Direkt zum Hauptbereich

Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012)

A killer tries to track down his older self from the future.

This one is really an enjoyable sci-fi. It is safe to say, that all time-travel based stories need to set up a premise that the audience has to be willing to go along with. This film used simple voice-over technique and surprising imagery to describe the situation the protagonist is (caught) in.

What I really liked about this film is that they've tried to avoid cliched situations. And many small, carefully designed details show that - the introduction of the 'bad guys', the way the 'forward'flashes explain the story, bold use of typo if necessary, the extremely late introduction of the woman in the story, etc.

There are two or three moments that didn't quite fit in - Bruce Willis' slaughtering the baddies and the love scene seemed a bit stapled on to the whole - but thankfully these were really short. The boy was quite an amazing cast, you can really feel the anger and desperation boiling inside him. I felt uneasy, every time his face was on the screen. Levitt put on some special make-up to make him look more like Bruce Willis, but that wouldn't have been necessary - his acting is convincing enough.

Overall entertaining and surprisingly smart at the same time. My favorite dialogue (p'phrased):
"I'm going to France." - "No, you're going to China" - "France!" - "I'm from the future. You're going to China"



Kommentare

Beliebte Posts aus diesem Blog

Time of the Gypsies / Dom Za Vesanje (Emir Kusturica, 1988)

A supernaturally gifted boy from a Gypsy community is forced to survive in the world of crime. The intriguing qualities of Kusturica's films I've seen is his relentless depiction of basically crazy communities. Not just agreeably potty, they're usually outright interstellar-nuts. Here, he follows the fate of the rather harmless boy Perhan, that leaves for Italy in hope of a better future for him and his loved ones. There are some enormously interesting images in the film that kept ringing long after. The ritual in the river and the last scene in the church ruin (with a horse standing somewhere far back in the image...). After sketchily mapping out the scenes it is surprising how rigorously three-acty the screenplay is constructed. The first act seems quite long in terms of time and number of scenes, but there is also a lot of imagery spent on depicting life in this crazy universe, which makes the second part in Italy much more believable. And there is a certa...

The Bank Dick (Cline, 1940) #DTC #848

The grumpy family head and  hobby sleuth gets hired by the local bank. I have never (gasp) watched a WC Fields movie before, so it took my pretty long to get used to this - in its time well known - personality that is quite a misanthrope. The pacing of the actual film felt slow and the scenes had not a lot of connection to the grand story, basically just setting the stage for the gags Fields was performing. It is quite interesting if you start to sympathize for such a thoroughly unsympathetic character on screen. Maybe because the man basically just wants to be left alone - everything that happens to him, even under the most contrived circumstances doesn't affect him in the least. It doesn't even look like he is interested in the money. Except for the money part, the disaffectionate personality seems like a rather modern rendering of the hedonistic generation Y, despite all vintage look-and-feel. I wonder about the other films, hope to get around to see them soon.

Detour (Ulmer, 1945) #TSPDT #390

A hitchhiker is picked up by death and then picks up his personal tormenting devil. The plot looked fairly straightforward, but the magic of this gem is that the story strand convolutes until it tightens into a strangling gordic knot - which is pretty much exactly what happens towards the end. The flashback structure are very noir-ish, so was the plot - everything straight down, right from the beginning. I really rooted for the guy to get out of this situation, but every time he takes a decision it actually gets worse - so in the end I was just hoping he might die and get relieved. Most striking was the jaw-dropping performance of Ann Savage. She pops out about a mile and her character is rendered so immensely unlikeable that I wondered that she has not been called the godmother of a new type of acting school (maybe she was?) This is definitively a film worth studying again. Its shortness does nothing to diminish the impact and it is rich on details.