Jeff Daniels

Looper: A Movie Review

/ Casey Tingle / Leave a comment

The year is 2044 and time traveling has not been invented. Yet. But it will be.

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) works as a looper, who are a kind of hired assassin. When time travel is invented, it will be controlled by the mob bosses who send people they want killed back into the past and it’s the looper’s job to get rid of them. Looper’s are only finished being a looper when they are sent their future selves to kill. It’s called closing their loop.

When Joe’s future self (played by Bruce Willis) is sent to him, he hesitates in his surprise and lets him get away, which is a big no-no in the looper job description. Now Joe must hunt him down and kill him before his present self is apprehended by the leader of the operation. Tracking him down won’t be as hard as he thinks. His future self has a goal: to find and kill the child who will be the future Rain Man, a powerful entity who begins closing loops in the future. But which Joe will find the child first?

Looper was an interesting movie. I thought the concept was intriguing, which is what drove me to see it, but other than that the rest was just OK. There were some parts that I felt were forced, such as the people being telekinetic. It felt like that was just added in there as an excuse to why other things ended up happening. For me, personally, there weren’t any parts of the movie that “wowed” me. Not that everything was totally predictable. Just not surprising. I also didn’t have a connection with any of the characters. There was nothing in the movie that made me care what happened to the characters in the end. Overall, good movie, interesting concept, but not winning any Movie of the Year awards from me.

Grade: B

Review of “The Squid and the Whale”

/ Casey Tingle / 1 Comment

Over the past couple of years I have grown a fondness for Jess Eisenberg. It all started, really, when I saw him in Zombieland as the nerdy college student who shuts himself in to play WOW and eat pizza rather than go out to make friends.

Being a sucker for nerds, it is needless to say that I quickly fell for his character, Columbus, and, through the eight other times watching Zombieland, constantly questioned why no one in the movie would find his character attractive. I did.

So I looked up other films that Jesse Eisenberg starred in, one of them being “The Squid and the Whale”, which I found this past weekend in the $4.99 and up bin at Best Buy and knew I had to get it. I don’t regret this decision at all.

“The Squid and the Whale” is the autobiographical coming of age story of two brothers, Frank (Owen Kline) and Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), whose writer parents (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) decide to get a divorce. With a greater animosity growing between the parents, the tension also grows between the two brothers. Walt takes his father’s side and Frank his mother’s, and although they have shared custody of the children, “mom’s days” and “dad’s days” start to become blurred as Walt decides to not go back to his mother’s house and Frank would prefer to be with his mother more.

While watching this movie, I couldn’t help but be reminded of “Running with Scissors”, the comedic movie based off the memoir of the same title. The atmosphere of both movies is very similar, and I think the fan of one could easily be a fan of both.

The characters portrayed in the movie are funny, yet disturbing at times. With the father’s bad advice to Walt, the mother’s numerous love affairs, Walt’s need to be exactly like his father, and Frank’s sudden attraction to drinking beer, the movie throws many curve balls that will either leave you laughing, or thinking “What the…?”

I recommend this movie to anyone with a sense of humor for taboo topics.

Grade: A+

Similar films: “Running with Scissors”