Filums
Watching the BAFTAS and though I have seen neither (yet), rather pleased to see little-David Argo beat all time Goliath Lincoln for most the big awards. Has no one else noticed how much those Lincoln trailers resemble the The Comic Strip Presents version of Hollywood in Strike!? I suppose not. Sigh. (and now I see Brave won Best Animated too. yay!) I wish we'd seen more of the little awards tho, all of which seem to have gone to aliens beamed down to earth as part of the Les Miserables stage crew.. (deely bobbers??!) (and where was Daniel Craig eh? no wonder they didn't give him a best actor nomination!)
Hohum. Watched Looper last night and was rather underwhelmed. As a long time lover of headfuck time travel I'd expected to adore it, but really, it was a bit derivative even for me and started from an even sillier high concept than In Time.
I mean, really, there are scarey-ass gangsters out there in the future and the best thing they can use pinpoint-accurate time travel for is getting rid of bodies? even if you accept this (and I'm willing to accept one daft pretext as the basis of a good movie) it didn't really make sense. Why send back a loop to be killed by themself, clearly a tough job? Why not send back loop A to be killed by looper B and vice versa? Or why not just kill the Looper in the past after a few years, where there seems to be no danger of law enforcement intervention whatsoever (judging by the fact the Loopers aka multiple murderers, seem to be well known and have their own whorehouses, union and TV channel apparently?) And if the future law enforcers are so damn efficient it isn't safe to dump a body, why don't they er clamp down on this big time machine thing the baddies have? You'd think that's something it wouldn't be too hard to locate.. (And actually a ,much more fun movie, the one I was expecting really, was what an escaped loop might have made of their life in the past, with their physical existence affexted by whatever trauma the "original" goes through.. the best bit of the film's concept.)
Add in the silly guns the Loopers have which seem limited to a 15 yard range purely to expedite the plot and I really began to get annoyed. The heartrending end if you unpack it otherwise doesn't work at all. Logically, Joe's best choice is to shoot Bruce Willis: thus ending the threat to Rainmaker's Mom and giving himself the best chace of helping her bring up Rainmaker Kid to be good not evil. But no, that wouldn't show he'd Learned on his Journey so he has to shoot himself instead. I spent about 10 hours agonising about this till someone on Twitter just told me it was cos of the range on the gun. And when you get told that you realise just how artificial that plot-point was (I mean for godssake - we're less keen on mass murder right now on modern US of A and they still don't hobble all their guns to 15 yards..)
I did like stuff. I liked the random TK plot element, which I hadn't expected, I liked the cinematography (yet another influence on Utopia methinks) and I always like Bruce Willis playing the seasoned but strungout and world weary streetfighter. It's just we've seen it so often before and in so many vaguely timey wimey movies (Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys, Sin City..) all of them better than Looper (weell ok, not Sin City). The film staggered under the weight of its reference points : not just the above 3 but the entire Terminator oevre, Primer, Eternal Sunshine etc etc.. in the end I was waiting for the sequel where Rainmaker-Mom's unborn child by Joe (what was the point of the unconvincing shag otherwise?) is sent back in time to kill his mum thus preventing the Rainmaker ever being born (but also of course himself..).. watch this space!
Hohum. Watched Looper last night and was rather underwhelmed. As a long time lover of headfuck time travel I'd expected to adore it, but really, it was a bit derivative even for me and started from an even sillier high concept than In Time.
I mean, really, there are scarey-ass gangsters out there in the future and the best thing they can use pinpoint-accurate time travel for is getting rid of bodies? even if you accept this (and I'm willing to accept one daft pretext as the basis of a good movie) it didn't really make sense. Why send back a loop to be killed by themself, clearly a tough job? Why not send back loop A to be killed by looper B and vice versa? Or why not just kill the Looper in the past after a few years, where there seems to be no danger of law enforcement intervention whatsoever (judging by the fact the Loopers aka multiple murderers, seem to be well known and have their own whorehouses, union and TV channel apparently?) And if the future law enforcers are so damn efficient it isn't safe to dump a body, why don't they er clamp down on this big time machine thing the baddies have? You'd think that's something it wouldn't be too hard to locate.. (And actually a ,much more fun movie, the one I was expecting really, was what an escaped loop might have made of their life in the past, with their physical existence affexted by whatever trauma the "original" goes through.. the best bit of the film's concept.)
Add in the silly guns the Loopers have which seem limited to a 15 yard range purely to expedite the plot and I really began to get annoyed. The heartrending end if you unpack it otherwise doesn't work at all. Logically, Joe's best choice is to shoot Bruce Willis: thus ending the threat to Rainmaker's Mom and giving himself the best chace of helping her bring up Rainmaker Kid to be good not evil. But no, that wouldn't show he'd Learned on his Journey so he has to shoot himself instead. I spent about 10 hours agonising about this till someone on Twitter just told me it was cos of the range on the gun. And when you get told that you realise just how artificial that plot-point was (I mean for godssake - we're less keen on mass murder right now on modern US of A and they still don't hobble all their guns to 15 yards..)
I did like stuff. I liked the random TK plot element, which I hadn't expected, I liked the cinematography (yet another influence on Utopia methinks) and I always like Bruce Willis playing the seasoned but strungout and world weary streetfighter. It's just we've seen it so often before and in so many vaguely timey wimey movies (Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys, Sin City..) all of them better than Looper (weell ok, not Sin City). The film staggered under the weight of its reference points : not just the above 3 but the entire Terminator oevre, Primer, Eternal Sunshine etc etc.. in the end I was waiting for the sequel where Rainmaker-Mom's unborn child by Joe (what was the point of the unconvincing shag otherwise?) is sent back in time to kill his mum thus preventing the Rainmaker ever being born (but also of course himself..).. watch this space!