A new era, inevitably, has dawned. Newsweek will officially stop publication of its printed edition at the end of this year, presumably to focus on its online content:
There was a time I used to get the newspapers delivered to my door every day. There was a time I would eagerly head over to the bookstore to look over the latest magazines and books.
No longer.
When I heard the mega-bookstore Borders was in danger of being shut down, I was very saddened. I spent so much time in my local Borders store looking over the latest books as well as magazines and DVDs. However, by the time the store eventually shut its doors, things had changed considerably and realized I was no longer visiting the place anywhere near as often as I did before.
Why?
The internet. The fact of the matter is that you can find many fascinating magazine quality articles online, including those of Newsweek itself, online. There’s CNN, NBC, Salon, Slate, The Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, etc. etc. readily available and updated on a daily, sometimes hourly basis on your computer.
Likewise, any (and seemingly just about all!) books I want are readily available either for download or for ordering a physical copy via Amazon.com and other book sellers. At the time of Borders’ closing, I was buying cheap copies of used books I wanted through Amazon and receiving the orders relatively quickly…in a matter of, at most, a week. Very convenient and, unlike Borders, I knew the books were available and didn’t have to drive to the store to check if they had them.
Still, there is a certain sadness with seeing a publication with such a long history (Newsweek first appeared in 1933) leaving the printed edition market that it originated in.
The other day, a relative of mine had a garage sale and my wife decided it was time I unloaded about half of my CD collection. I’ve been buying CDs since the mid-1980’s but have long since stopped using them. I have my entire music library on my computer and any new music purchases are done online so getting rid of the CDs wasn’t something I found hard to do.
When people showed up to the garage sale and saw the CDs, they dived into them and bought just about all (I guess my musical taste was popular to those clients!). One of them, however, made a note of how “outdated” the CD technology was.
One day, I suppose the idea of seeing things on paper, other than titles and legal documents, might also become outdated.
When early word got out about the then upcoming film Looper, like many others I was intrigued. I’ve always been fascinated with the whole time travel genre, even though so much has been written about it since author H. G. Wells essentially created it with his 1895 novel The Time Machine.
What was most fascinating about the early reports on the film was that the film would feature Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis playing the same person, old and young versions of a hitman whose job in our near future is to kill people sent back in time and dispose of their bodies.
The wrinkle to the story is that these hitmen, known as “Loopers”, eventually wind up killing their thirty year later future selves. This winds up being their “last” job and is paid for in bricks of gold. The Looper then has thirty years to live out their life as they please, owing no one anything, only with the knowledge that after those thirty years are up, they will be sent back in time and killed by themselves.
Got that?
Personally, I find it an intriguing concept but one that, on the outset, is somewhat flawed…though ironically enough that central flaw plays a big role in the film’s ultimate resolution. Without getting into too many details (or spoilers), what young Joe realizes at the end of the film applies not just to him, but to everyone who has been sent back.
Anyway, the film was released in, frankly, a very dead time for movies, which made me curious. Early word was that the film was very good, yet the release date is usually a movie dead zone, a time when the studios release films they don’t think/expect to be quite worthy of summer or major holiday blockbuster release. Still, the film has done well, though after three weeks it does appear to be on the verge of dropping out of the top ten list.
Which is kind of a shame, for Looper is a very solid piece of entertainment.
Granted, there are elements of other films here, most notably the essential structure of The Terminator (or, if one wants to really get into it, a pair of Harlan Ellison stories, particularly Demon With a Glass Hand and Soldier, both of which appeared on the original Outer Limits tv show).
The big twist here, and what separates Looper from these works, is that in this case the old and young versions of Joe, the protagonist, are both operating with a different perspective. Old Joe (Willis) has seen an unpleasant future and, upon being sent back for his execution at his own hands, manages to escape from his younger self. His goal is to save the future in this past. The Young Joe (Gordon-Levitt), meanwhile, knows his older self is just one possible future, and that if he gets rid of him like he’s supposed to (and get the mobsters that are now coming after him for this botched assassination of his future self) he can effect change from the present on.
