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Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

This blog will pay for itself.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

No one could have predicted…

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

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Reader Interactions

93Comments

  2. 2.

    brent

    I actually do like the look of the trailer. I will definitely see it but I hate time travel as a premise. It almost always turns out to be a dog’s breakfast.

  3. 3.

    Wiesman

    I think it looks interesting as long as you don’t think about it. I mean….

    Let’s say you have someone who you need to be dead. Obviously this person is a threat to you in some way. What is the absolute worst possible thing you could do with a person who is a threat to you? Yeah, send him back to the past where he CAN COMPLETELY DESTROY YOU BY DOING SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS FINDING YOU IN YOUR CRIB AND KILLING YOU!!! AAAAAAH SO STUPID WHY IS MY CAPS LOCK KEY STUCK?!?!?!!!?

  4. 4.

    joes527

    Interesting premise?

    Criminals in the future find throwing someone into a time machine to be delt with by JGL is more efficient than just pushing them into traffic.

    I’m sensing that this movie has plot/bus issues.

  5. 5.

    Comrade Jake

    You think time travel blows your mind – wait until you see Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie. I heard it’s a real trip.

  8. 8.

    mai naem

    I thought you were going to show us the Mohammed movie.
    @Comrade Jake: I want to see that movie only because I have a feeling its a bunch of garbage, but hell if Dinesh Dsouza’s making a buck off me. I figure it’ll be on HBO soon enough.

  9. 9.

    General Stuck

    I always have trouble with time travel premise, but if the movie is imaginative with good F/X and storyline, I can go for it. The short trailer supports that possibility.

  10. 10.

    Richard

    Attack of the Zombie Ron Paul Campaign…

    http://news.yahoo.com/3-electoral-college-members-may-pass-gop-ticket-065818753–election.html

    At least three Republican electors say they may not support their party’s presidential ticket when the Electoral College meets in December to formally elect the new president, escalating tensions within the GOP and adding a fresh layer of intrigue to the final weeks of the White House race.

    The electors — all are supporters of former GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul — told The Associated Press they are exploring options should Mitt Romney win their states. They expressed frustration at how Republican leaders have worked to suppress Paul’s conservative movement and his legion of loyal supporters.

  12. 12.

    cathyx

    Is it a guy movie? Well, let’s see.

    Guns and shooting? yes
    Things blowing up? yes
    Cool lead guy? yes
    Helpless blonde girl? yes
    Bruce Willis? yes

    I guess it must be then.

  13. 13.

    gf120581

    After how good JGL was in Dark Knight Rises (seriously, I think he may have given the best performance in the movie), I’ll defintely be checking this one out. Plus, this reunites him with the director of Brick, that really cool high school noir film he did a few years back. Should be interesting.

    Oh, and it also has Emily Blunt in it. Sold.

  15. 15.

    mrmike

    @joes527:
    Interesting premise?

    Criminals in the future find throwing someone into a time machine to be delt[sic] with by JGL is more efficient than just pushing them into traffic.

    I’m sensing that this movie has plot/bus issues.

    Postulate a world with time travel and flying cars.
    Then postulate forensic science to match.
    Sending your enemy back in time to be destroyed before the advent of that technology seems pretty clever, actually.

    I’m not saying I couldn’t find equally clever things to do given that I have access to some pretty spiffy tech too, but most of them have larger windows where the modern high-tech cops can muck with them.

  17. 17.

    Villago Delenda Est

    OK.

    If your future self is sent to the past for you to kill, doesn’t that strongly imply that, in fact, you are in no danger at all for the next thirty years because there is a future self for you to kill?

    Already we’ve got PLOT FAIL all over the place.

    Don’t mess with the timeline. Too many paradoxes. Best left to guys like Matt Groening to have fun with.

  18. 18.

    Roger Moore

    @Richard:

    At least three Republican electors say they may not support their party’s presidential ticket when the Electoral College meets in December to formally elect the new president,

    A sure sign of a happy, well organized party with great confidence in their ability to win big in November. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group.

  19. 19.

    Jim Kakalios

    As Professor Farnsworth once bellowed: “Choke on THAT, Causality!”

    (One of my two favorite sentences ever heard on network television, the other also from Futurama: “Let this corny slice of Americana be your tomb for all Eternity!”

    And any film by the director of BRICK is worth consideration.

