Looper

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (with a brand new Bruce Willis nose) and Bruce Willis (with his existing Bruce Willis nose) in "Looper."

"Looper" was great.  You should go see it.

I mean, unless you're a small child or something.  If you're a small child, don't go see "Looper," you'd find it disturbing.  Also, stop reading my blog, it contains bad words that are only intended for grownups.

Finally, we have a time travel movie that's smart enough to stop wanking about the deep paradoxical ramifications of what it would mean if you could go and become your own damn grandfather or something, and instead recognizes that time travel, among other things, is a plot device that can be used well or poorly.  "Looper" uses it well.  The rules are clearly explained, and then they end up being important in terms of difficult choices the characters must make.  Butterflies flapping their wings and setting in motion cascades of events that alter the course of human history are not mentioned, because who gives a shit, really?

So it's 2044, and time travel hasn't been invented yet but it will be soon.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a looper, which means that organized criminals in the near future send victims back through time to a prearranged location where he's waiting with a gun.  He shoots them and disposes of the bodies.  Nobody in the present is looking for them, and nobody in the future can find them.  The victims arrive hooded and unrecognizable, with the looper's pay strapped to them in the form of silver bars.  The hood is important because eventually the victim will be an older version of the looper himself, loaded up with a big final payday in gold instead of silver.  By shooting himself, in the terminology of the movie, the looper "closes his loop."  After that, he's rich and he has thirty years until the mob finds him and sends him back to be executed by himself.  Why send loopers to themselves?  There are several possible answers to this question and one is that it makes quite an interesting premise for a movie.

Resident Evil: Retribution

Milla Jovovich and some other chick stride purposefully from one place to another, wearing impractical shoes.  Soon they will shoot some things, exchange a few lines of wooden dialogue, and then shoot some other things.

Resident Evil: Retribution is fine if you like that sort of thing.

It's also full of examples of that phenomenon in which the heroine is wearing very high heels until she does a demanding action sequence and then at the beginning of it they cut away for a second and suddenly she's wearing flats.

The ending implies yet another sequel, and with five of the damn things knocking around out there already, why stop now?

The Possession

As you saw in the preview, spunky young Natasha Calis stabs Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the hand with a fork because she's all possessed and everything.  What you did not see in the preview is that throughout the rest of the film Jeffrey Dean Morgan does not have a bandage or a wound or a scar or anything even though she stabbed him so hard that the fork was sticking out of his hand like it was a baked potato.  The reason for this is that the filmmakers pretty much didn't give a shit.

If you saw the previews, you already know that there’s an ominous box, and a little girl, and a bad supernatural thing in the box that gets into the little girl, and also some Hasidic Jews.  If you didn’t know that, now you do.  Let’s take it from there.

Horror movies are allowed to be bad.  More than any other kind of movie, a horror movie can suck and still be kind of enjoyable, if you like horror movies.  In a few years, this movie will probably be played on cable TV on a Sunday afternoon, and if you’re feeling lazy perhaps you will lie on the couch in your sweatpants eating those little cheddar cheese goldfish crackers and then 92 minutes later you’ll watch the credits go up the screen and think, “well that happened,” and then, as is the case with such movies, it will be later in the day and you will have little cheesy yellow crumbs on your t-shirt.  Which is totally fine, if you like that sort of thing.

Premium Rush

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his bike are in one place, but they must go to another place very fast.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a bike, and he also has a valuable piece of paper that a bad man wants.  He can ride his bike really fast, but the bad man chases him.  During the chase, the bad man is very bad, a lot. The piece of paper needs to get from Columbia University to Chinatown.

How few parts can a film or a bike be made of and still function?  Gordon-Levitt’s bike-messenger hero rides a fixed-gear bike with no brakes through a movie made only of a 91-minute chase with a few flashbacks.  Amazingly, it almost never gets boring.  (We’ll just forget about that gratituitous race through Central Park.  Don’t worry, it’s not too long.  They ride fast.  Go to the bathroom or buy some Runts or something.)

Other than that, there’s lots of balletic, gritty, hard-earned bicycle stunt work, a concerned lady whose role is to be super, super concerned about whether or not her valuable piece of paper reaches its destination, Aasif Mandvi, and an ex-girlfriend who manages to be a love interest while barreling all over Manhattan on another bicycle.  There is also a bike cop.  One of the rules of the movie is that when the bike messengers fall down, it’s serious and dramatic, but when the bike cop falls down, it’s hilarious.

“Premium Rush” is a good-natured, economical, oddly pure movie.  It contains no long speeches or elaborate theories.  It’s just a fun, fast ride.

Whatever That New Bourne Movie Is Called

Jeremy Renner attempts to conceal his beard behind a gun.

Just watched The Bourne (noun), another movie in which a super-duper-agent throws his lot in with a beautiful woman and then is pursued by killers through a foreign city, running across rooftops and riding a motorcycle rapidly through traffic and up and down stairs.

It was fun. Jeremy Renner displayed way less existential angst than Matt Damon, which was a relief. The stakes felt lower than in the other Bourne movies, but this one was always fun to look at. It was sort of like nice travel photography with occasional gunfire and drone strikes, and one fantastic cable-knit sweater. You'll know it when you see it. Man, I really wanted that sweater.

The plot consisted of a series of Very Serious Conversations about the drugs that made Jeremy Renner a super-duper-agent: what color they were, how often he needed them, where he had to go to get them, and how he could avoid needing them in the future. Secret, ominously named government supersoldier programs known only to Edward Norton appear to be a dime a dozen. Edward Norton also had access to an amazing room with many screens and phones that spat out plot information with astonishing speed and accuracy.

Finally, Jeremy Renner, an otherwise fine looking actor, should never grow a beard again. It looked like he had pubes coming out of his face.

Total Recall

Colin Farrell and his eyebrows.

Somewhere deep inside me, there's a sixteen-year-old boy that loved the shit out of the new Total Recall. Sure, it should have been at least fifteen minutes shorter, and five of those fifteen minutes were just shots of Kate Beckinsale striding purposefully down various corridors with her hair blowing dramatically around her face. Whatever. It was still a sweet valentine to a certain kind of sci-fi action movie from the late '80's and '90's. What it lacked in plot coherence, it made up for in sincerity, much of which was provided by Colin Farrell's bushy, soulful Irish eyebrows, which were constantly climbing his forehead in adorable consternation.

Prometheus

One character in Prometheus saw this alien parasite and immediately tried to pet it.  He died.

Prometheus is a visually stunning film in which unlikeable characters say dumb things to each other and constantly have stupid fights for no reason.

You already saw the good bits in Alien, sociopathic android and all. Mixed with these are a bunch of shitty subplots about romance, sinister corporate motives, and the struggle to maintain religious faith. Seriously, Ridley Scott has taken humanity's search for meaning in the universe and turned it into a fucking snooze-fest.

The only real take-away is that if you see a cave on an alien planet that looks like an H. R. Giger painting, DON'T GO IN THERE. Also, I lost count of the number of alien body parts that looked like moist, threatening vaginas with teeth.

Oh, and there's also a scene in which a woman programs a robotic medical pod to give her an abortion, but then the fetus turns out to be a squid. Because we've all been dying to see that in 3-D.