Skyfall (2012)

You cannot review James Bond. It is awesome and unreviewable.

Instead I will list some things that are awesome about James Bond (Skyfall in particular):
- It's British
- Daniel Craig
- Judi Dench
- Javier Bardem (I'd forgotten how much I like him and he's very cool in Skyfall!)
- The Bond-girls
- The chases
- The martinis
- The music
- It's Bond

The End.

Looper (2012)

The basic idea of Looper is reasonably easy to grasp. Time-travel is invented at some point in the future and then immediately outlawed. It’s used by gangsters of the future to dispose of their unwanted bodies, by sending people back in time to be killed by loopers – men hand-picked to be hit-men. Being a looper is well-paid and seemingly quite glamorous, but it comes with the rather large caveat that the loopers themselves will be killed off in 30 years’ time. But that apparently appeals to the live fast – die young type, and they don’t seem short of recruits.

The problem is, when in 30 years you’re sent back in time to be killed, you’re killed by yourself. The killing of your future self is known as ‘closing your loop’ and comes with a lot of money and freedom to live the rest of your life as you see fit. As long as you actually kill your future self, and don’t let them go – it all goes wrong for you if you do that!

And that’s where it gets complicated. Suddenly we end up with multiple versions of the same character, and multiple versions of events in time running in parallel. Even after serious thought and lots of discussion, these different strands still don’t seem to link together very well. I’m still not properly sure what happened or how certain people know certain things or even what order things happen in.

So if you want to watch this film I can only recommend one thing – don’t think too much! If you don’t think too much, and you just accept what’s going on as it's presented to you, Looper really is a very enjoyable film. Some bits are better than others, for example there’s a rather shabby time-sequence-montage-thing in the middle, but there is a fantastic, horrifying, amazing part reasonably early on where a future person’s body is changing in front of their eyes to reflect what’s currently happening to their younger self. A bit of a head fuck but oh so fascinating.

Another impressive thing about the film is how they managed to get Joseph Gordon-Levitt to look like a young Bruce Willis. The two men are completely different in every possible visual characteristic, but with a little bit of prosthetic make-up and a very good side-ways smirk by Gordon-Levitt it works – its magic!

The first third of this film is brilliant, and sets itself up to be an epic, but it all just falls away after that. From the first time you go ‘hang on – what?’ it gradually loses your interest, and instead of just being able to absorb it, too much of your brain is trying to un-pick problems and reorganise time. Reorganising time is exhausting.

Watch it, definitely watch it. But don’t think too much!

Hereafter (2010)

Everyone knows the name Clint Eastwood. It’s impossible not to – the guy’s been in God knows how many films and directed God knows how many more. Apparently though, this is the first film of his on either side of the camera that I’ve actually seen. I’m not proud of that – it shows a gaping hole in my film knowledge – but most of them aren’t really my thing so it’s a hole not likely to improve all that much. I might give some of the more recent ones a go – Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino, Changling – ones like that.

Anyway, as you can imagine, I didn’t pick this film because of its director. Or because of its cast. Yes Matt Damon’s in it and he’s very good and everything but I have no special love for the guy. He’s the cause of me having to sit through The Bourne Identity and I harbour a little resentment for that (no, I didn’t like it).

The only reason I felt drawn to this film was because I remember the trailer being quite promising. A guy that can genuinely speak to the dead – it could be ok if it’s done well (OK maybe the names Eastwood and Damon helped me trust it a bit), but I never imagined it would contain any great depth or complexity. So I was quite surprised when the film opens to a scene containing some random couple speaking French. That’s good though, not being scared to include a few subtitles. It gives the audience more credit than a lot of other films do.

Unfortunately, for all its French subtitles, Hereafter not only lacks depth, it also lacks any real complexity. It’s three films in one, following three people and their experiences with death and the deceased. While initially promising, I lost interest in all three stories (and the people in them) reasonably quickly, and so gained very little satisfaction from their progress and subsequent acceptance of their various trials and troubles.

It would have done well to tug at the heartstrings a little more. Not quite sure whether to make a moving film about loss and grief, or a Hollywood blockbuster with bombs and magic powers, Eastwood seems to have created something that’s half way in-between. And so is neither. It manages to pack in two of the major disasters of the last 10 years in a dramatic showy way that shouts “Blockbuster” very loudly in our ears, but it also tries to slow things down to showing us the subtlety of the loyalty of two brothers to their drug-addicted mother.

There’s also a half-heated attempt at a romance. Just to complete things.

There wasn't really any conclusion either thinking about it. The three stories converged as they do tend to do but we didn’t get all that much closure to the stories. Not that I noticed anyway – perhaps I’d stopped concentrating by that point. I did try though.

So no, I didn’t particularly enjoy this and no, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone. Even as a lazy Sunday night film it failed to keep me entertained.  Perhaps I’ll still give Eastwood’s other films a go but mostly because it seems blasphemous not to.  At the moment though, as far as I’m concerned, the best thing about Clint Eastwood is the song by Gorrilaz.