{"id":1359,"date":"2012-09-30T15:48:46","date_gmt":"2012-09-30T23:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/?p=1359"},"modified":"2012-10-06T22:50:55","modified_gmt":"2012-10-07T06:50:55","slug":"looper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/looper\/","title":{"rendered":"Looper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Feels like I&#8217;ve been waiting forever for <a title=\"Looper Network\" href=\"https:\/\/www.loopernetwork.com\"><em>Looper<\/em><\/a> to come out. Finally got to see it last night.<\/p>\n<p>Funny pre-amble: \u00c2\u00a0As I was buying tickets, the previous show was letting out. I&#8217;ve gone out of my way for months to not watch trailers, not read interviews, and otherwise not be spoiled at all before seeing the film. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by a mob who just saw it and are discussing what happened. I promptly put my fingers in my ears and started humming.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><em>(<strong>Warning<\/strong> &#8212; To make sure I don&#8217;t do the same to you, stop reading now if you haven&#8217;t seen the movie&#8230;)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Overall I mostly dug <em>Looper<\/em>, but it didn&#8217;t quite live up to the hype in my head. To be fair, with Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Rian Johnson, and consultation by Shane Carruth (of <em>Primer<\/em> fame) my expectation was &#8220;greatest time travel movie ever&#8221; which was probably setting the bar a touch high.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Likes:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The diner scene with future and past selves meeting is an instant classic. Some of the explanations of how memories work echoed <em>Timely Persuasion<\/em> to a degree, and how Bruce Willis decides to NOT talk about time travel is awesome.<\/li>\n<li>JGL totally sells that he&#8217;s a younger Bruce Willis.<\/li>\n<li>Jeff Daniels is awesome as Abe. \u00c2\u00a0Love his &#8220;I&#8217;m from the future. You should go to China&#8221; line.<\/li>\n<li>The flashback\/forward 30 year montage was very well done.<\/li>\n<li>Without giving too much away, the whole general conundrum of the loop was one of the more thought provoking takes I&#8217;ve seen &#8212; especially how it starts to play with whether the older self is actually older &amp; wiser or not (again mirroring TP a bit).<\/li>\n<li>What is probably the iPhone 21 (assuming every other year for a # jump) looks awesome!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>(Nitpicky) Dislikes:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Even though it was a good piece of subtle foreshadowing done well &#8211; and pretty crucial to the endgame &#8211; I didn&#8217;t really like the TK bits. Probably due to the fact that I tend to love time travel, but not really like other sci-fi all that much.<\/li>\n<li>I wanted a little more out of the Abe\/Kid Blue\/Rainmaker story. Maybe some sort of overlap or reveal (for awhile I thought Kid Blue was Abe &#8212; though I&#8217;m not sure if I still think that, or if it would be good or bad if he was). Didn&#8217;t need to be overt or overly explainy, but struck me as a missing piece.<\/li>\n<li>When Bruce Willis is holding his watch and talking about his wife at the diner, I thought the fact that they didn&#8217;t actually show the photo meant it was already gone. \u00c2\u00a0Would have been cool to take that further, indicating he still remembered her though the signs of her existence were fading &#8212; ala <em>BTTF<\/em>&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>I also wished we got just a little bit more from the ending. Maybe a very brief scene in 2074 that hints at whether or not the mission was successful. Not a Hollywood ending, but some sort of open-ended twist about how the Rainmaker turns out.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I suspect some of these dislikes will change over time &#8212; and the alleged 45 minutes of deleted scenes on the DVD may help.<\/p>\n<p>Probably need to revise my list at some point, but after one viewing I&#8217;d put <em>Looper<\/em> behind BTTF, <em>Timecrimes<\/em>, <em>12 Monkeys<\/em>, and <em>Primer<\/em>. Probably ranks right around the under-rated <em>Deja Vu<\/em> in my book &#8212; maybe a few clicks ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Feels like I&#8217;ve been waiting forever for Looper to come out. Finally got to see it last night. Funny pre-amble: \u00c2\u00a0As I was buying tickets, the previous show was letting out. I&#8217;ve gone out of my way for months to not watch trailers, not read interviews, and otherwise not be spoiled at all before seeing&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-time-travel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s3pfx3-looper","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":695,"url":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/search-terms\/","url_meta":{"origin":1359,"position":0},"title":"Search Terms","author":"LBDG","date":"August 9, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Google Analytics rocks.\u00c2\u00a0 I use it to keep track of traffic on all of the Timely Persuasion related sites, getting a decent heads up when the book is referenced on blogs, message boards, tweets, or elsewhere online. The most fascinating\/interesting thing is looking at the search terms people enter that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Misc Debris&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Misc Debris","link":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/category\/misc-debris\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":14,"url":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/commentary-3-gimme-three-steps\/","url_meta":{"origin":1359,"position":1},"title":"Commentary 3: Gimme Three Steps","author":"LBDG","date":"April 7, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the first of many introspective\/exploratory chapters where the narrator is trying to piece together exactly what is happening to him. High on stream of consciousness, low on dialogue. I've always hated writing dialogue, which is probably one of the many reasons I abandoned my screenwriting training and wrote\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Behind the Scenes&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Behind the Scenes","link":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/category\/behind-the-scenes\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12,"url":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/the-movie\/","url_meta":{"origin":1359,"position":2},"title":"The Movie","author":"LBDG","date":"April 1, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Got a call a few days ago from a friend in the industry. He circulated his copy of Timely Persuasion around the office and said it generated interest faster than anything he'd ever seen. I've been commissioned to convert the book into a screenplay (with an option for a sequel)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;News&quot;","block_context":{"text":"News","link":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/category\/news\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":321,"url":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/twilight\/","url_meta":{"origin":1359,"position":3},"title":"Twilight","author":"LBDG","date":"December 21, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"No, I'm not talking about the movie and series of books that are all the rage these days.\u00c2\u00a0 This is about Rod Serling and his good old fashioned series The Twilight Zone. I recently discovered that video site Joost has streaming episodes of the show available for free online, which\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Time Travel&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Time Travel","link":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/category\/time-travel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":852,"url":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/ramblings-iv\/","url_meta":{"origin":1359,"position":4},"title":"Ramblings IV","author":"LBDG","date":"January 17, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Been re-watching LOST in anticipation of the final season. \u00c2\u00a0Finished off Season 1, then decided to jump straight to Season 5 presuming these two will be the most relevant to Season 6. \u00c2\u00a0I'm still impressed with how well the time travel was handled in a \"Whatever Happened, Happened\" sort of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Misc Debris&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Misc Debris","link":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/category\/misc-debris\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1665,"url":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/kurt-cobain-time-travel-3-books\/","url_meta":{"origin":1359,"position":5},"title":"Kurt Cobain + Time Travel = 3 Books","author":"LBDG","date":"April 4, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Fun fact: Searching for Cobain time travel on Amazon yields 3 results: Lost in the '90s\u00a0by Frank Anthony Polito: A teenaged rocker stage-dives during a '90s themed dance and wakes up in 1994. Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman: An essay collection featuring unrelated sections on time travel and Kurt\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Behind the Scenes&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Behind the Scenes","link":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/category\/behind-the-scenes\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"The Drawing of the Three","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/2014-04-04-09.09.59-pm-282x300.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1359"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1366,"href":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions\/1366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.timelypersuasion.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}