LOOPER: I've seen the future and it looks like Bruce Willis

The most depressing aspect of director Rian Johnson's imagining of our near future is not the widespread homelessness or the rampant, casual gun violence.
It's the fact that in 2044 we'll be driving the same cars as we do today!
Seems that President Obama's rescue of the US auto industry 3 years ago wasn't enough to ensure long-term survival and after 2012 Detroit just stopped designing new cars.

All-in-all the next thirty years does not hold much for us to be cheerful about if LOOPER is to be believed. This thriller paints a pretty grim picture of the United States where the only thing that's really different from today is that engineers have found a way to take the wheels off motorbikes and make them hover a few feet off the ground.
Well, that and time-travel.
It still doesn't exist in 2044, but by 2074 it will have been invented and immediately banned, but that doesn't stop criminal syndicates from our future's future using it to send back to their past (but our future) criminals that they want murdered. That's because by 2074 not only will we have time travel and hovering motorbikes, we'll also have a body tagging system that makes it almost impossible to do away with someone surrepticiously.
So those marked for death are bundled into the time machine (which looks like an industrial washing machine) and dispatched to 2044 where Loopers like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are waiting with a shotgun to blast them into eternity.
It's a profitable business if you don't mind the blood but it comes with an inescapable expiry date. In order to conceal the fact that they're using illegal time-travel to bump-off undesirables, the mob of the future also periodically sends back the older versions of the Loopers of 2044 to be executed by their younger selves, thereby closing the loop.
Which is how Gordon-Levitt finds himself hunting down Bruce Willis, who is the Joe he's become by 2074, and whose time is now up.
Because Willis was Gordon-Levitt he knows the fate he has in store, and he's determined to avoid it so he can find and kill the child who will grow up into the ruthless mob boss who orders his execution.
(I promise you, this is definitely easier to follow on the screen than in print).
All of which sets up a tense cat and mouse game that allows Gordon-Levitt to show off his impressive Bruce Willis impression (with a little assistance from a prosthetic nose and - more disturbingly - lipstick and over painted eyebrows) and Willis to demonstrate that at 57 he still possesses his 'Die Hard' era tough guy chops.

I'm a sucker for time travel movies and particularly enjoyed writer-director Johnson's refreshing twist on the traditional time travel plot, with the younger Joe having zero interest in learning anything about his future from the older Joe, while the elder Joe's contempt for his younger self's hotheadedness is tempered by his vested interest in keeping him alive.
Stand-out amongst the supporting cast is Jeff Daniels demonstrating there's more to him than two decades of bland leading man roles might have suggested, while Emily Blunt also acquits herself well as the world's most unlikely farmer.
LOOPER is a gripping combination of sci-fi and thrills which will keep you pretty much on the edge of your seat right up to the final showdown. It works because the story is unpredictable, uncomplicated despite the subject matter, and succeeds in avoiding most of the holes and implausibilities which tend to dog time-traveling tales. With just one exception that I spotted, there's not the distractions caused by trying to figure out whether a certain thing really would or could happen when a character travels through time.
With LOOPER to add to 'The Dark Knight Rises', '50/50' and 'Inception' Gordon-Levitt continues his inexorable march towards Hollywood leading man status and director Johnson sets himself a high bar to clear with his next project, whatever that may be. For the rest of us, unburdened by such career opportunities or challenges. there's nothing more required than to sit back and enjoy.

 

ARBITRAGE: forget the title, feel the tension

Wall Street bankers and their ilk are rapidly becoming Hollywood's default bad guys. It's not surprisingly really given the financial misery they've inflicted on millions since 2008.
The latest incarnation of amorality and greed on two legs is Robert Miller.

He's a ultra-wealthy hedge-fund manager up to his neck in the brown smelly stuff.
And it's a situation entirely of his own making.
He's trying to sell his company before the buyers discover a 4 hundred million dollar hole in his accounts.
He's also trying to keep the financial quagmire a secret from his family.
And he's trying to placate his increasingly resentful and frustrated mistress who wants more of his time than he feels able to give. 
Despite the challenge, Miller's proving successful at keeping his head above the far less appealing equivalent of water until the fateful night when he falls asleep at the wheel.
For those who believe that those with money and influence have been getting away with it for too long, what happens next makes for sweet revenge.
It also makes for compulsive viewing.
Where 2011's 'Margin Call' focused on the complexity of the financial deals that brought about the crash of '08 and required close attention to follow what was happening, ARBITRAGE uses the world of high finance as the backdrop to a more traditional style of thriller. The focus here is less on the detail of the monetary shenanigans and more on the man at the centre of them.
As played by Richard Gere, Miller is outwardly a pillar of Manhattan respectability. He's just made the cover of Forbes as a shining example of hedge-fund smarts, and he and wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon) are generous patrons of various charitable causes. Miller's smooth, sophisticated and keeps his iron business fist buried deep inside an alluring velvet glove.
There's been much chatter about Gere's performance being Oscar-nomination and while it's true that he is totally convincing in the part and absolutely holds our attention whenever he's on screen, I'm less sure that what he does rises to the level of Oscar-worthy. He didn't blow me away like George Clooney did in 'Michael Clayton.'
Perhaps the problem is that Gere makes it all look so effortless. He doesn't simply play Robert Miller, he is Miller. He is a character we can believe exists outside of the confines of the movie. He had a life before the events depicted here and will continue living after we take our leave of him.

