Looper & Friends

So this Looper movie that opened on Friday, it is indeed pretty good, and I'd highly recommend the JABberwocky client list, many/most of whom have an inner sf geek, go and see it.

The barest bones of the concept:  we have time travel, since time travel is illegal only criminals travel in time, and criminals are sent back 30 years to be offed, in fact there are dedicated specialists who take care of that. Every once in a while, the specialist gets to "close the loop," kiling the 30-years-in-future version of himself that's just been sent 30 years into the future's past.  Yes, it's a time travel movie, so if this explanation is hard to follow don't blame me.  And specifically here, the future has a guy called "the rainmaker" who is taking over the mobs en masse, closing loops en masse, sending all his enemies back in time.  Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis play the same dude, the +30 and the -30 versions.  Bruce Willis doesn't want his loop to be closed, he wants to find and kill the person who's going to become "the rainmaker," this will not endear either of them to the mob headed by Jeff Bridges that runs the whole looper thing in the -30.

Mostly, this is handled with lots of pluses.  Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed, has an ace cast and an ace tech team, and the movie is well made, suspenseful, not without its bits of humor.

The time travel?  Well, it makes sense.  Or it makes as much sense as it can.  Like any time travel movie, if you get to thinking too hard about the consequences of the things that happen, you realize it's all quite nonsensical.  But Goldilocks would approve of the way the script makes just enough effort to make all of this seem logical complete with just enough hand-waving to cover up the illogic that you're willing to cut it some slack.

It's a nice contrast to some of the other attempts Hollywood will take to deal with sf themes, like the laughable In Time from a year ago.

Though just to say, for anyone who's seen, as one good example, Brian de Palma's The Fury, there's a scene that should easily reveal the identity of The Rainmaker long before the characters in the film get around to figuring it out.

Also worth seeing:  Michael Pena and Jake Gyllenhal in End of Watch.

Another auteur genre piece, this one written and directed by David Ayer,whom the posters remind us wrote the script for Training Day.

More good casting.  Gyllenhal and Pena have amazing chemistry and rapport together, and the script requires them to say things that always seem right, even at their most cliche.

As with Looper, a bit of slack needs to be cut.  The good guys can spend the whole movie radioing for backup and have it come nicely and quickly, until the final act when the back-up is most desperately needed and all of a sudden it's like the additional units need to drive to South Central from Santa Barbara.

This isn't Training Day.  It's a movie, and shit happens, but it's the cop drama that really has only the nicest things to say about cops.

It's safe to say I made the right decision to head to the movies after the first act of Harper Reagan, a play from an up-and-coming British playwright that makes it to New York a few years after a London debut.  A series of two-character scenes about a women I don't care about with family trouble I don't care about meeting characters I don't care about.  I hate walking out of plays, but with all the movies on my list and this play doing nothing for me...

Of course, I'm sure the reviews will be extravagant in their praise.  As I'd suspected, they've been very good for the play Detroit that I saw last weekend.

Friday night I saw an old "new to me" Hitchcock movie, Marnie from 1964, playing at the Loews Jersey as the lead-in to a 50th anniversary Bond double feature on Saturday of Dr. No and Goldfinger.  I'd have seen Goldfinger if not for a party to go to Saturday night, but had to settle for Marnie.  Even though it has Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren, who was also in The Birds for Hitchcock, there are lots of good reasons why this is obscure Hitchcock.  Marnie, the character played by Tippi Hedren, is a bag of troubled woman cliches.  Sean Connery's reaction to her makes absolutely no sense at all.  The production values are kind of cheesy, scenes of people driving that look unconvincing by standards of a 1922 silent film, blatantly matte-painted backgrounds to the point that they distract from the actual important things happening in the frame.  (I'm looking at the Wikipedia entry after typing this last sentence and seeing that these were things that were picked on by critics at the time.)

However, if you've seen a lot of Hitchcock, there's so much of Hitchcock in this movie that it's fascinating to ponder on in the context of his career.  There are so many Hitchcock women like the ones here, the suave debonair matinee idol like Sean Connery is a fixture of Hitchcock's work from Farley Granger in Rope through all the Hitchcock with Cary Grant or James Stewart.  There's a very good score by Bernard Herrmann who started in film with Citizen Kane and did a number of Hitchcock films later on.

Based on a novel by Winston Graham, the screenplay is the first by Jay Presson Allen.  This gives the movie a little extra resonance for me, Jay Presson Allen wrote (with her daughter) a stage play based on The Big Love, a book by Tedd Thomey which was part of my portfolio at Scott Meredith, and it's the one time I've gotten to go to a Broadway premiere and after-party. And it turns out that Jay Presson Allen was hired to script after Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain, and a one-time Scott Meredith employee himself, was fired.  Who knew!

