MOVIE REVIEW: Sam & Jony
by Maria Bustillos
★☆☆☆☆
Sam & Jony is a propaganda film that opened yesterday at the OpenAI website, starring Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and former Apple chief designer Jony Ive. It is just under ten minutes long, and is a two-hander, more or less, like My Dinner with André, Misery, or Waiting for Godot—though unlike those stories, watching this one is so boring you’d die of boredom except you already died of mortification.
Evidently the dullest, most witless people in the world are somehow in charge of tens, hundreds of billions of dollars—money enough to build high-speed rail lines, fund medical research, feed and educate millions of people—and what they are choosing to do with it is this:
The first thing to know about this diabetically syrupy, pointless film is that events immediately preceding its release appear to have made one of its stars, Jony Ive, very super rich: OpenAI has just agreed to buy Ive’s hardware startup, LoveFrom, (?!) in, reportedly, an all-stock deal worth more than $6 billion. Little wonder, then, that the Sam & Jony website reads like an engagement announcement, with the luckier fiancé posing submissively, head adoringly atilt, just behind the great man.
The second thing to know about Sam & Jony is that if you watch it you will not see even one prototype, mockup, or drawing of even a single product its stars intend to manufacture in the fruition of their multibillion-dollar deal. The movie is all vibes and they’re all terrible.
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