An Analogue Splinter in the Digital Eye

It'd been a while so I decided it was time to dip my toe into the realm of currently popular anime. So I watched the first couple episodes of Re:Zero--Starting Life in Another World (ゼロから始める異世界生活), a popular series that debuted this year. Anime series are being produced constantly now, cheaply and unabashedly recycling devices, which is a big part of why I rarely watch anime anymore. Re:Zero looks cheap and liberally incorporates well worn devices but there is an inventiveness in the dialogue itself that makes it enjoyable.

Among other things, it has the stock fish out of water protagonist--a young man, Suburu (Yūsuke Kobayashi), transported to a magical, vaguely European mediaeval fantasy world, and, in an extremely conventional twist, he's the post-modern hero aware of all the fictional conventions. He talks about how he was probably summoned by a beautiful woman, he probably has magical powers now, etcetera. I wonder when we'll get the post-post modern hero who's aware of being aware--maybe that would be like the protagonist breaking the fourth wall in a flashback seen in the recent Deadpool movie.

The main love interest, though there's the usual harem of potentials, is an unremarkably designed, beautiful silver haired tsundere named Emilia (Rie Takahashi) though, unlike Senjougahara in Bakamonogatari, she's not aware that she's a tsundere, all the post modern awareness being reserved for Suburu so far. Most interesting to me, though, is the show's use of a Groundhog Day style time loop device.

A recent movie starring Tom Cruise, Edge of To-morrow, is based on a 2004 manga called All You Need is Kill. So by way of that manga, the plot device seems to have entered the realm of acceptable, recycled devices in Japanese fiction. Re:Zero begins in the real world where Suburu, at a convenience store, talks about how a fellow needs food after a marathon session of gaming and I thought, the normal experience of the young person nowadays can't be adapted to a story, we have to begin with an unusual break in routine. The experience of playing the video game can't be adapted so the story needs the unusual situation of the character going outside for once. Except, the Groundhog Day device provides a perfect analogy for the gamer's life experience. In fact, the author of All You Need is Kill, Hiroshi Sakurazaka, has cited the experience of a gamer, in addition to Groundhog Day, as being an influence on his work.

Players being transported into the world of a video game is hardly new--the recent Sword Art Online uses this premise, I think inspired by an episode of Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai. But beyond the comedic potential inherent in pairing video game logic with the real world, like "Anthology of Interest II", an episode of Futurama recently plagiarised by an Adam Sandler movie called Pixels, these shows don't really address the emotional reality of a young adult's life devoted to gaming. The Groundhog Day time loop speaks to the life experience of a gamer on a more fundamental level.

The stock characters in Re: Zero are also like the character types in a Japanese dating game simulator. The concept of games with multiple endings, and the need to obsessively replay a game in order to unlock all endings, is a very familiar experience to the gamer. Having a character transported to the world of a video game is ultimately no different from a character being transported to any other world. A post-modern self aware character who continually interacts with the same stock characters, trying to reach a desired relationship goal like a puzzle, and using experience from previous lives, mirrors the gaming experience exactly. In a sense, this is what Groundhog Day is, though Bill Murray's unique style of performance that seems to exist simultaneously within a plot and outside it is a form of post-modernism that can't be matched. But Groundhog Day is also about the protagonist trying to get the "right" ending. The difference perhaps being that Groundhog Day ultimately shows up the shallowness inherent in this pursuit.

While I think Re: Zero may be shallow, my point in bringing this up is that the human experience of the gamer seems to be fighting for expression almost of its own accord. As much as people devoted to gaming to the exclusion of all other activities might obsessively pursue simplistic plots and repetitive tasks, an inevitably more complex story emerges.

Fire, Water, All of It!

How can a movie that gets so much wrong be so damned good? 1954's Hell and High Water (not to be confused with 2016's Hell or High Water) is a sweaty, Red Scare submarine spy film filled with racial stereotypes and sexist attitudes that bizarrely actually seems to mean well as regards race and sex. This Samuel Fuller film succeeds on pure, pulpy, gargantuan Cinemascope attitude.

According to Wikipedia, Steven Spielberg revealed to Fuller in the early 80s that he kept a print of Hell and High Water in the trunk of his car. The film feels very Spielbergian--it obviously had influence on all the submarine material in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But there's a dedication to hitting character emotional beats to string along the logic of the story, for the characters always to be touching each other's nerves, that feels very Spielberg in a more fundamental way.