What is indisputable is that ARBITRAGE is Gere's film. There's strong support from Sarandon, Brit Marling (as Miller's grown-up daughter and chief financial officer at his company), Nate Parker (as a young man whom Miller helps and uses without understanding how the two are mutually incompatible) and Tim Roth as an NYC detective - with a decidedly dodgy American accent - on a mission to bring Miller to justice, but it's Gere who dominates.
Much credit is also due to writer-director Nicholas Jarecki who has created a powerful, tense and compelling story which is nowhere near as predictable as one might expect given the subject matter.  It really does keep you guessing to the very end and, unlike 'Michael Clayton',  the plot is as strong as the performances.
Do not be dissuaded by the title (which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary means "the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities or foreign exchange in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies"). An MBA is not required to appreciate this impressive thriller.

SKIDOO: a drug fueled trip to self-indulgent hell

Few films better illustrate mainstream Hollywood's complete inability to grasp late 1960s counter-culture than SKIDOO.
Otto Preminger's 1968 cinematic rendering of an LSD trip is enough to put Charlie Sheen off drugs for life.
Produced and directed by the autocratic 63 year old and starring two actors with a combined age of 99 this film never stood an icecube's chance in hell of accurately portraying the youth dominated hippie movement and its fascination with peace, love and illegal substances. Heck, it's not even an entertaining parody of the culture!

But it's worst offence is not the patronising attitude towards the teens of America who chose love over war, nor is it the simplistic and stereotypical depiction of their alternative lifestyle.
It's the sheer boredom of the undertaking.
The opening scene is an ominous portend of what is to come, with Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing as Tony and Flo Banks, a long married middle-aged couple bickering over which tv channel they're going to watch. With Preminger's camera holding steady on the Banks's tv screen it switches back and forth between channels as Tony and Flo use their respective remote controls to battle for supremacy.
The temptation to reach for my own tv remote and hit the OFF button was immense, but I resisted, persuading myself - in the words of 1990s Irish dance band D:Ream - that "Things Can Only Get Better."
Oh D:Ream, what a heavy burden of guilt it is you bear.
Not only is that song forever etched in my memory as the soundtrack to Tony Blair's 1997 general election triumph and with it the image of John Prescott, Peter Mandelson and other Labour heavyweights half-heartedly mouthing the lyrics at their election night party, but it is also my automatic default internal debate clincher when faced with unmitigated dross like SKIDOO.
No D:Ream, things did not get better. They got worse.
This nonsensical, inconsequential and completely unengaging waste of space turned an hour and 37 minutes into an eternity - and not in a good way.
The leaden comedy drags along, seemingly oblivious to its awfulness and the absence of elements that might loosely be termed entertainment.
I stuck around because once I start watching a film I am really really really loathe to bail on it and also because I wanted to see how the famous old timers in the cast fared.
Not very well as it turned out.
Groucho Marx looked and sounded all of his 78 years. Not even a jet black wig and painted-on mustache could conceal his tired and weak appearance, and his obvious reading of his lines off cue-cards.

George Raft had a nothing bit part which traded on the fact that he was George Raft, former big time movie star, without giving him anything worthwhile to do. I shouldn't have been surprised at that. It's what he did in practically every film he appeared in after his star waned in the mid 1950s.
Mickey Rooney, Cesar Romero, Peter Lawford and Peter Lawford were all similarly underused.
Which left me with Gleason, whose appeal eludes me, Channing in her underwear, which is now  an image now, unfortunately, burned onto my retina, and a surprisingly charmless Frankie Avalon.
SKIDOO is bizarre, undeniably different and monstrously awful. It's not even bad enough to boast kitsch appeal. It's just self-indulgent rubbish by a director who should have known much better.