  20. 20.

    Dennis SGMM

    Seems to me that unless you’re someone like Phillip K. Dick or the estimable China Mieville time travel becomes a cheesy sort of deus ex machina on which to hang a movie. The thought that occurs to me is if people can travel through time then why would they have to fuck with anyone?

  21. 21.

    joes527

    @mrmike: OK. Let’s assume.

    Since I have a time machine, do I send the guy I don’t like into the past, where he can kill my parents, or into the future where he can … piss on my grave?

    Don’t get me started on the whole “time travel hasn’t been invented yet” silliness.

  22. 22.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Dennis SGMM:

    The thought that occurs to me is if people can travel through time then why would they have to fuck with anyone?

    Why did Dick Cheney engineer an entire war just to get a shitload of torture porn to get his tiny dick hard?

    This is Hollywood. We’re not dealing with normal motivations here.

  23. 23.

    JGabriel

    __
    __
    Funkula:

    Not buying JGL + 30 years = Bruce Willis …

    Yeah, I’m not a big Willis fan either. On the other hand, Willis is an interesting choice, given the time travel and similarity to his role in Twelve Monkeys.

    .

  24. 24.

    RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist

    Oh, seriously! Who cares if a movie is implausible? It’s already just moving lights on a 2-d surface showing actors being who they’re really not. Every one’s got implausibility in spades even before the opening credits roll. I will see this and enjoy it despite the multiple improbabilities. Like a guy being able to move with that much gold on his back. Gold is HEAVY!

  25. 25.

    John Cole

    You anal retentive pricks are the reason we can’t have nice things. I hope you all enjoy Transformers IV, since you’re OCD is why we can’t get new and interesting movies like Looper.

    How the fuck did you all get past the Hobbits in the LOTR trilogy. You know, they don’t really exist…

  29. 29.

    joes527

    @Dennis SGMM:

    The thought that occurs to me is if people can travel through time then why would they have to fuck with anyone?

    Also, if there were such a thing as time travel, wouldn’t the interesting moments of history get really …. crowded, with all the time tourists coming in to watch over the shoulder of Lee Harvey Oswald, and such?

  30. 30.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @John Cole:

    John, you have to suspend disbelief in ways that don’t utterly insult the intelligence of the audience.

    Tolkien knew better than to try that. These clowns do not.

  34. 34.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    I am in my happy place today seeing as Nate Silver said that if the election were held today Romney has an 8.2% chance of winning the election. I saw that and drank it, let it roll around in my mouth like a meaty red wine, enjoyed its flavor and richness before I allowed it to slide down my throat. Desperation is a joy to behold.

  37. 37.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Well, we know JGL must survive or else he can’t come back as Bruce Willis.

    ETA: I hate the NFL network. Packer-Bear game and I have to follow it online. Fuckers.

  38. 38.

    Suffern ACE

    Since this is a movie thread I’m going to plug the movie Raid, which I saw last weekend. Yeah it’s a martial arts film and the premise is way to just get people fighting on screen. Doesn’t matter if people do things that are strange as long as there’s a fight. But the fight scenes are actually quite fun to watch and probably cathartic in these times. It isn’t beautifully choreographed fighting. Its more like Jackie Chan style-pick up whatever is handy and use it as a weapon brawling only actually violent.

  40. 40.

    MikeJ

    @John Cole:

    How the fuck did you all get past the Hobbits in the LOTR trilogy. You know, they don’t really exist…

    I wasn’t really a fan. Never made it more than halfway through the first one.

    This looks better to me.

  41. 41.

    Dennis SGMM

    @Litlebritdifrnt:
    I spent time in places where we had rats. I believe that they are described as Brown River Rats. They were large and not particularly brave. If you cornered them, however, they would do their damnedest to fuck you up. I do not think that Mitt Romney is aove such behavior.

  43. 43.

    Chris Andersen

    It would be interesting if this movie turns out to be really good. I consider the best time travel movie of all time to be Twelve Monkeys and that was a Bruce Willis film as well.

  44. 44.

    lamh35

    I’ve been seeing trailers for this one for a while now and I read reviews from film festivals taht have been good for this film, so I’m really psyched to see it too. It’ll have to wait ’til next week, so no spoilers JC.

