Nebraska Review

Nebraska
Directed by Alexander Payne
Released in 2013

You can’t stop him. The old man hoofs it up the highway shoulder, against the traffic flow. He studies his feet and ignores his white, battered hair, just as he has every day for a couple decades now. He’s not walking for exercise, nor does he look like he’s having a bit of fun. As we soon learn, he’s off to claim a million dollars. But he’s not a millionaire, just a dupe: He fell for one of those mail order sweepstakes. He can’t be that gullible, can he? He’s going senile, yeah, but still, what gives? What drives Woody Grant? Such are the deceptively simple questions in Nebraska, another plainspoken masterpiece directed by Alexander Payne.

It is difficult to summarize Nebraska because it is so easy. Not a whole lot happens. Woody (Bruce Dern) insists he won, but he’s not one to stay put and argue. Rather, he just leaves, by foot, trudging from Billings, Montana with full intent on reaching Nebraska, where the letter promises him money. Woody’s firecracker of a wife, Kate (June Squibb), pegs his misconception on old age and life-long alcoholism. Their son, David (SNL’s Will Forte), agrees, though for some reason he also agrees to humor his old man, firing up the Subaru for a two-man road trip to fetch the money he knows is not there. Perhaps David needs a change after losing his girlfriend, working in a listless electronics store and watching his older brother, Ross (Breaking Bad’s Bob Odenkirk), climb the ranks to anchor the prestigious local Billings newscast. Maybe he just wants to get close to his father. Who knows.

These characters keep their motivations close to their chests. But don’t blame screenwriter Bob Nelson for doing a bad job. If anything, sing his praises. He has written one of the greatest scripts in years, the kind of story critics bemoan we never see in America anymore, to say nothing of Middle America. Again, how to describe? Well, Nelson wrote an … extremely unpretentious art film. Each scene breathes, letting characters live, drink beers, ignore their wives, look off into space, before carrying over, by virtue of classical Hollywood cause-and-effect, to the next scene. Yes, yes, Nebraska has a conflict, a climax, a three-act structure, all that jazz. There is order. But unlike less organic comedy-dramas, like this summer’s The Way Way Back (written by the Oscar-winning pair who collaborated with Payne on The Descendants, which had its forced moments, too), not one moment feels obligated to push the plot forward or, better yet, unearned. Nebraska unfolds like life, as we know it: with time, with memories, with unplanned hilarity.

Like any film of this sort set in the Midwest, like Fargo, The Straight Story or Payne’s own About Schmidt, we often laugh when the characters don’t. Nelson, Payne and we find the pauses in these people’s conversations funny, precisely because the characters don’t. There are laughs to be had in a world unafraid of taking things slow, allowing silence, ignoring “awkwardness.” Contrary to some critics’ conclusions that Payne (an Omaha native) looks down at Midwesterners, I find this film to be an appreciation of their lives … with some reservations. Two nephews of Woody’s turn out to be brainless, boring bullies, begging comparisons to Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. (The look on their faces when David corrects their epithet that Kia is not a “Jap” car but a Korean one is priceless.) The true, albeit minor, antagonist, is Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), who seeks to siphon some of Woody’s fake prize money in order to settle scores from decades prior. Everyone but Woody sees through Ed’s fake smile at once, particularly Kate, who takes on her enemies with simultaneously shocking and adorable profanity. If anything, Payne loves the release — the f-bomb, the punch. No matter where you live, B.S. is B.S., and it cannot stand.

June Squibb as Kate Grant

But these are good people, really. Despite his reputation for black comedy, Payne sees the good in humanity and struggles to do it justice. Shot in black-and-white by Phedon Papamichael and gifted a wonderful bluegrass score by Mark Orton, Nebraska evokes the deserted, timeless quality of the American pastoral. Those who live there must work to do so, and through work manifests greatness. We recognize that David can do so much more than hock speakers in a strip mall, and he recognizes it, too. Woody once flirted with legend — injured Korean War vet, young entrepreneur — before settling on the bottle and fooling around. Even with their personal failings, which are accurate representations of most of us, they live on intuition. David grimaces at Woody’s confession that he and Kate never talked about having kids or what marriage means to them. But then, in a beautiful scene, David watches his mother berate Woody, lying in a hospital bed (not a spoiler, for he’s a clumsy old man), before planting a big kiss on his forehead. Some things don’t need to be explained; they just are, eternally so.

