I watched this about six months ago so it's not clear in my mind but one thing I did get from Looper's world building is the idea that it's at the point in a near future where what's new technology now enjoyed by the rich has filtered down to the poor etc.

The film does have a good example of "A Footprint in the Snow" Where we start looking up at tall future buildings and flying things and pan down to a street that looks pretty much modern but we buy it because we saw the skyline.

Fantastic episode, guys. I'm in pretty complete agreement with Dorkman (and also Trey, except when he says you could get away with just randomly having the kid be a superhuman killing machine). I love Rian Johnson's other work, the trailers for this were great, and I was expecting a total home run. Turned out to be just okay. I'll probably never watch it again either.

I just couldn't manage to make it to the theater on this one, so my first viewing was on the blu-ray from Netflix last week. Since I had the option I watched the bonus features too, so I wanted to address a couple of things you guys touched on. First, in regard to Kid Blue being Jeff Daniels... If you consider deleted scenes canon, no.

You could argue that in the theatrical cut it's ambiguous, but Rian Johnson's intent in the film as scripted and filmed is just that Blue's a screw-up of a lacky who looks up to Daniels' character. There are a whole host of deleted scenes featuring Kid Blue, and how he tracks down the Joes. But the revealing one is after Daniels takes his gun and hammers him, a guy takes him out back and is going to kill him, but Kid Blue escapes. So safe to say he's not meant to be young Jeff Daniels.

You also mentioned that it's surprising how wonky the time travel mechanics are, because he had Shane Carruth consulting on that, but Johnson makes a remark on that in the commentary. Towards the ends he basically gives him a thank you shout-out and says, half-jokingly, "He looked over the script and said, it's good, but your time travel is total bullshit, and then I didn't do anything about it." I'm paraphrasing, but not that much.

Last edited by C-Spin (2013-01-29 03:49:47)

And I think this is where he and I are similar, because I don't think he was aiming for the single most "effective," way (as if that was a totally  quantifiable attribute to begin with, which I don't believe it is) to tell his story as much as he was looking for a way that appealed to his sensibilities and preferences the most.  There are many more effective ways of telling a murder mystery than against the setting of a High School in a bizarro, post modern Dashell Hammet motif, but I'll be damned if I don't love Brick.  I think he took a theme he really liked (atoning for one's sins and the ability to overcome yourself) placed it in a world in which he wanted to explore (sci fi time travelling assasins) and made the plot work AS BEST HE COULD from there.  But when push came to shove, he wasn't going to sacrifice some of the elements in order to put a bow on the plot.  I get why it doesn't work for Mike, but I was totally fine with it, because the emotion of it was so authentic that I could get past the, by Mike's own admission, nitpick with the logic.

Last edited by Eddie (2013-01-29 02:59:36)

Talking about setting/tone is not even the same thing as talking about plot/story.

My contention is that those elements wouldn't have to be sacrificed to do so, although some things would. But we all have to kill our darlings for the sake of the story sometimes.

The logic of the time travel is a nitpick. I mean, it has MASSIVE problems but so does BTTF. The logic of people's behavior and the flow of the story, on the other hand, is fundamental, and where I think BTTF soars and LOOPER stumbles.

Obviously YMMV with any movie. Some people loved this flick unreservedly. But for me, the storytelling was messy enough to get in the way of the authenticity of the emotion. The lack of a solid story throughline translated into a lack of emotional throughline, for me.

Do you honestly expect a filmmaker to mount an extended defense of their screenplay in 140 character chunks with some random guys he's never met before on Twitter? The fact that he even bothered to engage with some of the criticisms and have a brief discussion is incredibly impressive. The 1 hour thing absolutely makes sense, if you've worked on something for 4 years, I think there's a lot you can go into regarding your intentions and motivations in making various choices that is simply unfeasible to discuss in that kind of format.

Last edited by bullet3 (2013-01-29 04:28:46)

Johnson clearly enjoys interacting with the audience, he's done it quite a bit with Looper in various ways.  My guess is listening to us yammer would be frustrating not because he can't bear criticism, but because he'd want to respond, or correct things we were just wrong about, etc.   Which is fine - and it'd be fun to actually do that if he ever wants to.   But I agree that Twitter is a poor forum for that kind of thing, it's just too limiting and disjointed for any lengthy discourse.   

Even so - just reading through the tweets, I pretty much get why he made the choices he made.  I just disagree with a lot of them.  Which again is fine - somebody makes a movie, somebody else watches it and has their reaction, good, bad or indifferent.  That's the deal.  Neither side owes the other anything else.   

I'm still glad he got to make the movie he wanted - and I'm glad it was a movie someone wanted to make, as opposed to another soulless paycheck flick like Battleship or Transformers.    The movie didn't work that well for me personally but hey, whadda ya gonna do.

The thing which I appreciated from his back and forth is he does appear to believe in the choices made. I'd love to hear a live discussion with him, and see if there could be another way of telling the story which addresses some of the criticism, but maintains his core story line.

Hmm.  My posts usually have the opposite effect.  I dunno what happened there.

Also:

We've said often that you need to learn the rules of an art form before you go about breaking them - so at least you know when you're breaking them.   Johnson clearly knows the "rules", I gather he believes they aren't always that critical, or at least shouldn't take precedence above all else.   

Again, I say okay, if that's how you want to play it.   I can see the same sensibility in Brick and Brothers Bloom too.  Those stories aren't disjointed or incomprehensible by any means, but they do color outside the approved Syd Field guidelines at times.  Yes, that can work - and I hate formulaic movies as much as the next person - but there's also a risk of losing the audience if you bend things too far. 

My bottom line with Brick, Bloom, and Looper is exactly the same - there was a point in all three movies where I found myself thinking, wait - what's happening now?   What's this movie about, again?   Are we getting near an ending or what?    Bloom was especially odd for me - I mostly liked it, and thought the ending was pretty good.  The only problem was the movie kept going for another thirty minutes afterward.   Swear to god, I checked the DVD case to make sure it wasn't some kinda special edition double feature and I'd somehow missed the transition to Bloom II.

It still comes out to the same place - Johnson doesn't have to follow the "rules" if he doesn't want to, and if that means the Stokes kid isn't going to love the result, then that's just how it is.

As opposed to the screenwriting 101 crowd (what I'd call the Save The Cat crowd), who believe the rules are ironclad and if you so much as bend one you might as well set yourself on fire, you amateur. Rather than looking at the full tapestry of a story and asking, "does it work? Why/why not?" they mindlessly follow a checklist without even understanding what half of it signifies.

As you can see, I share Johnson's antipathy for this particular "creative" population. The 101 jab usually references not all the people who are new to something, but the people who take one basic course in a subject and believe they've suddenly become an expert. Philosophy 101ers are especially ugh.

Last edited by Dorkman (2013-01-29 06:35:53)

Theravada Buddhism and integral calculus are almost the same thing.

Last edited by paulou (2013-01-29 07:10:58)

I'm sure there's a proof out there somewhere.

That's the problem right there. He's saying 'all my choices are correct and I don't care if you disagree'. I got the same vibe from reading the twitter discussion.