Frankly, I love the fact that one can look at both perspectives and realize both Joes are right in wanting to fix things their way. And as the film progresses, one of the central questions becomes just what is the right way to go about fixing the future.
But, but…but…
SPOILERS FOLLOW!
YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!
One of the little wrinkles this film presents is that in this future world of Looper assassins, a group of people have developed telekinetic powers. The powers are nothing terribly big, those able to can lift small objects (usually coins) six or less inches off the palms of their hands.
However, in the future of “Old” Joe, one person, the mysterious “Rainmaker”, has taken over all the mobs and is intent on ridding the world of all Loopers and assuming all power for himself. No one knows who this “Rainmaker” is, but he is effectively terrorizing the entire power structure of the future world. When “Old” Joe returns to the past, thus, he is intent on finding and killing this future “Rainmaker”.
Like the Terminator searching for Sarah Connor, “Old” Joe has three possibilities, children born at the same time and at a particular Hospital his future self determined was where the “Rainmaker” was born. His grim task is to assassinate these three children, one after the other, in the hopes that one of them will turn out to be this “Rainmaker”.
As it would turn out, young Joe gets to the future “Rainmaker” and his mother first. The young child has telekinetic abilities far beyond those of everyone else, and it is through these abilities that his future self is able to rule the criminal world. However, in the present, young Joe who comes to realize that this boy can turn out to be good rather than evil, provided his mother is there to raise him as she has been. Old Joe, on the other hand, is set on killing the boy and, in so doing, risks killing the mother and setting off the very thing he is, ironically enough, trying to avoid: Making the “Rainmaker” evil.
Thus, young Joe comes to realize that he’s effectively witnessing a time loop that’s bound to go on again and again and again, where the “Old” Joe and the “Young” Joe will inevitably butt heads and the “Old” Joe will inevitably kill the young child’s mother and the young child will escape and become an evil figure.
So, the young Joe realizes there is only one solution: Suicide. By killing himself, the “Old” Joe will cease to be and mother and child will live to a (we presume) better world.
The problem? The time loop, as I said before, applies to everyone sent back in time, not just to this situation.
Person “A” kills his older self “B”. He then lives thirty years and becomes “B” only to then go back in time and be killed by “A” who then lives thirty years and becomes “B” only to then go back in time and so on and so on and so on.
In the case of old and young Joe, however, another wrinkle is set up:
Person “A” fails to kill his older self “B”. “B” heads after child but never gets him and the “Rainmaker” grows to become a powerful mob figure. “A” grows up into person “C” (person “B” might, after all, still be around in this new reality, though a very old man by that point) and is sent back in time where he either merges with “B” (two people appearing in the same space at the same time=splat?!) and “A” wonders just what the hell that was all about. Then person “A” grows up to be “B”, is sent back in time, escapes (because he knows the evils of the “Rainmaker”), fails to get the boy, “A” grows up and becomes “C” again and splat! once again.
Or…there is no splat and each subsequent “Old” Joe appears before “Young” Joe until there is literally a field of “Old” Joes sitting before “Young” Joe, all intent on killing this one boy.
As I said before, and it bears repeating: The first time loop applies to ALL the Looper killings, not just to “Old/Young” Joe. They’re all in a time loop, young and old versions, all killing their older self and growing up to be older people who are then sent back in time, are killed, and grow to be older and are killed again and again and again.
Time travel stories can really make your head hurt.
Still, if you aren’t like me and don’t get so damn anal (like me) about these things, I nonetheless recommend you go out and see Looper. While it may not leave you cheering at the end, it is nonetheless a great diversion and an intelligent take on the whole time travel concept.
Despite some great sequences and some interesting ideas, last summer’s Prometheus, legendary director Ridley Scott’s (somewhat oblique) return to the Alien universe, remains one of the bigger cinematic disappointments I’ve experienced in many a year (read the original review here).
When I walked out of the theater a few months back after seeing the film, I nonetheless wondered if I would purchase the eventual BluRay release, which I figured would have some cut scenes included. Surely there was some trimmed cinematic seconds/minutes of material out there that would more fully flesh this sometimes very perplexing film.