The Loews Jersey has a 50'-wide screen.  There was music on the Wonder Organ before the performance.  It would be nice if they would get the balcony open, they've been talking about this for as long as I've taken in the occasional movie (they show one Fri/Sat per month from September to May).  I'm told the problem is less putting in the seats than being in a city-owned building with the city not rushing to repair the fire escapes and put in updated alarm systems.

Master Rush

I seem to be treading water at work right now, I didn't feel like I was getting that badly backed up during the weeks I was away from the office but now that I'm back it's like the needle on the in-box doesn't want to move.

But at least I'm getting caught up on movies very efficiently.  There's nothing much better for that than having an 8:10 showing of one movie you want to see (Premium Rush) which runs for 1:31 with the same theatre providing a 9:45 of another move you want to see (Master) which meant there was around one coming attraction of down time between the two!

Premium Rush was a lot of fun.  It opened quietly in August and hasn't done much box office, but it won't surprise me if it has a good moment on video.  It deserves to.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a bike messenger delivering an envelope that a lot of people want, so his life is going to get complicated.  Ours gets put on hold for 90 minutes, half of which is probably spent riding along with with the bikes on the streets of  New York, weaving in and out of traffic.  There are little scenes like in Sherlock Holmes where the messenger maps out his routes, seeing which path through an intersection has him thrown thru a taxi cab window and which he can skate by an opening door unscathed.  I was surprised at how many fx and visual effects credits there were at the end of the movie, because it's so smoothly done you'd think it was all filmed right there on Broadway.  The movie is utterly preposterous, but because it doesn't take itself seriously it didn't bother me so much.  So you pick up a package on 116th St. and take it downtown by first going up to 130th St.  So there's supposed to be suspense in whether you can get a package downtown in 90 minutes that shouldn't require anything close to that on a bike.  So even though your bike can probably go through traffic, a guy in a car will catch up to you.  Tony Scott's remake of Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 a few years ago, all the implausibility and the remaking of the NY map to fit the movie's convenience drove me crazy in part because the movie depends on the hijacking situation seeming real, here none of it was supposed to be real so I gave lots of license to it.  It was an enjoyable 90 minutes.

The Master?  Oh my.  Paul Thomas Anderson has directed some classic movies, I'd see Magnolia again in the blink of an eye and thought There Will Be Blood was a masterpiece, which I happily enjoyed seeing twice.  This latest film is a dull dreary bore, ignore all the highfalutin praise you'll be hearing about it because the fact is, let me repeat, that it's a dull dreary bore. The alleged topic of the movie could/should be interesting, supposedly the lead is a surrogate for L. Ron Hubbard and the movie a gloss on the introduction of Scientology to the world.  But you know, I'd think L. Ron Hubbard would be an interesting person to make a movie about, and there's nothing interesting about Philip Seymour Hoffman's stand-in.  He seems to lead the most boring existence spending his time giving classes to stuck up rich people, and if he steals some of their money in the process we don't find out much about that.  Joaquin Phoenix's character isn't any better.  I recently saw a play in New York where one of the characters had to act with one side of his face not quite working, and it was distracting but ultimately you learned to live with it and take the character for what he was instead of for the tic, but Joaquin Phoenix is nothing other than his occasional ability to really scrunch his face in the strangest way.  It's a 2:16 minute movie that not only does little to develop its lead characters but leaves all the side characters behind as well.  I have no idea what purpose was served by the character played by Jessie Plemons, or who the Amy Adams character is, or...  I mean, pick a character in the movie, I don't think you'd know what they're about if you didn't have the press kit in hand to explain.  Maybe that's why so many critics like it, because they had the press kit.  I toyed with walking out, I decided Paul Thomas Anderson had given enough great film to my life that he surely deserved another hour of my time to finish telling his story, and in retrospect I wish I'd followed my instincts and bailed on this.  The score is interesting.  There's the occasional nice composition, I didn't see a 70mm print and one or two of the shots I thought "gee that might be nice to see on a 70mm print," then I'd ask why you shoot in 70mm but don't actually shoot in wide screen to take fullest advantage of the wider film format.  The two lead actors are so different in their approach that there's the occasional brief scene which uses that contrast to good effect, a jail sequence when Philip Seymour Hoffman watches quietly while Joaquin Phoenix rages in the next cell breaking his toilet with sheer force of will.  I'll be awfully curious to see if the box office holds up as actual viewers are exposed to the film, instead of the cineastes at Telluride or in the buzz factory of the Toronto Film Festival.  I was a bit surprised to see how well Tree of Life did a year ago, but that had more star power in Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, and if you read the reviews you at least saw a movie that was kind of like what the reviews told you it would be.  This, it's oh so highly praised, and there's nothing there.