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Review: “Looper”

30 Sunday Sep 2012

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“Killing Time”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

 “IF YOU WANT a vision of the future,” George Orwell once remarked, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”  If that’s a grim forecast, it’s also a strikingly apropos one in relation to “Looper,” a dystopic sci-fi flick from writer-director Rian Johnson (“Brick,” “The “Brothers Bloom”).  It’s the second best science fiction film of 2012, after the even loopier “Prometheus.”

The face-stamping boot in “Looper” belongs to Bruce Willis (old Joe), a contract killer working for a crime syndicate in the future, who returns to the year 2044 to confront a younger version of himself (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt).  Because time travel has been outlawed, young Joe is a bad guy (and a junkie), a “looper” hired to, as he puts it, “take out the future’s garbage.”  He works a remote corner of a cane-field in Kansas where his victims suddenly appear, hands-tied, head-bagged, ready for a shotgun blast to the chest.  The executions are carried out like clockwork until, of course, there’s a glitch in the “Terminator”-like system.

Unbeknownst to him, Joe’s bosses in the future have sent the old Joe back in time to be killed by the young Joe and effectively close the loop.  We never see the evil genius known as the Rainmaker, busy sending old loopers thirty years back in time to be shot down by their former selves.  Joe’s friend Seth (Paul Dano) suffers this gory fate early on in the film.  Watch as a young Seth is cut down, limb by limb, in the present, his wounds materializing in the future.  Don’t worry; the temporal antics of “Looper” won’t be on the test.

Johnson’s plot line is intricate whereas personal matters in “Looper” are fairly old-timey.  There’s a prostitute (Piper Perabo) who keeps the young Joe drugged and confused, and, in the farm house nearby his killing floor, a single mom named Sara (a butch Emily Blunt) keeping a close watch over her precocious son Cid (Pierce Gangon).  Could Cid be one of the three kids that the old Joe is dead-set on exterminating?  The uncanny Gangon has special powers, which I won’t reveal here, but he could be the creepiest kid on film since the tricycle-riding Danny Lloyd in Kubrick’s “The Shining.”  Blunt, meanwhile, who has the Midas touch in picking scripts, never gives a bad performance and she offers the film some much-need pathos.  She shelters Joe, from old Joe and from the truth, and in the end, young Joe returns the favor in a sacrificial last act.

The only misstep in “Looper” was a needless effort to make Gordon-Levitt look like Bruce Willis.  A plaster mold of Willis was cast to help the young actor resemble the iconic action film star.  Fitted with a putty nose and prosthetic upper-lip, young Joe looks more like a glass-eyed Howdy Doody doll than the moonlighting star of yesteryear.  And because science fiction is always already not the real world, this turns our anti-hero into something even further unreal and distracts the audience.  The gun violence is gratuitous as well, and though it happens off-screen, watching children getting shot at close range threw me for a loop.  It goes without saying that if the older version of myself in 2042 got in touch with me now, I’d be asking for stock tips, Super Bowl wins, Lotto numbers, and other money-making factoids, not whom to kill and when and where.  But that’s the real world not the movies.

“Prometheus” aside, “Looper” could be the most inventive science-fiction film of 2012; what is your vote for best action/sci-fi film of the year thus far?

Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”

18 Wednesday Jul 2012

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“Over the Moon”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

“FICTION IS ABOUT what it means to be a ******* human being,” said the late, great David Foster Wallace.  I have censored the post-postmodern author of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again only because Wes Anderson’s newest opus, “Moonrise Kingdom,” not only delivers on Wallace’s challenge to all contemporary ironists to rise about their sometimes stilted aesthetic and to show some heart, but because, at Camp Ivanhoe, the summer scout camp setting of Anderson’s adolescent romance, cursing is forbidden.

So, too, is running away from home (and camp), the double infraction of the comedy’s twelve-year-old couple, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward).  She’s a little runaway, carrying a suitcase of obscure books and a pair of scissors for lefties.  Remember, however, that “Moonrise Kingdom” is a Wes Anderson movie, which means that the couple beats to their own drum and moves at the pace of molasses. Think of Shakespeare’s star-cross’d lovers after the pair had given blood and/or ingested a large-animal tranquillizer.

Sam and Suzy’s escape throws Khaki Scouts’ leader, Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton) into his bloodhound mode and hot on the young couple’s trail, he enlists the support of Suzy’s parents (Andersonians Frances McDormand and Bill Murray).  Yet “Moonrise” follows a higher law: Walk, Don’t Run!  There’s no real hurry in Anderson’s world: Scout Ward pauses to smoke, sip scotch in his plaid, zippered tent and record his reflections.  Co-written with Roman Coppola, “Moonrise Kingdom” excels because it delights in the fascinations of childhood and the complexities of adulthood in equal measure.  Enter Bruce Willis as Captain Sharp, whom Suzy’s mother has been seeing extramaritally, and as much as Suzy fights her mother, we can’t help but notice the major way in which she becomes her by the film’s end.

At one point, a bespectacled Sam (replete with Scout badges and coonskin hat) exclaims, while fishing with Suzy: “Fish on hook!  Reel him in slowly!”  That instruction could serve as an apt metaphor for Anderson’s method, more self-satisfied than eager-to-please. A storybook-like plot and excellent ensemble cast (including Tilda Swinton and Jascon Schwartzman) reel the viewer in and in and in.  Again, Anderson doesn’t like to be rushed.  The reason why “Moonrise Kingdom” succeeds whereas his most dissatisfying deadpans such as “The Darjeeling Limited” and worse, “The Life Aquatic with Steven Zissou,” did not, is that adulthood is shaky ground for Anderson; his adult characters come across as precocious children whereas his children are more like puerile adults.  As paradoxical as it may seem, “Moonrise” is a fully mature work about immaturity.  Who else but this auteur could give us an over-stylized scene in which Sam’s foster father’s yellow shirt matches a yellow fan, a yellow refrigerator and a yellow rotary phone, and exchanges like this one, concerning the death of a dog named Snoopy:  “Was he a good dog?” Suzy asks of Sam to which he replies: “Who’s to say but he didn’t deserve to die.”

Meanwhile, it’s safe to say that “Moonrise Kingdom,” Anderson’s best film since “The Royal Tenenbaums” a decade ago, is the most uncampy fun you’ll have at the cinema this summer.  Walk, don’t run.