Right?
Yet I was on the fence. Would/could anything “improve” this deeply flawed (to my eyes) work, or would the cut scenes reinforce my feelings that the film was flawed almost from the very beginning and would never become an improved or better work?
Well, the BluRay/DVD was released yesterday and the sale price proved low enough for me to give the BluRay a try. I immediately put the disc into my machine and moved to the alternate/deleted scenes segment and…
…well…
Sadly, the cut scenes reinforced the later opinion. The film was always going to be a flawed work, and the sequences that were cut didn’t really add all that much more clarity to the overall product. I suppose the best of the cut scenes was a sequence that humanized Charlize Theron’s Meredith Vickers a little. There was also a longer climactic fight between Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw and the engraged/revived Engineer, but in the end it was wise to trim this down. It was simply too difficult to believe the injured Shaw would offer that much of a fight against such a bigger menace…a menace that a few scenes before disabled the stronger David in a matter of seconds.
Otherwise, all the movie’s original flaws -again, to my eyes- remain firmly in place. I still don’t understand why David spiked the drink. I can’t understand why Weyland “hid” in the ship…it proved a completely pointless storyline. The male medical machine, similarly, was an alternately silly and too obvious (look here! A medical machine…I wonder if it will be used later in the film!?) idea in the end. If such a machine existed, why would it be designed for men alone?
Then there were the various characters. Why was Charlie Holloway, Elizabeth Shaw’s lover, so disappointed by what they found? Sure, they didn’t find living engineers, but they found iron-clad evidence of intelligent life! Why was he so sour about this?
Jeeze, I could go on and on and on here.
I suppose the bottom line remains as it was before. Despite some interesting concepts, Prometheus remains a deeply flawed work. I don’t think there will be a future “director’s cut” that will clarify and improve on what we saw in theaters, at least based on the cut scenes included in this release. I could be wrong, of course, and perhaps there are a few sequences out there that weren’t included in this release.
As a lifelong fan of music, it is humorous to have your very own offspring mock your musical tastes as old fashioned. Once in a while, though, I startle them by sniffing out something they (grudgingly) wind up liking before they or their friends discover it.
First Aid Kit’s Emmylou is one such song, a terrific tune that resonates despite the fact that I’ve never, ever been much of a fan of country music. Still, the most remarkable about this song (indeed, the album itself) by this sister act is that they hail from that bedrock of country music…Sweden!
…and wouldn’t you know it, there’s actual video of the crash:
Weird stuff. As informative as the clip above was, I didn’t get a terribly good sense of what this the Bugatti Veyron, the $2.2 million dollar car itself, looked like. This is it:
Needless to say, a pretty nice looking vehicle, though even if I were a multi-multi-millionaire, I’d have a hard time justifying spending that much cash on what amounts to a…car.
As for the video itself, I think things aren’t looking all that good for the car’s owner. To begin, one has to agree with the report: It doesn’t look like there was any pelican distracting or causing the driver to veer into the water. Further…just what the heck was he doing driving a multi-million dollar car so close to the edge of water in the first place?
With a few exceptions. Like interesting characters. A scenario that, clever as Mr. Whedon and company made it, also expected the audience to accept our villains were also incredibly, mind-numbingly stupid.
But let’s back up for a moment. The film starts with two seemingly divergent sets of characters. On the one hand we have a bunch of office drones in some strange, undefined worker setting complaining about your typical office drone problems with management or the job itself. Then, you have a group of five rather old looking “teens” (I suppose the satire element has begun!) who are about to embark on a vacation. Their destination? A…cabin in the woods…
Strange stuff subsequently happens and our two seemingly divergent sets of characters are slowly brought together into a single gory (but not too gory) story.
As a fan of horror films and the horror genre, Cabin In the Woods sounded like something in my wheelhouse. Early word was that this was a clever deconstruction of the modern “slasher” genre, and I was certainly game for a clever horror film.
As the film played out, it was hard to miss the references to other famous (and infamous!) horror films like Evil Dead, Friday The 13th, Hellraiser, Psycho, etc. And that’s not even mentioning the very obvious shout out to Scooby Doo via the group of teens themselves.
