Missing mothers, lost wives, abusive and indifferent father substitutes — Looper may be a movie powered by time travel, but its emotional fuel is abandonment. The new film from Brick director Rian Johnson is a clever, clever contraption about trading in your future to feed your present, and the lost boys and regretful men who willingly embrace such a bargain already believe they have nothing to live for or look forward to. Thirty years of kicking around with a lot of cash in your pocket looks like a pretty good bargain when you're gazing down at it from in front of all that time, but when those last few days are running out, you might not be so ready to go. more »
The filmmaker-critic relationship has always been complex — as demonstrated last weekend with hearty debate and even more heartfelt punches in the epic Joe Swanberg-Devin Faraci throwdown, henceforth known as the Mumble in the Jungle — but Sunday night, Looper director Rian Johnson and journalist Aaron Hillis united in sweet synergy to drop a rousing rendition of Weird Al's Kinks-meets-Star Wars classic "Yoda." I wish I had a futuristic time machine to take us all back to relive the moment with our younger selves, but this YouTube video capturing the entire number should suffice.
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Hitman Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is confronted with his future self — in the form of a time-traveling Bruce Willis — in Rian Johnson's Looper, the writer-director's third feature and one of the freshest original science fiction tales in years. Before debuting the September 28 release at Fantastic Fest over the weekend, Johnson spoke with Movieline about the pre-Brick short script that gestated into Looper, the film's dark streak and the 1970 soul ballad that serves as "the heart of the movie."
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Sony debuted the first poster for Rian Johnson's Looper, which feels like its been in the works for something close to ever but nevertheless has nearly six months remaining before it comes to theaters on Sept. 28. In the meantime, here are its stars doing their best playing-card imitation. Jack of hearts? King of clubs? Enh, forget it.
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This fall you'll see Joseph Gordon-Levitt as you've never seen him before: As Bruce Willis. In the sci-fi time-travel action pic Looper, from Brick director Rian Johnson, Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, an assassin who ties up loose ends for the mob by killing targets as they're sent back in time from the future -- until one day his own future self (played by Willis) comes through for extermination. Previewing a teaser for the September release at WonderCon, Johnson and Gordon-Levitt discussed the trickiness of transforming Gordon-Levitt into a young Willis, pulled off with the aid of prosthetics, and why it's particularly difficult to talk about their time travel thriller.
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a number of high-profile films in the works, but the Jon M. Chu-directed sequel to 2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra isn't one of them. After the jump, watch JGL expertly break the news while avoiding Dark Knight Rises talk, enthusing over Rian Johnson's Looper, and pimping his new film, Hesher.
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