I was also reminded of Star Trek II in the submarine battles and the use of an oddly triumphant Alfred Newman score for all the action scenes. And there's a giddy nightmare quality to the juxtaposition of the crew fighting over the woman on board, Professor Denise Gerard (Bella Darvi), with their submarine winning a blind fight with a Chinese sub accompanied by fanfare.

The film begins with a series of stock shots of London and Rome and then the story starts in a place that's supposedly Tokyo. A few kanji characters on a wall are the only clues as Adam Jones (Richard Widmark), a World War II veteran submarine captain, hangs about, irritable and wondering why he's there.

He's been called by no government but a secret organisation of civilian scientists from all over the world who are concerned about evidence of Chinese nuclear tests on an island north of Japan. Jones doesn't want any of this nonsense but agrees to help for fifty grand and a crew of his old American comrades in the Japanese sub he uses to take Professor Montel (Victor Francen) to the island.

It's lucky Montel brings his beautiful assistant along because she's the only one who can read the Japanese labels on all the equipment. How did they get a Japanese sub without a Japanese crew or anyone who speaks Japanese? The movie's too busy being fucking awesome to worry about that and moves right along.

Bella Darvi's not nearly as interesting as she is in The Egyptian and is generally rather demure in contrast to the volatile Captain Jones who seems to be running on all ornery but mostly accurate instincts. She throws at him a bad decision he made that cost him dearly back in the war and there's a conflict between his two fisted way of doing things and her sensitive rationality. They hate each other but they can't resist each other. Neither can stand it when the other one is right but is made terribly vulnerable by the resultant insecurity and everyone gets sweaty when they have to turn off the fans to run silent and to conserve power they use red light . . .

It's so bad but so, so good. Even with the poor stereotype Chinese crewman on board who sings a weird alternate English version of "Don't Fence Me In" in order to fit in. His character's more adorable than human but seems to be Fuller's genuine attempt at saying, "We hate Communism, not the people of China."

The film's climax was absurd but I was completely invested in what was happening. This movie has heart, damnit, some things you just can't explain.

The Return of the Nelwyn

I said at one point I planned on getting really drunk and trying to enjoy 1988's Willow. This was after I'd watched my recently purchased DVD and found me as an adult detested this movie I adored when I was a kid. Well, last night I didn't get drunk but I did watch the newer Blu-Ray release, its transfer supervised by George Lucas a year after he'd sold Lucasfilm. And I enjoyed it, which was a relief. Maybe my expectations were lower this time. The film still has a lot of flaws but I'm pleased to say I can see its virtues again.

I was really into this movie as a kid. I think mainly it was part of a general hunger for a mediaeval fantasy film, the kind which studios were trying and generally failing to get off the ground in the 80s--the Conan movies, Krull, Sword and the Sorcerer, Excalibur, Ladyhawke, Legend, films of varying levels of quality but almost uniform poor performance at the box office. I guess they kept trying because of the success of Star Wars, which is essentially a fantasy film, so it seems natural a George Lucas fantasy film was greenlit as late as 1988, despite the poor box office performance of his more recent fantasy films, Labyrinth and Howard the Duck.

I wonder how much of the film was directed by George Lucas and not its credited director, Ron Howard. By his own admission, Lucas tends to take more creative control than producers traditionally do, which is something his friend, Steven Spielberg, was also known for in the 80s. I have the sense the two were modelling their careers on David O. Selznik, the producer from the 30s and 40s who was known for taking a very active hand in films he produced, resulting in a series of films by different directors that bear characteristics of his style. Willow has the Kurosawa style wipes that Lucas made part of the distinctive Star Wars visual style and the first credit that pops up on screen at the end of Willow when the music crescendos, the usual place for the director's credit, is second unit director Micky Moore who worked on the first three Indiana Jones films (credited as Michael Moore until the documentary filmmaker became more famous). This may have been Howard's way of quietly pointing out his reduced role as director.

It's strange that Sorsha (Joanna Whalley) is such a weak character, then, considering how strident Princess Leia was. A lot of that was Carrie Fisher's verve, but in terms of writing, Leia always had a very clear story and motivation. Sorsha is defined entirely by other characters. When her mother orders her to track down and kill babies, she does without complaint. When Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) falls in love with her, she falls in love with him and stops killing babies. She doesn't even try to command the forces attacking Tir Asleen after she defects, it's like she changes shirts in the middle of a football game and everyone just shrugs and goes with it. She's a complete leaf in the wind.