That last line sums up Nebraska, for me at least. I could continue picking apart scenes or applauding Bruce Dern, June Squibb and Will Forte’s performances, all three of whom you can expect Oscar to notice. Yet there’s a quality to this film I don’t want to tarnish through too much scrutiny. It’s not its pathos or humor, though those are alive and well, but more its ease of empathy. I see myself in all of the characters — even the dummy nephews who brag about how fast they can haul it from Nebraska to Texas. These people are more alike than they are different, and they could all do better at this life thing. Nebraska welcomes our late-act attempts at redemption while acknowledging that we never realize them, at least in the way we expect. We better ourselves through the effort, fueled by delusions as we hike along the interstate.

Final Verdict:

5 Stars Out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

The Butler Review

The Butler
Directed by Lee Daniels
Released in 2013

For a review of a movie like this, it is best to get right to the point: Lee Daniels’ The Butler is excellent. Typing those words, pairing this kind of perennial, distractingly star-studded Oscar bait with a word like “excellent” surprises me still. But if a review is anything, it must be honest, so I will be just that. The Butler not only moved me more than any other film this year (save for, perhaps, Fruitvale Station); it brought to life one of the most turbulent and inspiring periods in our country’s history while psychologically, socially and politically picking it apart.

That period is, of course, the civil rights movement, as seen from the vantage point of Cecil Gaines (Forest Whittaker), a black White House butler who served Presidents Eisenhower to Reagan, and who screenwriter Danny Strong based loosely on the little-known Eugene Allen. Cecil learns early in his career that the room should feel empty when he’s in it, and that the white men (and occasional woman) who fill these spaces of privilege expect faultless service and Uncle Tom-ism. “We have no tolerance for politics at the White House,” says the building’s black maître d’, with a mild smile. Cecil Gaines must wear two different faces: one stoic yet grateful, in front of the white man; another entirely before his wife (Oprah Winfrey, of all people) and two sons.

This clash of personae tears Cecil apart over the span of 34 years and makes for some incisive social commentary, but The Butler succeeds as drama and art (yes, I used that word) because Cecil’s eldest son, Louis (David Oyelowo), takes notice. Louis grows up ashamed of his father and what he sees as his demeaning line of work, even as Cecil puts more than enough bread on the table, including starched polo shirts for his sons. At Fisk University, Louis finds his calling in the Freedom Riders and perseveres through the beatings, obscenities and, most harrowingly, firebombs hurled his way.

Louis’ militancy should inspire any conscious viewer, yet Strong and director Lee Daniels coax some crucial moral ambiguity, not to mention over two hours of narrative tension, by pitting Louis and Cecil against one another and allowing things to get, well, ugly. While history has deemed Louis’ sit-ins across the South as a watershed moment in non-violent activism, the jury is still out on the Black Panther party, which Louis dives into with an anarchic zeal, much to the dismay of his father. Cecil may have stood against progress by discouraging Louis from getting involved in any of the political affairs that he himself carefully avoided all his life, but he valued the cogency and safety of his family more than anything else, which no father could blame him for. They scuffle and bare their teeth at one another, each believing with all their might in a code of conduct that the assimilation of their era soon enough deems irrelevant.  Whereas most civil rights films make time for the suffering of their black characters only to bestow the ultimate agency onto sympathetic white characters (see The Help), The Butler keeps the struggle within the black family unit, where the oppositions were often more trenchant and deep-seated than most of us, at least I, could ever believe.

Let us not forget that this a movie about a butler serving the Oval Office, where Daniels unleashes a drove of character actors and former A-list talent to fill the President’s seat. James Marsden may sound more like Mayor Quimby than JFK, but he brings smooth style to spare. John Cusack plays Nixon straight, with little makeup and surprising generosity, while Robin Williams, Liev Schreiber and Alan Rickman throw on bald caps, witch noses and a greasy toupee as Ike, LBJ and the Gipper, respectively. Those last three performances veer into camp, which Daniels, as the director of The Paperboy, can handle, tonal inconsistencies be damned.

