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.