SCANDAL SHEET: this thriller really grips!

SCANDAL SHEET is a gritty fast paced film noir that packs a whole lot of punch into its brief 82 minute running time.
Based on a novel by fledgling film director Sam Fuller, this is a story that'll grab you by the throat in the opening minutes and just refuse to let go until its gripping climax.
And that - in no small part - is due to Broderick Crawford's mesmerising performance. Playing Mark Chapman, the brutish, unscrupulous editor of the New York Express newspaper whose only concern is the number of zeroes on the end of his circulation figures, he dominates the screen and absolutely demands our attention.
Chapman has no time for ethics or morals. He doesn't care whose lives he tramples on or whose reputations he destroys. His sole ambition is to give his readers what they want - or what he thinks they want - and that's cheap sensationalism and the exploitation of those who can't answer back.
And while he sits in his office and barks his orders, it's his protege, ambitious young reporter Steve McCleary, who eagerly puts Chapman's philosophy into practice. When we first encounter him in the film's opening scene he's scoring an exclusive interview with a distraught woman whose sister has just been hacked to death. He gets to her before the police do by passing himself off as a detective and laughs in her face when she rails at him for tricking her. 
And it's McCleary in his zeal to please his mentor who sets in motion the seeds of his destruction. Latching on to the apparently run of the mill suicide of a down on her luck middle aged woman in a seedy rooming house, he discovers she was actually murdered shortly after attending an Express sponsored Lonelyhearts dance. He decides to exploit the connection for maximum publicity and insists it be splashed on the paper's front page, unaware that her killer is his boss.
And if that's not a contrived enough coincidence, Chapman actually encourages him in his hunt for the killer because the story is just too good to pass up.

There's no need for a spoiler alert because SCANDAL SHEET is not a whodunit but a will he get away with it. The thrill is not in trying to guess the killer but in watching McCleary painstakingly piecing together the random clues and wondering when - and if - Chapman will act to protect himself from discovery.
With such a short running time all this naturally unspools at quite a lick and that's good because it helps mask the deficiencies of its two young co-stars. John Derek is too much of a fresh faced pretty boy to be entirely convincing as the kind of journalist in whom an experienced editor like Chapman would place so much trust and confidence.
It's equally difficult to understand why Donna Reed, as the conscience of the newsroom, continues to date McCleary when he's so brazen about his manipulation of the news. McCleary embraces everything she disdains yet she's endlessly willing to give him another chance. If McCleary really were the hotshot journalist the film wants us to believe he is he'd be running around town with fast women and hanging out at nitespots til the early hours, not placating dull as ditchwater Donna.
Not quite a hidden gem but certainly not a diamonique bracelet either SCANDAL SHEET is definitely worth checking out just to sweat along with Crawford as he and we wait to discover whether he's gonna get caught or get away with it.

MEN IN BLACK 3: cast turns the neuralizer on themselves

and completely obliterate their memory of how to have fun.
MEN IN BLACK 3 is a weirdly joyless experience. Weird because it shouldn't be.
All of the elements that made the first installment so much fun are present and correct;

the original stars - Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones,       
the original director - Barry Sonnenfeld,
a multitude of heavily disguised aliens in mostly working class professions and closely monitored by the Men in Black,
an extra-terrestrial threat to the future of Earth which only Agents J and K can avert.
So what's not to work?
The story is slick and inventive yet also limp and lifeless. It's not a pleasure to watch and it's certainly not funny. Will Smith reprises his role as Agent J with professionalism, and Josh Brolin is efficient as a young Agent K, but there's no real energy in the film.
The reason?
This is a franchise that's run out of steam, that's just going through the motions, and deep down inside everyone involved knows it.
Everyone that is but Tommy Lee Jones.
He's not sensing it deep down inside, he's showing it right on the surface. He's barely in the film and when he is he looks like a man who'd much rather be back on his ranch. Heaven knows how big a check was dangled in front of him in order to persuade him back for a third installment of MIB but it wasn't enough to switch him out of autopilot mode.
With Brolin playing it equally laconic and monosyllabic as Jones's younger self it's left to Smith to do the heavy lifting and expending all that exertion leaves him no energy for creative comedy. He's even farmed out the theme song to Pitbull whose uninspired sampling of Mickey and Sylvia's 'Love is Strange' is not a patch on Smith's 'Forget Me Nots' sampling 'Men in Black.'
MEN IN BLACK 3 is not a bad film but it is a disappointing one. If you come to this expecting to relive past glories you will leaving feeling cheated. The magic is missing.