Golden Age for smart genre films?
Dear, God: Please let it be so! Per Steve Zeitchik at the LAT:
Cut to the fall of 2012, and not only was the film produced (by means of an unusual coalition of the independent companies Endgame Entertainment and FilmDistrict, the studio Sony Pictures and a Chinese production entity) but became a wide-release that brought out a few million people to see it on opening weekend for a total of $21.2 million in box office.
How did “Looper” pull off that feat? You could point to several factors — the growing appeal of Johnson’s go-to star Joseph Gordon-Levitt; a shrewd marketing campaign that made the movie seem, well, just commercial enough; a smart piece of dating in a soft September.
But it’s hard not to think of another factor, and an encouraging one at that: that the movie’s intelligence, far from being an impediment, was actually one of the reasons for its success.
Original movie? Intelligent? 70% of the opening weekend audience over the age of 25? On its way to being a solidly profitable movie?
Be still my heart!
And this on Looper from IndieWire:
But in recent years, as expensive tentpoles flopped, sometimes dramatically (“John Carter”), and audiences evinced sequel fatigue, bonafide high stylists took up the apocalypse and gave it new life, in such films as “Children of Men,” “Contagion,” and “Melancholia,” whether by breathless tracking shots, pummeling sound, or pared-down chill. In “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” Andy Serkis made motion capture — and its prophetic possibilities — more emotive than live action. Even films with questionable premises (“The Adjustment Bureau”) or too many untidy strands of plot (“Prometheus”) suffered from too many ideas rather than too few.
More inclusive, indeed more loosely defined, science fiction in film now probes the political and personal depths that novelists working in the genre, like Margaret Atwood, have been plumbing for years. Thus “Melancholia” imagines the end of the world within its story of a failed wedding and a flailing family, rather than making its characters exist only to kill them off in the finale (it does that, too). Thus “Contagion” gives us two heroes who never come in contact, playing intertwined games with different rules — the valiant, protective father (Matt Damon), keeping quarantine as though it’s the last thing left, and the cold, sharp scientist (Jennifer Ehle), breaking quarantine to save us all.
If this is where science fiction is going, to more intimate, individual, and unexpected realms, I’m in. Indeed, Johnson’s film, though more rough-hewn and dirty than these, is similarly measured. Without losing the creative, predictive aspect that brings us into the cinema for sci fi — the high production value of the bird’s-eye view — it always comes back to Earth, to the quiet porches, rural diners, and humming cityscapes in which the best stories seem always to be found.
Thus “Looper,” though it passes through Kansas and Shanghai, through mob murders and bad tempers, becomes a first-rate origin story. It asks not how we’ll look in the future so much as how that future came to be.
Every single one of us who has derided standard Hollywood fare — Where are the original movies?!?! — needs to go see Looper. Trust me, it’s a compelling and entertaining movie.
Smart genre movies? Yes, please!
For more of the LAT article, go here.
For more of the IndieWire article, go here.
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