She watches Madmartigan fighting and is really, really impressed and then suddenly finds he's at her mercy . . . so of course she has to change sides. Aside from the fact that this contributes to her reduction as a character, this reflects one of the things I really like about the movie, which is its structure, particularly when it comes to Madmartigan.

The thing that made me want to watch the movie again was hearing a few days ago that Kevin Smith had named his dog Madmartigan. It's such a Kevin Smith thing to do, name a dog after a bad ass character from a movie that everyone's dimly aware of but doesn't get a lot of mainstream attention. I remember as a kid, every time I watched the movie I'd wait with great anticipation for Madmartigan to get his hands on a sword. Then when he does, I'd revel in what great swordplay he engages in. Except, it's not that great. Every time he uses a sword, it's actually a pretty brief shot, usually some kind of spin and a stab, he has nothing on Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. The great thing is how the movie makes you think he's a great swordsman.

We meet him well into the film, locked in a crow's cage on some gods forsaken crossroads. Already he's bragging about what a great swordsman he is and he's frustrated by his predicament. Val Kilmer is handsome and has charisma, overcoming even the film's unfortunate tendency to have everyone call Willow "Peck" all the time to be intriguing. He's dangerous but also kind of likeable and one genuinely wonders what's going to happen once he's let out. When he is, he still doesn't have a sword. He leaves the film a while and we catch up with him again later when he's pretending to be a woman in a stupidly broad comedy routine. This quickly escalates into an exciting chase scene, all through which he still doesn't get a sword. The film teases you with it again and again before he finally gets that sword in Sorsha's tent--maybe it's meant to be a metaphor about discovering his manhood when he falls for a woman--and then he bursts out with it. He was frustrated because he didn't have a sword either and because he was a hero we identified with at this point it added to our frustration, too. So him just having a sword and looking at least halfway cool with it is surprisingly cathartic. It reminds me of Toshiro Mifune in The Hidden Fortress who's introduced as a great warrior but he doesn't get his hands on a weapon until halfway through the film.

Of course, even before he's hit by the love powder there are signs that he likes Sorsha. He's overcome by her beauty when he first sees her and then his petty antagonism with her after she captures him only makes him seem like he likes her more. The film is filled with mythological allusions--the baby in the river like Moses, the sorceress turning the heroes into pigs like Circe in The Odyssey--the love potion works like in Wagner's take on Tristan und Isolde, it doesn't really make two people love each other who don't but breaks down the barriers of society to express a repressed, pre-existing affection. Well, for Madmartigan, anyway, Sorsha just goes with the flow.

Obviously the film owes a lot to The Hobbit with Willow (Warwick Davis) being essentially a Hobbit from Hobbiton only in this film he's called a Nelwyn. Like in The Hobbit, Willow's not a teenager or kid but someone who's already settled down, in this case with a wife and kids. It makes for a nice moment when he feels the braid of hair his wife gave him while he's staring at the walls of the enemy fortress. It's a moment that gives you a sense of how far he's come and how much bigger this world seems than the world he grew up in. And Warwick Davis gives a very nice performance.

In the villains, one sees more parallels to Star Wars with the skull helmeted General Kael (Pat Roach) obviously standing in for Darth Vader--functioning much as Vader did in the first film, before we knew much about his broader connexions to the universe--and Jean Marsh as the evil Queen Bavmorda. Her character is even more simplistic than Grand Moff Tarkin or Emperor Palpatine--or Maleficent, for that matter, motivated entirely by a general, vague hatred and ruthless self-preservation. It's interesting seeing how her relationship with Sorsha could have been something like the one between Vader and Luke but it completely lacks depth. Still, Jean Marsh is very good and her performance almost compensates.