  45. 45.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @John Cole:

    How the fuck did you all get past the Hobbits in the LOTR trilogy. You know, they don’t really exist…

    Bullshit. How else does one explain Wallace Shawn?

  47. 47.

    pacem appellant

    To me, this feels like inverted Freejack. I’m not a huge fan of movies that need to be described in their trailers by a minute and a half of exposition, but if John’s buying, then let’s go!

  48. 48.

    Jim Kakalios

    John Cole said: “How the fuck did you all get past the Hobbits in the LOTR trilogy. You know, they don’t really exist…”

    Hey! Spoiler Alert next time?!

  50. 50.

    JGabriel

    @John Cole:

    How the fuck did you all get past the Hobbits in the LOTR trilogy.

    I didn’t get past the Hobbits. I stayed in Hobbiton and married a Hobbit woman who gave me three daughters, all as a cute as a wee kiwi can be.

    Actually, I just made that up because I like saying “cute as wee kiwi can be.”

    ETA:

    I hope you all enjoy Transformers IV, since you’re OCD is why we can’t get new and interesting movies like Looper.

    John Cole, you do know questions are supposed to end with a question mark, right? Sorry, but my OCD wouldn’t let me get past that until pointed it out.

    .

  51. 51.

    General Stuck

    How the fuck did you all get past the Hobbits in the LOTR trilogy. You know, they don’t really exist…

    Yes they do. they do they do.

  56. 56.

    General Stuck

    LOTR’s isn’t actually sci fi. It says right on the box that it’s fantasy. Ask me the question could there be monsters on Acheron (LV-426). Maybe. Believe it or not.

  57. 57.

    CatHairEverywhere

    @John Cole: We’re Dr. Who fans in my house, so we’ll probably find this very realistic.
    It looks fun and entertaining- glad to hear about it.

  58. 58.

    RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist

    Somebody name a ‘realistic’ film and I’ll be glad to point out the utter unreality of a 120 minute story told in sound and flat images.

    It’s OKAY for fiction to be all fictional.

    ETA: on second thought no I won’t. I’m mentally exhausted. I just peeled a Hershey’s Kiss, threw it away and put the foil wrapper in my mouth. Screw it. I’m going to bed.

  59. 59.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Sly:

    Even fictional universes have to be internally consistent.

    This is one of the things that J.K. Rowling was very careful to maintain in her magical Howgwarts universe. There have to be rules, or you leave yourself open to shattering the suspension of disbelief necessary to tell the story.

    Time travel stories are always tricky this way. Trek was constantly doing really stupid things with time travel stories that made people groan in agony. The entire premise of Enterprise, the “temporal cold war” was seen as a way to chicken out, at any point, if the writers managed to paint themselves into a corner. They’ll just hit the reboot button and cheat their way of of the stupid mess they’d gotten themselves into.

    Time travel narratives have to be simple to work, and they can’t have internal contradictions (like this one does) right off the bat.

  60. 60.

    Chris

    @John Cole:

    Shorter this entire thread: “I want my sci-fi fantasy action flicks to be realistic.”

    Nothing wrong with a little realism. Good sci-fi/fantasy should stretch the envelope, but there’s such a thing as going too far and breaking the envelope.

    On the other hand, like I said when TDKR came out… trying too hard to make your stuff realistic (like the pseudo-science in Star Trek, especially TNG, or the “gritty realism” in the Dark Knight trilogy) only calls further attention to the fact that it’s still impossible, which just makes it look more ridiculous.

  61. 61.

    Dennis SGMM

    @Litlebritdifrnt:
    You’ve been there and you’ve done that. I apologize if my comment seemed in any way to disparage your experience of life. Those of us who have encountered pure ugly, no matter what its physical form, have a tendency to believe that we own that experience.

  62. 62.

    22over7

    Cole is right, y’all, but thread is right too. Sometimes you have to suspend your disbelief, sometimes you have to leave it in the car and park the car in the back part of the lot, and sometimes you have to send it on a nice vacation to Antarctica.

    I thought I had done this when I paid money at the theater to see Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Made it almost all the way through, but (SPOILER ALERT!!!1!!!)

    when Mary Todd Lincoln started ordering around General Hancock at Gettysburg, my disbelief hit me on the head. Ow.

  63. 63.

