Looper* (2012) 9.5, 10, 9.5, 29

So I went last night on a whim and finally saw Looper. I was absolutely not disappointed. This film is this year’s Inception. I do not say this lightly. Not every year has an Inception. Only occasionally do we see a science-fiction film of this depth, both in terms of its understanding of its own fictional science and in its moral delving. I would compare it also to Primer. I love this kind of film.
        I could simply gush for another paragraph, but I'll get down to brass tacks. Wit is a 9.5, but a low 9.5. Malcolm X is a 9.5 and this is not Malcolm X, but that's really more like 9.72. Looper is closer to 9.26, but both even out. I feel better comparing it with Last King of Scotland or Lat den Ratte Komma In. It is better written than the former and better acted than the latter.
        As far as the writing goes, I really appreciate the way that it deconstructs the idea of scientific progress making us better. It takes apart the main premise of the X-Men comics, that evolution and mutation will give us discernible and exciting new powers in large numbers. Its moral delving intelligently analyzes the morality of fixing things through violence. If you can fix your life simply by killing the bad guy, should you? I don't want to give anything away, but the questions this film asks and the potential answers it gives are mind-blowing and new-world-opening.
        Now to the acting. Joseph Gordon-Levitt really doesn't grab you, but he eeks into you and makes you really care. His character is perhaps most interesting because both he and Bruce Willis play him. They both give you a strong sense of his emotional dependence and his repeated failed attempts at independence. This may be one of the most impressive aspects of it. These two actors seemed so in sync in terms of their choices about the character, but you can see them diverge and Joseph become something different. These two performances can hardly be separated, but I do feel like Joseph does a better job. Bruce fails to draw you in in quite the same way. He fails to make it seem real in the same way that Joseph does.
         Paul Dano, despite only being in the movie in the very beginning, really made me scared and grabbed me in a way no one else did. It makes me want to watch There Will Be Blood again. He genuinely reaches moments of emotion equal to the end of that film in fifteen minutes of Looper. He really makes you afraid of the life that he has gotten into, which helps when Joseph's character gets into it later.
        I take back what I said. If Paul Dano excites me and pulls me in, Pierce Gagnon absolutely tore my mind open. I will not ruin this, as the fact that this part of the story is not in the trailer made it all the more impressive and wonderful and fun. Just watch out for the young boy in this film. It is genuinely the most impressive child performance that I have ever seen.
        For wisdom, I gave this a 10. I really believe that he gets to the heart of the obsession with violence that I know I have. He really opens up the question of whether violence solves things, anything. He doesn't however answer it simply. He shows us a method of solving problems that involves self-sacrifice instead of the sacrifice of others. This seemed a very Christian idea to me. That is, I guess, the best compliment I can give.
        Wonder is also a 9.5. I placed it along with Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Primer. I think it failed to make it to a 10 because its music didn't stand out, but the action and the setting are flawless, especially in the parts that are more sci-fi oriented. They do them with ease. I really appreciate the simplicity of the way that they represent the most complicated concepts.
        If you haven't seen this, I would definitely suggest it to anyone interested in the sci-fi aspects and also to anyone interested in the moral questions involved. Also, if you just like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, or Bruce Willis, this film will not disappoint.

Last Night** (2010) 8.5, 7.5, 9, 25

So I had high hopes for this movie and most of them were dashed. I'm going to deal with wit ad wisdom together on this one, as they are so deeply entwined. At the start of the movie, I saw some beautiful little bits of dialogue. Keira Knightley really knocked this one out of the park. From beginning to end, I found her performance compelling. I wish I could say the same for old Sam Worthington. He convinced me, in part, at the very beginning. Frustration and sweet sincerity flow from him naturally, but the more complicated parts seemed to baffle him. This may be due to the poor writing of his character. But he is struck nearly dumb and his dialogues with Eva Mendes feel stilted and painful. Eva, of course, is splendid. She clearly envelops her time onscreen.
I will admit that all of my comments, positive and negative, could be chalked up the writing. The writer makes Sam stilted and awkward. Nearly no attempt is made to justify, even psychologically, how his character moves from the moral high-ground, allowing me to believe that he is innocent, even occasionally showing himself so as he speaks to Eva, to the senseless betrayal that he enacts in the second half of the movie. I can hear various critics, good friends of mine, calling me naïve. Why can't he be good and then break? He talks a good talk with his wife and then cheats. It's believable. It happens. But he convinces me of where he stands before he cheats and then is unconvincing afterward. He obviously believed he loved his wife when he was talking to her, but he turns so quickly and crosses the line with such ease. He confesses prior mental infidelity that seems out of league with his earlier moment.
Keira's part seems less stilted. She goes through an emotional turmoil and still doesn't move ahead without thought or sense. She betrays him, but she persists in loving him. The whole half of the movie with Keira is more believable.
But the ending is all. I believe that we genuinely have come to accept to lightly what once worked because it was avant-garde. A Serious Man chooses to have no ending because we know the ending and it doesn't need one. A large number of modern films simply cut the ending off in an attempt to be “edgy.” I believe that Last Night is a victim of this. If this film needed one thing to become a great film, it is an ending. The movie ends mid-sentence. No attempt is made to explore the aftermath of their infidelities. It simply stops before they can get going. At the last second, Keira gives a shrug as if to indicate, “Who really cares what happens next?” I am not satisfied, on artistic as well as moral grounds.
  The moral grounds are based upon the fact that it reads like a dismissal of the importance of infidelity and, as To Rome with Love also insinuates, it imagines that infidelity can come into a relationship with no discernible side-effects. I've never seen it happen. I do not believe it is possible. The truth always seems to out. Furthermore, the film appears to make a moral judgment that the infidelity and the consequences and unimportant. This could hardly be more false.
  As noted above of course, I gave the film a 8.5 for wit and a 7.5 for wisdom. This is a low 8.5 for wit, closer to King of California than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  I don't give a lot of 7.5's for wisdom, but for perspective, I gave Match Point, which depicts a man murdering over infidelity being let off the hook and living happily-ever-after, a 7. So this is only slightly above that.
For wonder, I gave the film a 9. It should not be understated how well the beginning and middle of the film feel. Little mini-cuts within scenes of dialogue emphasize the sense that what we see, we've seen before. That there is nothing to linger on about with infidelity. I really love those bits when Keira is discussing her plans with her ex-lover and you can see that a short cut was made and you see that not everything is being shown. It creates a nice little effect that keys you in and keeps your mind in the right place, but the ending makes me wonder if the director had any better sense than that it looked nice. It's unfortunate.
Overall, it is a low five star film. I generally consider all five stars worth a re-watch, which was required just to write this review, but I wouldn't encourage you to go out and get this now.