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Killing the Joke

It seems a ridiculously familiar pattern; a revered Alan Moore comic gets turned into a film, the filmmakers say they're doing everything to stay faithful to the source material but they don't and people complain, usually Alan Moore among them. In the case of 2016's The Killing Joke, the film hasn't even enjoyed the usual first flush of fervent praise, mostly from people who never read the comic, and Alan Moore's complaint seems to have manifested mainly in just taking his name off the credits. He said this in a recent interview:

As with all of the work which I do not own, I’m afraid that I have no interest in either the original book, or in the apparently forthcoming cartoon version which I heard about a week or two ago. I have asked for my name to be removed from it, and for any monies accruing from it to be sent to the artist, which is my standard position with all of this…material. Actually, with The Killing Joke, I have never really liked it much as a work – although I of course remember Brian Bolland’s art as being absolutely beautiful – simply because I thought it was far too violent and sexualised a treatment for a simplistic comic book character like Batman and a regrettable misstep on my part. So, Pradeep, I have no interest in Batman, and thus any influence I may have had upon current portrayals of the character is pretty much lost on me.

I understand Moore's feeling that going to darker, more adult places with superheroes has gotten to be a pretty lazy device with modern writers--it's frequently used as an end unto itself which is pretty boring to anyone mentally over fourteen. But I don't agree that Batman is necessarily a too simplistic character in whose universe sex and violence don't belong and I think The Killing Joke, the comic, demonstrates some of that potential. The adaptation, produced by Bruce Timm of Batman: The Animated Series, directed by Sam Liu, and written by respected comic writer Brian Azzarello, is vastly inferior to the source material. But not for sexualising anyone, as has been the primary complaint. No-one mentions the violence because everyone kind of agrees that violence is great. Have you seen the ratings for Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead?

Spoilers after the screenshot

The filmmakers concluded the original comic, which was forty four pages, was too short for a feature film, and for some reason this had to be feature length, so they added a thirty minute sequence at the beginning written by Azzarello. The rest of the movie is supposed to be totally faithful to the comic but it's not. Several lines are slightly altered or removed--like Bullock informing Batman they'd found a lens cap and inferred the Joker had used a camera--and whole new scenes are added which alter the context of the original material, like a fake courtroom scene where the Joker tricks Commissioner Gordon into condemning Batman and a scene at the docks where Batman talks to three prostitutes, something which many viewers say makes a somewhat ambiguous assault the Joker commits more definitely rape. Bruce Timm said in an interview that it never occurred to him that the Joker raped anyone when he read the original comic. If that's true, bless his innocent little heart, but I think most of us, when a ganglord strips a paralysed girl naked in front of his thugs, assume if he's not going to rape her at least one of his men will.

In a now infamous encounter at Comic Con (which I didn't witness), a fan, reportedly dressed as the Joker of all characters, confronted Azzarello for making the character of Barbara even more sexualised than she is in the original comic. Azzarello then chose probably the worst word possible and called the guy a "pussy" in response. Who knows what else Azzarello said, the whole panel's not online, and now I really wish it were because this is just the sort of thing critics will happily massage into any direction they like. It's true, those first thirty minutes added to the film are badly conceived, but it's kind of sad because it's clear Azzarello was trying to write something exactly in response to complaints people had about sexualisation of Barbara in the original comic.

Barbara (Tara Strong) becomes the point of view character in this first portion of the film, telling a separate story in voice over about how she retired as Batgirl. She and Batman (Kevin Conroy) are trying to catch a gangster named Francesco (John DiMaggio), presented as a sort of proto-Joker. Treating everything as a joke, he also makes crude sexual comments about Batgirl and is set up as a kind of stalker. The fight scene animation sadly doesn't do Batgirl any favours by having her stupidly standing with her back to him twice to get caught off guard. Batman wants her to stay off the case, at first saying it's because Francesco isn't afraid of her and he wants him afraid, then saying it's because it's becoming too personal for her.

The story is quite deliberately setting up a parallel to The Killing Joke proper. Like Batman and the Joker, Batgirl and Francesco are set up as adversaries who reflect each other. Batman is about fear and awe, the Joker is about the meaninglessness, and therefore not frightening, universe. Batman is about extreme morals, the Joker is about extreme amorality.

With Batgirl and Francesco, this dichotomy takes on a sexual dimension. This isn't "just" sexualising Batgirl. It's an attempt by Azzarello to put her sexual assault into the context of a conversation about sex rather than what it's criticised for being, a cheap shot, the quick introduction of an issue with all kinds of layers that many people feel need addressing whenever it's brought up. Batgirl versus Francesco is a chance for Batgirl to intellectually deal with the issue--Francesco as the Joker type devalues her as a person, his meaningless world is one where there's no reason not to use women. Batgirl's version of Batman's point of view is a little trickier--she keeps asserting that she's above Francesco's rap, just like Batman always puts himself above the Joker's attitude.

