MY MOVIE SHELF: Looper

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 36 Days to go: 26

Movie #404:  Looper

It’s back-to-back Emily Blunt pictures! And it’s another example, incidentally, of the complex and fascinating characters Emily Blunt plays on the regular. In Looper, Blunt plays Sara, a tough and enigmatic woman who lives alone on a farm with her son Sid (Pierce Gagnon). It’s a small yet pivotal role, and Blunt gives her shading and depth that would be completely lost and overlooked in a lesser actor. Sara is a woman who feels she’s made mistakes in her past and she’s trying to make up for them. She’s no-nonsense and formidable, but she has a softer side and a sexier side as well. She’s also trying to protect her son and protect herself from potential futures she’s better not even contemplating. But in Looper, the future is everything.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, living in the not-too-distant future. He’s a junkie and a killer — known as a looper — working for local boss Abe (Jeff Daniels). Abe is from the future (a future where time travel has been invented but is highly illegal) and he’s here to recruit young vagrant boys to the business. What a looper does is simple — basically, he’s just a hitman, only he’s one that doesn’t have to do any kind of legwork. He shows up at the appointed place and time and kills whoever the crime lords send back to Joe from the future. It’s easy enough work, and Joe gets paid handsomely for it. Not only that, but at the end of his contract he gets a big payday and is released from duty for 30 years, when he’ll be sent back in time to be killed by his younger self. It’s called closing the loop.

Looper is one of the tightest and most original concepts to come along in a while. Everyone quoted that “Time is a flat circle” line from True Detective, but that was a lot of malarkey in a lot of places. Here, time really is a circle, and it just keeps going around and around. When Old Joe (Bruce Willis) comes back, instead of Young Joe killing him (as he did when Old Joe was Young Joe), Old Joe evades the shot and knocks Young Joe out. Suddenly, Old Joe has a mission. There’s a new crime lord in the future — an unseen menace called The Rainmaker — who’s closing all the loops, and his rush to send back Old Joe resulted in Old Joe’s wife (Qing Xu) being killed. So Old Joe isn’t going to die quietly. He’s going to go back and find The Rainmaker and kill him, so his wife never has to die and he won’t be sent back. It’s a twisted, intricate puzzle of the film, but everything is explained clearly and succinctly handled to avoid confusion. Even when Young Joe tries to open the Pandora’s box of questions time-displacement naturally brings forward, Old Joe shuts him down. “It doesn’t matter,” he shouts, and goes on to make a very meta statement about how if he starts asking questions they’ll never get anywhere. They’ll just sit there forever making diagrams with straws trying to figure the whole thing out, and he has a point. One of the keystones of time travel stories is to keep confidently moving through the plot; never ask too many questions.

Not that the mythology of Looper doesn’t hold it to scrutiny, because it absolutely does. Events that occur earlier in the film feed into what will come up later, such as a fantastic sequence when Joe’s friend Seth (Paul Dano) — who sets the stage for Joe’s own troubles — fails to close his loop and his older self (Frank Brennan), while on the loose, starts losing body parts to history. It’s fantastic, and Joe uses it later when he needs to get a message to Old Joe. He simply carves the message into his arm.

I’m not going to lie, the make-up used on Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make his facial features more like Bruce Willis is somewhat disconcerting. It doesn’t really look like anyone to me, though I can kind of see where they were going with it. However, Gordon-Levitt completely integrates Bruce’s tone and manner of speech — his cadence, his style, even his squinty-eyed delivery — in a way that is lies somewhere between eerie and impressive and definitely helps drive home the fact that these two men are tied together by fate and time, that their lives are one.

And in the end, it turns out there’s more than one way to close a loop.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 37 Days to go: 27

Movie #403:  Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow

When I first saw this movie, it was just called Edge of Tomorrow. Then, for some reason, it didn’t do well in theaters and some genius decided obviously its title was the culprit, so they changed all the DVD and blu-ray titles (and on Amazon) to Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow. Because that’s TOTALLY better. However, if you look it up on IMDb, it’s still called Edge of Tomorrow, and it won’t even recognize Live Die Repeat, like it sometimes does if someone has had multiple names over the course of their career. Moreover, channels like HBO list it simply as Edge of Tomorrow in their guides, and yet I’m stuck with stupid blu-ray packaging that calls it Live Die Repeat. It’s asinine. As far as I’m concerned, as soon as you go to release with a movie, its title, whatever it happens to be, is the one you’re stuck with. Because changing the title for DVD or OnDemand or what have you doesn’t make the movie more appealing to people who might not have seen it before, it just makes it more confusing for people who have, like when, for a brief time in the ’90s, TV stations would promote Gleaming the Cube as A Brother’s Justice. As if ANYONE willing to watch a Christian Slater skateboarding movie would tune in for some crap called A Brother’s Justice. It doesn’t work and it’s stupid; stop doing it.