There are about a million other actors to mention, including Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan (there seems to be no ulterior motive in her firm yet warm portrayal) and Cuba Gooding Jr. and Lenny Kravitz as Cecil’s genial co-workers. Many of these roles are paper thin, although none is as troubling as the plantation owner played by Alex Pettyfer (Magic Mike). In one of the earliest scenes, this brute of a man rapes Cecil’s mother (Mariah Carey, actually) and blows out her husband’s brains, all in front of a (understandably) traumatized young Cecil. Now, I don’t doubt events like these occurred, but as one of the gateways into this film’s world, it proves especially jarring. Such plantation killings bring to mind the 19th century and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; 1920s hate crime is more often associated with lynching, a motif Daniels also employs. This is a nitpick, in a way, but it simplifies Cecil’s conflict into some binary of white versus black, whereas the rest of the film opts for more internalized and relatable struggles.

Movies like The Butler — the sentimental, decades-spanning Academy-Award-for-Best-Makeup-Oscar-hopefuls “inspired by true events” — are flawed creatures. As much as you cried throughout Forrest Gump, doesn’t that one look funny the more you inspect it? What was its theme, its purpose? The Butler holds up to scrutiny because Strong and Daniels had the clear mind to keep the family dynamic at its core, where history bleeds into their lives and not the other way around. Cecil may win over the hearts of the world’s most powerful men, and Louis may help topple Jim Crow, but they only got there because of the other, whether they like it or not.

Final Verdict:

4 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Amour Review

Amour
Directed by Michael Haneke
Released in 2012

The power of Michael Haneke’s Amour borders on paradox. On the one hand, this film imparts a quiet, rich message of how art, in all its forms, provides the ultimate respite from the harsh realities in life, like illness, attacks and aging. However, the film so fully immerses the viewer into a suffocating depiction of these realities that the experience of watching it becomes its own struggle. It is not a film I recommend lightly, nor one everyone should see, but it grasps the human condition with such conviction and insight that anyone prepared for its brutality should explore its cavernous depths.

The first scene gets right to the point: Firefighters break through the locked door of a posh, worn Parisian apartment and find the wizened corpse of Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) on her bed, hands crossed and surrounded by flowers. From the start, writer-director Haneke shocks us with an image of absolute serenity and truth. Flashback several months back to octogenarians Anne and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) attending a concert of one of her former piano students, Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud), and then returning to their apartment, where the rest of the film remains. These opening shots are composed entirely of long shots, as if these two could be any elderly couple strolling the city. As tempting it may be, however, it is wise not to identify Anne and Georges with kindly grandparents you have or had. Rather, it is better to conceive of them as young lovers still so enamored with each other that the perils of age sneak up on them unawares.

This “attack” hits Anne the morning after the concert, when she stares off at the breakfast table, not responding to Georges’ concerns. Her subsequent surgery (not depicted on-screen) renders her right side paralyzed; coping with this abrupt rearrangement of responsibility tests Georges, as well as the boundaries and definition of love (amour). Cheery stuff. There are moments of levity — Anne spinning donuts with her electric wheelchair, or Georges describing his friend’s “bizarre” funeral — that never deign to “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” levels of irreverence, but the mood only darkens as Anne loses her facilities and, for George, his patience.

Film students will likely study Amour for its restrained camera movement, long shots and varied compositions within a single setting (which calls to mind the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu). Amour could just be a clinical textbook example of how to make a soulless and agonizing ‘art film,’ but Haneke’s direction provokes real feeling. Haneke wants us to empathize with Anne and Georges, two characters who may just be us someday in the future. He also, however, allows us to be frustrated with them, particularly the helpless Anne. As Anne regresses into a more infantile state — framed in unglamorous, laborious close-ups — and Georges grows more irritable, Haneke leaves his audience to just witness their acts, free of sentimental cues or melodrama. It’s not forced but real, which is why it’s so tough.