She and Batman get in a fight about him not respecting her enough to face Francesco, she knocks Batman down and starts kissing him, they have sex. As sex scenes go, it is in itself extremely awkward, largely because the animation isn't very good. But the Bruce Timm DC animated universe has always been awkward whenever characters show affection and director Sam Liu's framing of Batman's hand on Batgirl's ass is just embarrassing. I don't have a problem with it, as many seem to for some reason, on the grounds that Batgirl is supposed to be Robin's girlfriend. It doesn't even bother me that there's an age difference between the two or that Batman's a mentor figure. I can see that leading to a dysfunctional relationship, but I see nothing wrong with their relationship being wrong, if you take my meaning. Stories need to be about problems. But it seems kind of pointless here. I think the idea was to establish Batgirl as an adult who can choose a sexual partner and enjoy sex rather than a virgin martyr. But it's just incredibly awkward and Batman's reluctance to talk to her, while credibly creepy, also derails any ideas of exploring Barbara's sexuality in a contrastingly positive way.

When Alan Moore says in a recent interview that he took characters to places they weren't complex enough to go, I don't agree that because a character might not be complex now it means they can't be complex later. But it is surprising hearing the Joker suddenly become so genuinely clever in The Killing Joke. His extended metaphor about Barbara as a library book is so horrible because it's actually pretty clever and the Joker's jokes have traditionally been pretty dumb. In fact, The Killing Joke establishes his origin story as a failed comedian. But the Joker's a lot more interesting when he's philosophical, a hell of a lot more interesting, continuity be damned. Part of the difficulty in adapting The Killing Joke is that it's kind of already been adapted as The Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan which worked so well largely because the Joker was doing in that film precisely what he's doing in The Killing Joke, not trying to get rich, but trying to prove to Batman the world is fundamentally mad. And that sets up Batman as a hero not just there to save people's lives but to save the idea that people's lives mean anything at all.

Azzarello had a good idea in making a parallel story where Barbara becomes part of the conversation but part of the reason it doesn't work and is so tonally different from the Alan Moore material is that Azzarello's dialogue just isn't as fascinatingly brilliant as Moore's. So Barbara versus Francesco is a more run-of-the-mill story, with some awkward sex, unflatteringly juxtaposed with The Killing Joke. It's not just Moore's dialogue, too, that absurdly outshines Azzarello's material, it's Mark Hamill voicing the Joker.

I always thought it was kind of neat Mark Hamill of Luke Skywalker fame voiced the Joker though I generally thought his performance was just adequate, not magnificent. Not so with The Killing Joke and it comes as no surprise to me Hamill's been itching to perform this material for years. Gone is the one note cackle man, Hamill brings layers to this performance I never knew he was capable of. The flashback scenes of the man the Joker used to be, pathetically trying to make it as a comedian despite his end of the rope frustration become deeply absorbing for Moore's dialogue from Hamill's voice. Dropping from the high pitch, Hamill here sounds like a man with an already tenuous grip on a reality that short changed him at every turn, waiting for that last push to go over the edge. He rises above the extraordinarily bad art style.

I can only imagine how bad this looked on the limited big screen release. If people in the audience wondered if this was only test footage I wouldn't have blamed them. Attempts to echo the look of the original comic just serve to underscore how really cheap and boring this movie looks. Bruce Timm's DC animated worlds have pretty much looked like this for a while--he's drifted far from what made his original animated series so remarkable with its emulation of Max Fleischer's Superman cartoons but drawn and painted on black paper. Going to digital seems to have come with stylistic laziness where nothing seems to have a consolidated aesthetic intent anymore but only the dull, fill in the blanks style typical of American productions outsourced to South Korea. For contrast, check out the beautifully stylised animated films included on the Batman: Gotham Knight DVD release, an anthology of animated Batman shorts, that preceded Nolan's The Dark Knight. If any one of those directors and studios and adapted The Killing Joke, we could have had something really amazing. As it is . . .