But, but, but…
As clever as all these little tips of the hat were, as the movie went on, I found myself less and less engaged in what was going on. Yes, there were moments I chuckled. But there were very few moments I actually felt any horror. After a while, I realized that part of the problem was that as clever as the script was in riffing off other films, the characters we were suppose to sympathize with were simply…flat.
In many ways, Cabin in the Woods seems to be trying, more than anything else, to be this generation’s version of the 1981 film An American Werewolf In London. Both films featured clever (and plentiful) riffs on other films, but An American Werewolf In London worked better, to my mind, because the characters were far more genuine and interesting. Thus, the shocks, the gore, and the laughs were that much bigger when they came at you versus Cabin In The Woods.
In the end, Cabin In The Woods winds up being a disappointment. It’s not a bad film, mind you. It is perfectly watchable to any horror fan out there. But by the same token it never quite reaches the heights of what I felt it was trying for.
Of the many, many beautiful women who have appeared in film, one of the most beautiful, to my mind, is Bridget Bardot.
In the following link, photographs are presented of Mrs. Bardot’s “Style Evolution.” What was most depressing to see was that in her most recent photographs, on what I’m assuming is her 78th birthday, she is using crutches to get around:
Fascinating article about the controversy regarding the “Isleworth Mona Lisa” a painting very similar to what is perhaps the most famous painting in existence, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci.
It would appear the people who own the Isleworth Mona Lisa claim that extensive examination of the painting suggest to them that Leonardo Da Vinci did this painting as well, perhaps as an “early draft” of the more famous painting that followed.
For what it’s worth (what am I, an art expert?!) in looking at the two portraits side by side, with the original Mona Lisa on the left and the Isleworth Mona Lisa on the right, it appears to me the Isleworth Mona Lisa, while obviously very similar to Da Vinci’s painting, also appears to me a much simpler piece. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that it wasn’t made by Da Vinci, but it does plant a seed of doubt in my mind.
As for the actual experts presented in the CNN article linked to above, it would appear those who may have an interest in the painting being declared a Da Vinci obviously stand to gain a lot of money if such a declaration is valid…which unfortunately further raises suspicion in my mind.
The fact is that the Mona Lisa has been a very famous painting for many, many hundreds of years, and therefore it seems more likely that a painter with some undeniable skills decided to make their own version of the famous painting. Maybe, just maybe, they even did it concurrently with the Da Vinci piece (a student in his studio?). Or maybe a decade or two after the fact. Maybe even a century later.
Still, it is undeniably intriguing to think that Da Vinci might have made another version of what is without a doubt the most famous painting on the face of this planet.
The last time I saw Hard Rain (which could well be called the wettest movie ever) it was during its 1998 original theatrical run. Though overall I felt the film was a disappointment, unlike many films I see and promptly forget about, the movie’s setting stuck with me over all these years and, when the film played on cable the other day, I couldn’t help but revisit it.
So, did my opinion of the film change in the fourteen or so years since its initial release?
Alas, not all that much.
Hard Rain, as already mentioned, could well be the wettest film ever made. It involves a town that is facing a flood, a security truck filled with loot, thieves (and other unsavory types) using this disaster to enrich themselves on said loot, and the honest security truck driver who tries his mightiest to thwart the crooks from getting the loot.
The honest security truck driver, Tom, is played by Christian Slater in a role very reminiscent of his straight arrow (ouch) role in the John Woo directed Broken Arrow, released only two years before this film. In fact, it doesn’t surprise me to much to find, while investigating this film, that John Woo was in fact originally slated to direct Hard Rain but ultimately, obviously, didn’t.
The director of this film, Mikael Salomon, does a good job presenting the incredible flooding sequences and semi-submerged buildings. His action scenes, on the other hand, don’t have the zip of a John Woo, and one can’t help but wonder if this movie might have worked better had a more established action director taken the helm.