    Hob

    Half of the “how could this make sense” complaints in this thread could be resolved by reading just about any review of the movie. I try to avoid the reviews, but I’ve already picked up enough of a plot summary to be pretty interested.

    I was less interested when I thought it was “Oh no, surprise twist, I’m assigned to murder myself”, but I really like the idea of guys signing on to a job that they know will eventually end that way. I totally believe some people would do that. Just saw Margin Call and was spooked by Kevin Spacey’s speech to the traders near the end, where he’s trying to psyche them up to do a thing that is 100% certain to destroy their own jobs and the economy in general.

  64. 64.

    Hob

    Also, I liked Brick a lot and just wished Johnson had had a few extra bucks to spend on that, because the sound mix on that movie was so bad that the stylized dialogue became incomprehensible. So I’m glad he has a few extra bucks now, and whatever he does with it, I’m willing to bet it’s not stupid even if it makes no sense.

  65. 65.

    RedKitten

    Time travel premises ARE tricky, but sometimes you just have to stop dissecting it and enjoy the show.

    I’m also interested in seeing “Seven Psychopaths”. Woody Harrelson is great at playing crazy.

  69. 69.

    The Crafty Trilobite

    ‘nother little prob with the premise:
    Almost all mob hits are on another criminal, usually b/c the victim is either a) getting uppity and trying to take over your territory; b) in your way when you’re trying to take over his territory; or c) (1)about to turn/(2)already turned states’ evidence. So, ok, you put a hit on him so hard his Mom dies from it. Literally. What does that get you? For (a) and (b), you now have a world where someone ELSE is breathing down your neck or in your way. Or where everything the guy built up that you exploited or want to take over is gone, so you robbed yourself of the gain. For (c)(2), you can’t use the guy’s death to scare off other would-be rats, because nobody remembers he existed. (c)(1) sorta works, except how often does someone who actually has useful info, have so little value to the organization that you can afford to retroactively wipe out his services? And btw, isn’t ANY change to your shared past basically like committing suicide? Some version of you will live, but not the one that put out the hit.

    Don’t even get me started on the entropy problems in The Matrix, or how easy it would have been to fix that dumbness.

  71. 71.

    Anton Sirius

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    Tolkien knew better than to try that. These clowns do not.

    No offense, and with all due respect, and bless your heart VDE, but you have no fucking idea what you are talking about. Every single complaint mentioned in the comments to this thread gets addressed in the movie. Every. Single. One.

    There is nothing more pathetic than someone complaining about the plot of a movie they haven’t even seen.

  73. 73.

    Hob

    @The Crafty Trilobite: That’s not what the movie is about. They’re not killing a younger version of the guys in the past, they’re just using the past as a garbage disposal mechanism for the older guy that they sent back – not trying to change history at all. Of course that’s still a horribly risky thing to do, but like I said, I have no problem believing that people will do massively stupid things if it seems to save them some trouble.

  74. 74.

    Chris

    @The Crafty Trilobite:

    Don’t even get me started on the entropy problems in The Matrix, or how easy it would have been to fix that dumbness.

    When I was young, I thought it’d be really clever if the machines had created a Morpheus-program to seek out the troublemakers, “free” them and take them into a world where they think they’re fighting the machines, but really is just another version of the Matrix.

    Then I realized, why bother with that, just use the Morpheus program to identify the troublemakers and kill them.

    Then I realized, why would you allow the humans to ever achieve consciousness? Why not just cultivate them like vegetables so the problem never arises?

    Then I realized, why use humans at all? Surely there are other, less evolved animals who could serve as AA batteries just as well.

    Oh, the dangers of overthinking sci-fi movies.

  75. 75.

    Arclite

    DON’T WATCH THE TRAILER.

    It gives away too much. Just go and see the movie. It’s getting universal praise at early screenings.

    Rian Johnson (writer and director of Looper) is one of the most talented writer/directors of his generation, having previously done Brick and Brothers Bloom. His movies are simultaneously clever, consistent, stylish, and unique.

  76. 76.

    ericblair

    @RedKitten:

    Time travel premises ARE tricky, but sometimes you just have to stop dissecting it and enjoy the show.

    Getting back to Larry Niven (from the quantum transporter entry; jeez we talk about boring stuff), he’s got a pretty good argument against time travel.