Squad of One

The thing that finally breaks my brain might be Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in 2016's Suicide Squad. Talking about her and talking about the movie barely seems like the same topic. Every time she was on screen I completely forgot about every thing else like I'd been hit in the head with a baseball bat. It wasn't even until after the movie I asked, "Why would the U.S. government include a gangster's girlfriend with a baseball bat in its covert elite strike force?" The movie is filled with things that don't make sense and sags like a garbage bag with wildly misguided sentimentality in the climax but I did not care so long as I got to watch Harley Quinn.

I could swear her shorts got smaller every time she was on screen. Robbie has a perfect face and a perfect body--and I know, there's a massive minefield in saying something like that and I genuinely love curvy, Christina Hendricks bodies. But Robbie's body and face are like one of those computer generated images that number crunch to find the optimum ratios for proportions based on elaborate psychological testing collated from cultures all over the world. It was the same thing when I saw her in Wolf of Wall Street and Scorsese perfectly cast her as the girl in a room full of beautiful girls that Leonardo DiCaprio's eyes were drawn to like magnets. Because she draws the eyes like magnets and her big eyes and affected accent are perfect for Harley Quinn. But she's not just beautiful; Robbie can play her instrument.

The piqued little head pop when someone mentions "crazy", her high rope acrobatics, her coquettish delivery on the "that's not what they [the voices] really said" punchline.

She overpowers Jared Leto's Joker a bit though I didn't dislike him. Obviously he has a lot less material to work with and Heath Ledger's Joker is an all but impossible act to follow. He functions as Harley's boyfriend and lacks the philosophically motivated destruction that made Ledger's Joker so compulsively watchable or the sheer force of personality that made Jack Nicholson's work. But I liked the visuals constructed around him.

Despite Warners CEO Kevin Tsujihara's recent comment that the DC cinematic universe, contrasted with Marvel's, is "steeped in realism", it's been abundantly obvious in Zack Snyder's two films and this one that they're moving towards something much more deliberately artificial than the Christopher Nolan films and I think Suicide Squad is the best in the line so far. I hear there's something like seven or eight completely different cuts of the film and the final result is a committee created collage of the cuts. The shifts in tone are most jarring in the climax where the team faces off against a villain that, as most reviews point out, is not nearly as good as all the collection of backstories. But what really drags things down is literal drag, when the film gives us a series of slow motion shots that attempt to wallow in a hastily inserted theme about the importance of friendship. If they'd asked me for advice, I'd have told them to go and watch Reservoir Dogs. You want to make a movie about a team of scumbags? That's where you look for inspiration.

Oh, yeah, Will Smith was the star of the movie. He was fine as Deadshot, really the only character who makes sense. He's a hired gun so I can believe he'd work for the U.S. government for the right price and I believe the government might actually want to recruit him. And Will Smith is fine, he just can't compete with Margot Robbie.

Trained as a psychiatrist and then shown living it up with the Joker she somehow has mastered martial arts. Well, okay. The filmmakers evidently felt the group needed a bunch of thugs to fight against so they're confronted by guys who look like Scaroth from the Doctor Who story City of Death.

They're less convincing without Julian Glover behind the mask.

Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) looks pretty good in her costume though mostly she just makes Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) look incompetent.

Scattered Things in the Void

The 2008 Doctor Who audio play, Assassin in the Limelight, is a nice enough time travel adventure about someone trying to prevent Abraham Lincoln's assassination for nefarious, timeline altering purposes. It's the usual Time Traveller's Responsibility dilemma (with The Time Meddler directly referenced) but it's nicely done. Featuring the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) and companion Evelyn Smythe (Maggie Stables), my favourite thing about it is that it allows Evelyn to actually seem like a history professor. She's one of my favourite companions, partly just because she's atypical for being an older woman, but also because she's had more training and experience than most companions and Maggie Stables gives a good performance. So often she's written like most other companions, there to constantly ask the Doctor questions. Here, she's able to recognise people and places in the mid-19th century U.S. much quicker than the Doctor, which is a pleasing change of pace, particularly for the conceited Sixth Doctor.

To-day I read "BEDTIME STORY", a 1983 story by Caitlin R. Kiernan included a couple days ago in the new Sirenia Digest. A nice little horror story, I was surprised how much it resembles her newer work, particularly in the old man telling stories to his grandchildren. The tone of the scene strongly reminded me of the old woman telling stories in a homage Caitlin wrote to Lovecraft's "Cats of Ulthar" in the Digest some time ago. It has the levels of menace existing simultaneously with the playful childhood compulsion to test courage and an adult's real fear of unknown danger in the darkness.