There is a subtle undercurrent regarding the ineffable, healing power of art throughout the film. As cultured, bourgeois Parisians, Georges and Anne appreciate music, cinema, painting, photography and literature, and Haneke includes a scene with one or both of them interacting with each of these mediums and finding strength therein. The most touching, naturally, relates to cinema, when Georges recounts how he was overwhelmed by a film he saw when he was a young boy. “I don’t remember the film … but I remember the feeling,” he tells Anne, who is enraptured by his story. And so the cycle continues: She will cherish her feelings when hearing his story, and he experiences them once again through the act of confiding to his love. When ailments and age impede on a devoted relationship, Haneke reminds us that art can alleviate the painful path to, well, you know, the end.

Amour recently won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and, back in May, the Palme d’Or, the prestigious honor bestowed at the artsy Cannes Film Festival. Any fears that this is a pretentious, boring film should go unfounded; instead, this is an emotionally draining, arduous two hours that will leave no one unscathed. I have not even mentioned the performances of Riva or Trintignant, though their eminence needs no description. But it is Haneke who deserves the utmost praise for his Oscar-nominated screenplay (a Freudian can analyze the meaning of the pigeon and dream sequences to no end) and direction. He put his all into this honest and unflinching masterpiece — though you may just resent him for it.

Final Verdict:

4.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower Review

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Directed by Stephen Chbosky
Released in 2012

You either ‘get’ The Perks of Being a Wallflower or you don’t. But if you do, it gets you, too. Ever since the source novel was first published 13 years ago, many have compared Stephen Chbosky’s coming-of-age tale to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. The association makes sense, as both novels derive their power from empathy and resonate strongest with the creatures most demanding of it: teenagers. Not everyone connects with these stories — not because of class, race or age as much as a certain sensibility. Perks, as it is affectionately called, speaks to those with a curiosity unfulfilled by a school curriculum, those with a romantic streak marked by spells of sadness, those who crank up Bowie’s “Heroes” while driving with the top down and windows open because, hell, that’s life right there.

Set in Pittsburgh circa the early ‘90s, Perks tells the story of Charlie (Logan Lerman), who narrates from a series of letters he sends to an anonymous acquaintance. Charlie is a shy, troubled and brilliant kid entering his freshman year of high school. Suicide took away his one good friend just months before, and the violent death of his Aunt Helen (Melanie Lynskey) — his “favorite person in the whole world” — on his seventh birthday haunts him still. Struggling alone with remnants of severe depression, Charlie finds the transition more difficult than most. There’s that one girl who calls him a “faggot” for his neat stationary; other bullies join her when they learn he aces papers and completes them early. Perhaps you need to suspend some disbelief to buy that a guy who looks like Lerman can get this much flak, but think back to the dull ones in high school who saw beauty in conformity and disorder in everything else.

With nachos in his hands and nowhere to sit at the football game, Charlie summons a few words to engage Patrick (Ezra Miller), the goofy senior in his freshman shop class. Patrick’s half-sister, Sam (Emma Watson), joins them and Charlie is instantly smitten — I say “instantly” because of the angelic close-up that introduces her, with her face eclipsing the Friday night lights like a halo. After the game, Sam and Patrick welcome Charlie to the “Island of Misfit Toys,” Sam’s too-perfect title for their eclectic group of friends, which also includes “punk Buddhist” Mary Elizabeth (Mae Whitman), kleptomaniac Alice (Erin Wilhelmi) and stoner Bob (Adam Hagenbuch). These are the creative and inquisitive types, some from happy families and others from abusive ones. If you fall under Perks’ purview, you will overlap in some way with one or more of these characters. They scrap the past in favor of the present, bonding over car rides, gifts, dancing, study sessions, movies, marijuana, LSD, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, “Come on Eileen,” The Smiths and lots of mixtapes.

Most teenage movies fall apart after these introductions, devolving into hedonism or empty moralizing. Perks is not like most teenage movies. In a rare sign of trust, producers handed directing and writing duties to the most capable hands possible: Stephen Chbosky himself. He expands the characters he created with simple but undoubtedly filmic elements (there’s grain on the image!). Soft light diffracts about the theater during a Rocky Horror reenactment the friends stage before a packed midnight screening. Their dance moves bring down the house, despite slip-ups here and there. These kids might as well be you or me during those times we stepped out of our comfort zones with a little help from our friends. Perks appeals to those moments of belonging — when “we are infinite,” as Charlie says — and asks us to cherish the love we get.

