Chistopher Shinn's Picked is sort of a topsy-turvy Avatar: Kevin, a stolid, eager, good-looking working actor (played by stolid, eager, good-looking working actor Michael Stahl-David) is recruited by a backslaping director (Mark Blum) who's looking for an unknown to star in a science-fiction epic. There's just one catch: He'll be using computers to extract the actor's id and map it onto a CGI villain. It's basically a high-tech soul-stealing fable, and casting the Handsome Nobody from Cloverfield is a stroke of evil genius. Stahl-David (pictured with Liz Stauber) responds with one of the season's most quietly disturbing performances, as a disposable person fighting to prove he actually exists.
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