Entries from October 2012 ↓

Not surprisingly, the main sticking point with why my friends are divided over the mind-bending sci-fi thriller Looper is the time travel. (Warning: major spoilers herein!) The friend I saw it with and I both totally bought into the logic that Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) had to kill Old Joe (Bruce Willis) in order to be able to become Old Joe… but then once he was older and had lost his wife to the mob, he was going to go try and kill the little kid who will grow up to become the mob boss The Rainmaker.

It also made (enough) sense that the only way Young Joe could prevent Cyd from being traumatized enough to grow up into this psychopath was for Young Joe to murder himself so he never grows up or has any reason to come back into the past. Sure, suicide in time travel is an overused trope, but it was effective in this story which has already laid the groundwork for commentary on self-destruction in the beginning with Joe’s hedonistic lifestyle and drug habit.

Well, one of our mutual friends derided this “twist” as a narrative cop-out, mostly because he didn’t think it made sense for Young Joe to narrate the whole movie and then say, “And then I killed myself.” This didn’t really bother me, but I couldn’t articulate why. The best argument I could make was for parallel plotlines, but it wasn’t until I saw this infographic from Noah Iliinsky that it made sense.

Iliinsky is an expert in data visualization and drew up this nifty diagram for Wired, showing all of the various paths for each of Looper‘s main characters. As he explains it, time travel stories deal with time in two ways:

1) Immutable past: What’s happened in the past can’t be changed, which makes the future inevitable.

2) Malleable history: Commonly known as “the butterfly effect,” where your actions in the past change the future. If I might add, in these stories people still know what that future is, often because it’s the reason they went back in the first place.

But in Looper, we see both in effect:

Again, it’s tied up in the basic premise: The only way for Old Joe to live his happy life and then have it ripped away from him is to — as Young Joe — kill his older self as a looper. But once he gets caught up in the consequences of Old Joe going after Cyd and his mother Sara (Emily Blunt), Young Joe realizes that if Old Joe kills Sara, Cyd will become The Rainmaker. Of course, I’ve seen arguments that he could’ve just shot Old Joe in the hand… except that Old Joe would’ve still found a way to kill Sara and/or Cyd, because he loved his wife that much. In this way, Young Joe — who’s never been happy, who’s always been looking forward to his post-looper retirement as the prize for his ugly job — has to rob himself of all happiness by killing himself.

But he doesn’t realize this until he sees Old Joe live out the thirty years that were supposed to belong to him. Like I said, parallel plotlines! Without them, we wouldn’t have any emotional depth.

Of course, I still kinda wish the movie had ended with Cyd becoming The Rainmaker anyway. Because for a five-year-old, he’s got plenty of emotional baggage even with a living mother to take care of him. You don’t make someone explode in your living room and escape from that without some sort of complex, whether it’s self-loathing or thinking you’re God. I think that would’ve been a great nudge to us, additionally, a way of saying, “No matter what drastic measures you take, some events are fated to happen.” As Iliinsky points out, there’s a chance that still could’ve happened after the credits started rolling. That’s up to us to decide.

[via io9]

Photos: Alan Markfield/Looper, LLC and Noah Iliinsky

Related posts:

• ‘Disney’s Looper‘ Might Satisfy All The Haters With A More Family-Friendly Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Bruce Willis Showdown
• Looper Is The Mind-Bending Sci-Fi Thriller The Summer Was Missing
• Looper Solidifies Joseph Gordon-Levitt As The Next Ryan Gosling
• Test How Loyal a Browncoat You Are with This Infographic of 18 Little-Known Facts About Firefly
• Infographic: The Evolution of the Geek

Post from: Crushable

Some celebrities have stranger burial wishes than others and not all of them want a gravestone or cremation urns. So, let's have a look at some of the stranger celeb final wishes. Hunter S. Thompson. After a life of hell raising Hunter S. Thompson …
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(RadarOnline)

“Danny DeVito’s shocking split from his wife Rhea Perlman was due to his wandering eye,” reports RadarOnline.

The webloid claims that after 30 years of marriage, Perlman was “finally fed up with the 67-year-old actor’s flirty and inappropriate ways and gave him the boot.”

According to a supposed family “source” for the site, “Danny can be quite the flirt and because of his powerful status in Hollywood, he’s not ashamed to abuse his position and chat-up young, aspiring woman (sic) looking to make it in the industry.”

The alleged insider says, “Danny’s actually quite the womanizer,” adding, “If he sees an attractive girl in a coffee shop or walking down the street, he will give her the eye.”

“After years of turning a blind eye to it, Rhea finally snapped,” explains the so-called “source.” “She had enough of his bad-boy behavior and wanted an end to their marriage.”

Really?

Not. At. All.

RadarOnline is simply trying to keep the buzz going on the pair’s sad split by alleging that the breakup was more dramatic than it actually was.

A rep for both DeVito and Perlman tells Gossip Cop the webloid’s report that the couple separated because of the actor’s alleged “wandering eye” is a complete “fabrication.”

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The images are countless, breathtaking: Four editors-in-chief, 16 years online, piles of exclusives, plenty of gossip, invented languages, maddeningly fascinating celebrities (dead and alive) and…

The Saturdays’ Frankie Sandford is usually the one in the spotlight but on Sunday it was her sister who was keen to hog the limelight for a change.

Though they lost their dad way too soon, the orphaned Jackson siblings have each other to depend on, a bond strong enough to thwart any scheming Jackson relatives. Despite the series of unfortunate events, Prince Michael, the eldest of the brood is looking after his younger siblings.

Now at 15 years-old, he takes his little 10-year-old bro Blanket to his weekly karate lessons, the way their dad used to do when he was alive. Prince Michael is definitely growing up quite the responsible brother the King of Pop would be proud of.

According to a new book, Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson, author Randall Sullivan writes of a mad money scramble that happen on the day of Michael Jackson’s death as relatives demanded their way into MJ’s rented mansion to retrieve MJ’s garbage bags filled with cash. The book also reveals the fight over Michael Jackson’s cemetery plot, that no burial was going to happen until Janet Jackson’s $ 40,000 security deposit was ponied up.

Three years without Michael Jackson, and still Paris, Michael & Blanket are still neck deep in the Jackson family feud, there are only few people the Jackson kids trust besides their grandmother Katherine Jackson. Not far, their court appointed guardian TJ Jackson was around to look after the brood. He is one of the few people the three siblings believe to be honest and trustworthy.

Prince Michael with a learner’s permit, six months shy of his sixteenth birthday on February. He usually drives the kiddos to the mall.

Lois Smith, a longtime celebrity publicist who helped promote the careers of Marilyn Monroe, Robert Redford, and Maryl Streep among many others, died Sunday.
The Inquisitr