I was sorry to hear to-day of Kenny Baker's death. Most stories refer to him as the man who played R2-D2 but, really, just about anyone Baker's height could shake that droid around. When I see that face, I'm more reminded of his role in Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits as Fidgit or as the circus denizen in David Lynch's The Elephant Man. Time Bandits was probably his best, most high profile role in an industry that usually has very limited opportunities for dwarves. He held his own alongside John Cleese and Sean Connery.

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The Old Joe is New Again

Common wisdom might say only a zealot would take a job that ended in certain death. Such wisdom forgets junkies and short sighted young people--these are the kinds of people who might take a job as a Looper in Rian Johnson's 2012 movie of that name. An amazing Sci-Fi noir, the movie has style and attitude with a genuine understanding of what makes good noir work.

A lot of people think noir is detectives and/or bad people in trench coats with a tragic ending. The introduction many people have had to noir as a concept in the past twenty years was probably Sin City, the anthology film in which the best story has Mickey Rourke as a big, strange looking guy who's willing to go any distance for his ideals. It's a good story but it's not really noir. A noir is almost always a tragedy in the classical sense of the word--that is, a story where the protagonist comes to a bad end and it really is his or her fault in some way. A good noir is the story of a guilty protagonist.

Looper is obviously to some extend about age. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in prosthetic make-up rivalling Mickey Rourke's in Sin City, plays Joe, a "Looper", a mob employee who murders people sent from the future so that their bodies can be untraceably disposed of. They're called Loopers because, sooner or later, every Looper knows that he's going to have to kill the future version of himself sent back. That's why all the people sent back are wearing hoods. They also have, strapped to their backs, the compensation--twenty or so bars of gold which the Looper can use to live comfortably for thirty years until he's forced to go back in time and be shot.

To a typical young hoodlum, thirty years sounds like a million years and the people working as Loopers tend to make other self-destructive lifestyle choices. Joe doesn't seem different from any other and doesn't seem to have many compunctions about murder or betraying a friend. Then Joe meets his future self, who unexpectedly comes back unbound and without a hood.

The older Joe is played by Bruce Willis, which is why Gordon-Levitt wears the funny nose. I have nothing against Joseph Gordon-Levitt, he's a decent actor and was good in Rian Johnson's Brick, though I don't think anyone's looking for him in movies. I think he's a guy who gets work more because filmmakers like him than because audiences do, Looper could certainly have done with casting someone who looked more like a young Bruce Willis. I remember hearing Terry Gilliam, in the 12 Monkeys DVD commentary, talk about how he likes Bruce Willis' nose, describing it as something that starts at the top as a beautiful Roman nose that then gets abruptly chopped off halfway down. Gordon-Levitt's prosthetic just approximates a normal Roman nose.

12 Monkeys is a movie many people have compared Looper to and its time travel logic is similarly satisfying. But Willis sitting down across from Gordon-Levitt in a diner establishes the film as being more about the contrast of perspective that comes with age. Older Joe doesn't seem to like younger Joe--he knows exactly how irresponsible this kid is and he's had the benefit of having been married to a woman who helped him through drug addiction and other self-descructive tendencies to find a happy and contented life. Until the past came to collect.

It's a common noir theme for a reformed man or woman to suddenly be haunted or ambushed by their past--one of the great classic noirs is even called Out of the Past. Maybe this concept was never more literally realised than it is by Looper.

But the story isn't simply about a reckless Joe versus a mature Joe. Older Joe may in fact be worse for the fact that he has a sense of responsibility and reverence--he has commitment to something now that could make him do worse things than he ever did when he didn't care.

Emily Blunt plays the mother of a gifted child and much of the movie takes place on her farm. Her character reflects the haunted past theme in a more traditional sense--she gave her son to her sister when she led a more reckless lifestyle but is now trying to make good since her sister's death. With this and Edge of To-morrow, Blunt seems to be establishing herself as a name in the time travel movie game.

Aside from Gordon-Levitt's prosthetics, the only complaint I have about the film is all the lens flares. With this movie, Johnson makes J.J. Abrams' lens flare-o-ramas seems like matte paintings. But I can easily forgive the film for this when it so successfully complicates the tragic hero story by the end.