Love, in its oh-so-many forms, unites these characters and tears them apart. Sam eventually returns Charlie’s affection, in a romance with many ups and downs. Patrick carries on a secret relationship with the school’s football star despite growing homophobic pressures. Charlie tortures himself with the burden of his aunt’s death, for she died in a car crash after giving him a special birthday present. Charlie’s supportive English teacher, Mr. Anderson (Paul Rudd), finds an answer for all the pain the most positive of emotions seems to carry: “We accept the love we think we deserve.”

The cast (which, by the way, includes our very own Julie Leon ’15 as an extra in the first Mr. Anderson scene) dodges the histrionic pitfalls littered about these roles. Lerman delivers a quietly powerful performance that may be tough to watch for those who share or have shared his timid or depressive traits. As for Watson, not once did I think about the Harry Potter films when she was on screen. Far from an overachieving bookworm (it is Charlie who helps her study for the SATs), Sam suffered childhood abuse that left her damaged, and Watson nails the subtleties. And Miller, who terrified as the child from hell in We Need to Talk About Kevin, does an about face here, stealing the best and funniest lines. His role also demands a few potent scenes, whereupon he taps into that familiar melancholy.

I guess you can look at all this and still consider Perks to be routine, or contrived, or stereotypical. Come on, Zach, I’ve seen this all before, you say. You have, yes, and you’ve also heard, smelled, tasted and felt these moments before. Those memories rattle around your brain to this day. Therein lies your power. 

Consider life itself. So much of it abides by routine: We start with the developmental rites of passage mostly out of our control — our first hairs, teeth, steps, words, ‘potty.’ We grow up with ‘play dates,’ television programs and coloring books with shapes that have already been drawn. We begin to process what is going on, how others view us and how we view them. Bam! Acne hits, voices crack and organs grow. We feel miserable. We don’t ask for the purpose of life but for the purpose of living. We grow outward. We begin to notice a pattern. We are surrounded by people playing this same cosmic game. We realize we don’t have the answers to life but everyone else does. We ignore that they actually don’t, because we are having too much fun. We laugh, gossip, cry, fight, kiss, have sex and children. We grow old and settle in routine once more — there are bills to pay. We relax and watch our children start all over, and then their children. We die. What’s the point? Who knows. But we do know the time was worth it when we’re with those we love. We exchange jokes, secrets and mixtapes. And we watch a movie like The Perks of Being a Wallflower and think, “Huh, someone else gets it.”

Final Verdict:

4.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Looper Review

Looper

Directed by Rian Johnson

Released in 2012

Looper is a very good sci-fi movie with a very cool premise. Like Inception, sometimes that premise gets in the way of the story, and like Prometheus, sometimes that story takes one turn too many. But for a film centered on time travel, Looper does its best to remain sober, introducing its made-up rules and paradoxes without obsessing over them. Director and screenwriter Rian Johnson even finds a way to fuse all the fake science with the film’s message and direction. At the very least, it makes for a stunning first act that tapers into a solid but lesser final act upon the introduction of a woman and child (Remember I Am Legend?).

The year is 2074. Time travel is invented and immediately ruled illegal. Naturally, a seedy criminal syndicate manipulates it to kill undesirables. For some reason (DNA tracking?), disposing of bodies is next to impossible in the future, so the target is draped in a hood, strapped with a slate of silver bars (it’s a strange image to describe) and blasted 30 years into the past. In 2044, a “looper” awaits the poor chap to apparate (spellcheck tells me this is not a real word, which makes me sad) out of thin air, at which instant he blasts a hole through the target’s chest with a “blunderbuss” shotgun. It is about as impersonal a murder as one could carry out within such close proximity: Learn French with Rosetta Stone as you wait, listen for the thwap of space-time being breached and pull the trigger before the hit can make a peep.

That is how Joe Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) conducts his business, at least. When not a heartless killing machine, Joe roams the decrepit streets of Kansas City, pumped with normalizing drugs administered through eye drops. He is numb to the world’s poverty and violence, in a daze not unlike Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club. Seth (a reliably flustered Paul Dano) could be considered his friend, but Joe makes a crucial decision that negates even that. The time comes when Joe must face himself — literally. Part of the deal with being a looper is “closing the loop”: unknowingly shooting your future self when the syndicate cuts your contract. The hitman then has 30 years to live in peace, until the gangsters come after you to take you out ... which they already did (time travel is confusing, huh?). Joe’s problem, however, is that his future self (Bruce Willis) appears without a hood, staring him right in the face. Young Joe hesitates, allowing Old Joe to escape.

