TV’s Loopers and Practical Jokes (2012): I thought Looper was a pretty good one. I’m still confused why 500 Days of Summer had to get cut to look like Veronica Lake, though— why can’t he just look like himself? I guess he was trying to look like young Bruce Willis except I already know what young Bruce Willis looks like— he looks like Die Hard and/or David Addison. So drenching 500 Days of Summer in some goo, what’s the point? I don’t know— I hate when famous actors pretend to have accents or put a bunch of stupid makeup on themselves or all that shit— Brad Pitt’s done an Irish accent, and he put a bunch of makeup on, and he does all that shit, and everytime, it’s like, “Dude… we know you’re Brad Pitt. You’re not mindfreaking us by talking all Irish— you’re not the mindfreak.” You know?
But besides that, this was a fun movie, if you’re okay with time travel movies where the plots don’t really work. They do one of those “Just forget about thinking about the huge obvious glaring plot-hole at the center of this movie” scenes, which is a really cute scene, but I guess it didn’t work because boy howdy, does that story not make much of any sense to me, that’s mostly what I left the theater thinking.
Anyways, it’s still just got a lot of cool shit in it, which I guess matters more for this kind of thing— the first 60-70% of the movie felt like just one cool thing after the other, and they don’t ruin it by overexplaining everything. A lot of fun, that stretch. The world-building shit, just the world that surrounds the movie, feels like this full thing where you always want to look at what’s going on in the margins— and it felt original to it; like, I mean, it didn’t have the budget of Blade Runner but it had that thing of just … I don’t even care what’s happening, if I can watch people drive down streets. (Or I obviously found myself thinking of that Walter Hill movie Streets of Fire a lot…? Not storywise but…)
Also, there’s a part where the movie shifts from being a movie about 500 Days of Summer to being a total classic Bruce Willis movie where it’s… I found myself thinking, “as a matter of fact, I would like to see Bruce Willis run around doing action shit, as that has been pretty much been true my whole life, thanks.” Bruce Willis has been playing his character in this movie since most of tumblr were tadpoles, you know? Oh, and Jeff Daniels is PERFECT, and whathisname Eli from There Will Be Blood blows 500 Days of Summer way the hell off the screen. Like, I can’t say I loved how it all ended, but boy, I was pretty into the first 2/3rds… (And I’d liked Brick but HATED Brothers Bloom, just fucking hated it— and movies about con men are my favorite kinds of movies but that one… oh I just really hated it, except that opening sequence…)
… Did you ever read Chuck Klosterman’s essay on time travel movies, Eating the Dinosaur? That’s one of my very favorite of his. I don’t know— I like time travel movies, that’s a cute thing for a movie to be about, but boy they’re a headache to think about. I think I enjoyed it more as just a science-fiction-bros-run-around movie than as a quote-unquote “time travel” movie— like, instead of it comparing it to Back to the Future or 12 Monkeys, or whatever…? See 12 Monkeys was good cause again, Bruce Willis runs around, but also, Brad Pitt didn’t pretend to have some stupid German accent or wear the nose from Roxanne. He just… anyways…