Now, there are a lot of plausible theories you could come up with for why not many people saw this one in theaters (none of which are its title, by the way), but the one that rings truest to me is that Edge of Tomorrow was marketed as a Tom Cruise action film. I mean, technically, it is a Tom Cruise action film, but not in the way most people perceive that descriptor. This is not Tom Cruise being a super spy or an alpha male or a an earnest defender of justice or any of that kind of self-inflated crap Tom Cruise has done in the past that most people are sick of and bored by. No, in this film, Tom Cruise’s character Bill Cage is a bureaucrat who talks a good game but can’t back it up at all. He’s the US military’s media liaison, which is a fancy way of saying he’s a pretty face and a confident speaker who sells the public on war. He tells people why we should go to war, how well-equipped we are to fight a war, and how we’re planning to win a war. But when the UK military general (Brendan Gleeson) orders Cage to actually report to the front lines of the current war being waged against alien invaders, Cage’s reaction is to try to weasel his way out of it in any way possible, up to and including extortion of a superior officer. And when Cage finds himself stuck fighting on the front lines, he’s not magically infused with a great sense of duty; he’s scared shitless, and he’s incompetent, and he gets himself killed. A lot.

Yes, the main plot of Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow is that Cage is caught in a loop, thanks to killing one of the alien “Alphas” on his first day in the field, in which he has to live that battle over and over again. Every time he dies, he wakes up again the previous day and the only way out of it is to get a blood transfusion. But before he can do that, Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) is going to make him use his unique gift to help her defeat the aliens (called Mimics). And that, my friends, is why this film is so great. Before I’d known anything about the film, seeing Emily Blunt in the trailer was enough for me to know this movie would be more than it appeared, because Emily Blunt only chooses interesting roles. And Rita Vrataski is a spectacular one.

As wonderful as it is to see Cruise undermining his very macho, physical, earnest persona by playing a cowardly, inept, unmotivated soldier, it’s a hundred times more so to see Blunt playing Rita, a brave and uncompromising badass nicknamed both the Angel of Verdun and the Full Metal Bitch. See, Rita has been in Cage’s exact position before. She knows what he’s going through and she knows how to beat the Mimics. But because she no longer has the power and he does, she’s going to force him to cooperate with her. And for every moment that Cage wants to give up, Rita pulls him back in. She tells him to suck it up, she reiterates how important their mission is, she reassures him how accepting she is with the possibility of death. And she pushes and pushes and pushes. When Cage fails at his training, she shoots him in the head to reset. And when he hesitates, she shoves him forward. She is relentless and powerful and unafraid, and lest you think she simply became this way after her own experiences in the loop of repeating the same day, she makes it clear that’s not the case. She’s a soldier, and she volunteered for battle before she ever set foot in one. She is courageous to her core and it’s her, not Tom Cruise’s Cage, who really drives the action.

Some people have questioned the end of the movie, but I’ve already watched this film more than a half-dozen times since it came out last year, and it’s become clear to me. (Stop reading this paragraph if you don’t want to be spoiled.) There’s an aspect of the very, very end that feels like it may have come from an executive’s note or possibly a test screening in which filmmakers were urged to give Cage and Rita a chance at a happy ending, but I actually think it was the intention all along and that it fits with the understood mythology of these aliens. You see, when Cage kills the Omega, it can’t just reset the day as it had been doing, because then all these people who’d just defeated it would be alive again and would know, again, how to defeat it. So instead, the Omega resets to a day earlier, when it can keep its Mimics out of battle altogether and simply set off for a more compliant planet. Up until that point an Omega would just reset to the day before when a single rare Alpha was killed, knowing it would be nearly impossible for that Alpha to be killed again, but because the Omega is the end game, and all the Mimics die when the Omega does, it can’t just reset the same way because it would be in danger of losing everything again. So it resets a day earlier and hightails it out of there. End of story.

I love Edge of Tomorrow. It handles the time displacement exceptionally well, highlighting the repetition and length of time involved without slowing down the pace of the film. And it also conveys the different feelings of confusion and denial and despair and hopelessness Cage goes through (as anyone would go through) before becoming resolute and determined. It hits all the right emotional notes, it is never not entertaining, and the Mimics are reliably intimidating. It has everything. Except consistent titling. Seriously, is there any way someone at Warner Brothers could repackage this as Edge of Tomorrow again and ship me a copy? I’ll send you my address.