    So somebody somewhere in the universe invents time travel at some point, where you can travel to an arbitrary point in time and change history. Immediately (heh, figure that out), history will be changed millions and millions of times in millions of ways by time travelers from all over time and space. There will only be one stable configuration to history: when at some point, nobody in the Universe ever invents time travel. Then, and only then, history will be stable and nobody will fuck with it. Ergo, time travel never gets invented. QED.

  77. 77.

    Patricia Kayden

    Didn’t like the Time Traveler’s Wife (too sappy and sentimental), but Loopers should be better. Hopefully.

  78. 78.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Anton Sirius:

    I’ve seen the trailer. And the trailer makes no fucking sense. It only makes sense if you kill your future self, then, you start to try to figure out how to save your future self. Because obviously, if you have a future self, you never died for the failure to kill your future self, which is the premise of the movie. You can’t fail a hit, or you die. So you made the hit.

    Damn, now I’m even confused about this.

  80. 80.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Anton Sirius:

    Oh, so the trailer is misleading? All I have to go on, yes indeed, and I’ll admit to it, is the trailer.

    There’s more to it than that? Well, good. Then perhaps it does make sense in the end.

    But you can’t tell that from the trailer.

  81. 81.

    Older

    @Villago Delenda Est: Not so tiny, really. Google Image Search for “Dick Cheney’s Dick” — people have told me that’s a catheter bag, but I’ve seen such bags and they don’t usually hang’em right in the crotch. OTOH, it’s the big ones that are sometimes difficult to get hard. In my experience.

    This picture is interesting in another way as well: It makes Mr Cheney look like a really likeable guy. I don’t believe it, and I’ve never seen another picture that creates that impression. But there it is.

  82. 82.

    Kevin Phillips Bong

    Like Arclite said above, Rian Johnson hasn’t made a bad movie yet. Brick and Brothers Bloom are both worth seeing, Looper is on the top of my list right now along with Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.

  83. 83.

    Nylund

    For people who get annoyed with time travel movies because of the paradoxes and plotholes, I highly suggest Primer. It’s one of the few that does the paradoxes correctly, although it can take a few watchings to start to unravel all the multiple timelines. Don’t worry though, the internet is full of diagrams to help sort it out.

  84. 84.

    Brachiator

    Looper looks like fun. I’ve been looking forward to seeing it.

    Also, too, in a recent video podcast, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone said that The Master is the best film he’s seen so far this year. Some of the scenes with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Joachim Phoenix look amazingly intense. And it looks like much more than “the exposé of the secret history of the Scientology movement” that some might be expecting.

  87. 87.

    Brachiator

    @ericblair:

    Getting back to Larry Niven (from the quantum transporter entry; jeez we talk about boring stuff), he’s got a pretty good argument against time travel.

    I got a good argument against Jedi. Never stopped me from enjoying the first Star Wars films.

  88. 88.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Anton Sirius:

    Oh, so your answer to the problem of the future self being proof that he gets through this problem in order to be sent back to the past is SHUT THE FUCK UP, THAT’S WHY?

    Good to know!

  90. 90.

    ImJohnGalt

    I saw the premiere on TIFF’s opening night last Thursday. I was actually a little disappointed. It could’ve used some editing for length, for sure. At first look, I didn’t think it was JGL, and said as much to my wife, who didn’t know what I was talking about. Turns out he sat through 3 hours of make-up a day to look like a younger Bruce Willis. He was clearly trying to “do” Willis in his mannerisms and speech, which was a little jarring.

    The entire part of the movie that involved Piper Peribo was completely useless – I can only think that it was originally something more, but that they cut a bunch of it, but had to leave in the earlier stuff.

    And then, well, time travel, yeah. A few things: in the movie, they say it was outlawed, so time travel tourism was a no go. The ending was pretty predictable, and opened up a huge paradox, but you kinda have to expect that any time you see a time travel movie. There were a couple of very cool uses of time travel in the movie though – in particular “communicating” with one’s future self in an unexpected manner.

    Anyway, if it was shortened by about 1/2 hour, I’d give it a 7.5. As is, prolly a 6.5. Not crap, but I had hoped for more.

  93. 93.

    Silicon Valley

    This Loopers movie is produced by the freaking CHINESE GOVERNMENT!! There is NO FREAKING WAY I’m going to spend my hard-earned free capitalist money on watching this chinese movie.

    NO.FREAKING.WAY.

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