For you see, the movie’s main problem, the one that had me leaving the theater disappointed when I first saw the film all those years ago, remains: The script is simply lackluster. Yes, there are attempts to create interesting drama by shifting character’s loyalties. However, the fact remains that the characters in this film are all…characters. Not for a second did I feel we were watching anything but a film. Thus, there was never any sense of dread or danger, something we should obviously have felt. Or, to put it another way, the movie’s many sequences (action or otherwise) play out one after the other and while there is some suspense, there just isn’t enough.
So what remains is what stayed in my mind all these years: Those incredible water filled sets. I can’t even begin to imagine the misery involved in making this film. I can’t imagine the number of hours the cast and crew had to spend soaked to the bone while wading through all that water and being drenched in all that rain.
Hard Rain is a truly unique film to see. I can honestly say you will never see the likes of it on almost anything else out there. Unfortunately, as an “action” film it fares less, raising just a little above mediocre but not all that much more. Given the unique setting, I would recommend this film to anyone curious to see a truly staggering water logged set. It is impressive as hell. But realize that the film itself isn’t the action and suspense classic it could have been.
I’ve presented the movie’s trailer below. However, be forewarned: One of the film’s bigger plot twists is revealed within it!
If there seems to be one thing you can expect to find every few months in the theaters is a Jason Statham action/adventure film. You have to admire the man’s ability to find steady work. In 2011, for example, IMDB lists four films he appeared in…though at least one, Gnomeo & Juliet, only featured his voice work.
2012 was a little “slower” a year for him as he appeared in only two features, Expendables 2 and the film that’s the focus of this review: Safe.
Like too many of Mr. Statham’s latest films, this one seemed to come and go rather abruptly from theaters, yet I recalled reading several positive reviews and decided to give it a try.
Did I waste my time?
As it turned out, I didn’t, though as good as I ultimately felt the movie was, it had the potential to be a truly great film…and just fell short.
Safe treads plenty of familiar ground. We have Mr. Statham playing the role of Luke Wright, a moody fellow who somehow got involved in an MMA fight that went horribly wrong and put him on the bad side of some Russian mobsters. They killed his wife and effectively (so it seemed!) shut his life down. The Russian mob warned him they would constantly watch his movements and anyone he got to close to would be killed. Likewise, he was told he could not put down any roots, as any home or apartment he tried to live in would be destroyed and anyone living near him would be killed.
Meanwhile, the mob in China has sniffed out a gifted young student named Mei (Catherine Chan) and transferred her to New York, where her incredible gift for mathematics allows them to use her to keep track of all their numbers. As the leader of the Chinese mob notes, he favors using this gifted girl as that way there is no “paper or electronic trail” to point incriminating fingers toward his organization.
Ultimately, Mei is tasked to see and recall a series of mysterious numbers for some mysterious purpose. She does as asked, but before she can use the numbers the Russian mob (the same individuals that crossed Luke Wright) kidnap the girl. The police get involved, but it turns out they’re just as corrupt as both the Chinese and Russian mobs, and a three way power play results when Mei escapes her captors and is loose on the streets of New York.
While loose, who do you suppose she happens to run into?
What follows are some good stunts and bone-crushing (yet not overwhelmingly bloody) violence as the damaged Wright takes Mei under his wing and tries to skirt the minefield erected by the various corrupt officials…including, as we soon find, the mayor of New York himself.
It is at that point, I felt, that the movie was at its best. When the revelations were made about who exactly Luke Wright was and what his place in this chain of corruption was, I found myself quite excited. Though the movie isn’t exactly the most original thing I’ve seen (the 1998 Bruce Willis/Alec Baldwin film Mercury Rising had a very similar plot), the revelations regarding Wright were intriguing and produced an almost Yojimbo-like sequence where our anti-hero began playing the players against each other.
Add to that a very intriguing (and surprising!) main villain showdown in the later stages of the film and there were certainly the potential for this film to really knock it out of the park.
But what was the potentially strongest part of this film, the surprise main villain, unfortunately played out a little too quickly for my taste. I wish more time could have been devoted to explaining who this person was and why he and Wright were destined to collide.
Having said that, Safe is one of the better of the more recent Jason Statham vehicles. Despite some flaws, I would certainly recommend it as a good action time-killer.