Johnson wrings this first encounter for more suspense than seems possible, given how this scene serves as the hook for all the movie’s trailers. An economic sequence cuts between a slowly zooming-in shot of an unnerved Young Joe and the rippling vinyl tarp that awaits his next victim. When Old Joe finally materializes, we see him from Young Joe’s distant point of view, followed by an extreme close-up of his eyes and then Young Joe’s eyes. It is filmic storytelling that would make Hitchcock proud (the scene is revisited later with a single, quiet long shot, parodying the earlier tension). A little troubling, however, is the heavy makeup applied on Gordon-Levitt’s lips, eyes and nose, in order to achieve a greater likeness to Willis. The effect is uncanny, in the disconcerting way; I often thought, “Hey, that’s JGL wearing makeup.”

But back to Hitchcock. The crime goons — called “Gat Men,” after the comically oversized revolvers they wield — pursue both Joes after Old Joe gets away, and Looper uses the classic Hitchcock “wrong man accused” trope in regards to Young Joe. But what if the “right” man is the “wrong” man? And what if one person is two different people? The movie sits the two Joe’s across from each other in a diner booth, rivaling the famous Pacino/DeNiro scene from Heat. What would you say to your younger self? Old Joe is downright hostile, scolding Young Joe’s drug addiction and reckless indifference. A sensible path forward would pair the two together, yet Old Joe retreats back into the dark in order to avenge a death, while Young Joe moves toward the light in inverse of Old Joe’s reprehensible actions. Due to some temporal overlap best not overanalyzed, Young Joe can scar or tattoo himself to communicate with his old self; the implications of this loophole are maximized to terrifying effect early in the movie, when an older version of a character literally falls apart while his younger self is tortured (it’s a brilliant scene worthy of your nightmares). The communication between the two Joes plays with (‘pains’ is also valid) your mind and posits life as a constant flux.

Unfortunately, a lot of this magic dissipates in the final 45 minutes, when the subject pivots to Sara (Emily Blunt, surprisingly) and her son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon). The two live by themselves in a rural Kansas farmhouse, which Sara fiercely defends with a rock salt shotgun. She also, naturally, serves as a love interest for Young Joe and allows him to spill open his deep-seated torment. The pace slows down during these scenes, which is fine, and Gagnon’s performance as the troubled child never succumbs to (though it may verge on) camp. But the bond between Young and Old Joe ceases to consider the abundance of existential conflicts the script initially flirted with, and Young Joe’s diminishing screen time robs his final decisions of their allotted impact. Instead, the story focuses on the standard “killing baby Hitler” paradox and throws in telekinesis (lifting things with your mind) as an excuse for lame special effects. Johnson works hard to make time travel appear plausible and seems to joke in the beginning that a genetic mutation has granted 10-percent of humans the ability to suspend quarters in mid-air. The subsequent about face — with the expectation for us to take this paranormal ability seriously — contradicts prior expectations and reverts the final act into a capable but far more ordinary film when compared to the preceding brilliance.

A lack of humor could be culpable for these tonal and narrative inconsistencies. Johnson introduces his world’s quirks early and efficiently, but poking fun at their logical gaps could have secured a defense against all but the most myopic sci-fi geeks. Indeed, the film’s funniest joke is also a grim one: When Young Joe tells crime boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) that he’s learning French because he wants to visit France, Abe replies in a monotone, “I’m from the future. You should go to China.” Ok, maybe not wholesome laughs, but Looper could have at least afforded a lace of sarcasm, right? The Gordon-Levitt voiceover is set, the Kansas City streets are caked in crime and cynicism is practically a pre-existing condition. It all sounds like a film noir, which Johnson and Gordon-Levitt exercised in their 2006 hit Brick. Perhaps our era’s rampant flippancy will erode into abject despair by 2044. I’ll arrange for a time warp with the loopers when that day comes.

Final Verdict:

3.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.