccoli soup, Li says.)
Li likes to keep her odds and ends organized with an “Eat Me First” box in her fridge. That’s where she keeps half-used lemons, leftover coconut milk or produce that’s starting to get wrinkly. “You kind of have an idea for, OK, here’s where you look first,” she says.
Don’t strive for perfection
Cooking these meals did feel like a game, as Li had suggested. It brought me unexpected joy to use up as many existing ingredients as possible — to the point where I often spent much longer in the kitchen because I kept thinking of new ideas: If I turn these wrinkly sweet potatoes into a soup, then I can caramelize this half-cut onion for a topping, and then I can use the leftover soup as a sauce tomorrow …
Did I cook more often, though? Probably not. My cooking energy burned brighter but fizzled out after a few nights, at which point I ordered takeout.
So I was glad to hear Li’s take: If you’re too hard on yourself, you’re not going to enjoy it at all. “ I try not to be too obsessive about eating absolutely everything,” she says. If my takeout was truly terrible, I’m allowed to toss it or, better yet, compost it.
If you really want to use up everything, you can always chuck ingredients into the freezer. Li has dedicated freezer bags for different dishes, like vegetable scraps for soups or fruit discards for smoothies. (She labels them, of course.)
And how does that smoothie taste? It’s “delicious,” she says, “even if it’s made up of all the things that have been rejected in the past,” she says.
Recipe: Make-It-Your-Own Stir-Fry
Excerpted from Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Copyright ©2023 by Irene Li and Margaret Li. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sauce
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon water
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon black vinegar, rice vinegar, lime juice, or other acid
- 1 tablespoon neutral oil, or enough to lightly coat the bottom of your wok or skillet
- 1 garlic clove, thinly sliced or minced, or more as desired
- ½-inch piece fresh ginger, minced or grated (optional)
- Pinch chili flakes or 1 small chile pepper, diced (optional)
- 4 cups leafy greens, torn into bite-size pieces, or 1 pound crisp-crunchy vegetables, cut into chunks
- Kosher salt
Stir the sauce ingredients together in a small bowl and set by the stove.
Heat a wok or large skillet over high heat until just smoking, then add the neutral oil and tilt to coat the bottom of the pan.
Add the garlic, ginger (if using), and chili flakes (if using) and stir-fry for 10 seconds. Add the greens and/or vegetables, in stages as necessary, and toss in the garlicky oil, then add the sauce and cook to your liking, stirring frequently.
Vegetable chunks may need 4 to 7 minutes — if you want to speed up the process, cover the pot so the vegetables steam for a minute or two, then uncover and toss again. Sturdy greens may need 3 to 5 minutes to get tender (we like to let them sit for a bit and char for extra texture).
Lighter leaves will need less than a minute to wilt down. Stir in a spoonful of any additional sauce you like, season with salt to taste, then sprinkle with your favorite garnishes and a generous drizzle of sesame oil.
A sprinkle of crunch is a great way to finish a stir-fry. Our favorites include crushed cashews or peanuts, toasted sesame seeds, thinly sliced scallions, and fried onions or shallots.
Your turn: What are your favorite go-to leftover recipes?
We’d love to hear from you! Share your recipe with us at lifekit@npr.org with your full name. We may publish it on NPR.org.
The story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks perform onstage during day two of the Boston Calling Music Festival at Boston City Hall Plaza on September 26, 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Mike Lawrie/Getty Images)
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This week’s show was recorded in Chicago with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Alzo Slade, Not My Job guest Stephen Malkmus and panelists Emmy Blotnick, Joyelle Nicole Johnson, and Gianmarco Soresi. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.
Who’s Alzo This Time
Pool Problems; Don’t Forget to Hydrate; The Rise of Hot Podium Guy
Panel Questions
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Not My Job: Stephen Malmus, lead singer and guitarist for Pavement, answers our questions about road construction
Indie rock legend and founder of Pavement, Stephen Malkmus, joins us to play a game called, “Pavement repairs are underway!” Three questions about road construction.
Panel Questions
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Limericks
Alzo Slade reads three news-related limericks: Good News For Gym Slobs; Cruisin’ For A Tattooin’; Fringe Food Benefits
Lightning Fill In The Blank
All the news we couldn’t fit anywhere else
Predictions
Our panelists predict what will find after the reflecting pool is emptied
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