Bruce Willis Is The Scream

I tried to prompt Stable Diffusion into recreating Munch's "The Scream" with Bruce Willis as the screamer, but the results were somewhat disappointing. Aiieeeeee!
 

Quick Take: The Last Boy Scout

The Last Boy Scout (Tony Scott, 1991) is loud, brash, treats women like props, and it's ugly. But somehow it works, and I think because the creators understand the toxic masculinity on display is, in fact, toxic. Sure Joe Hallenback (Bruce Willis) gets his wife back and wins the respect of his daughter in the end, but there's no undoing the havoc wrought earlier in the film; Hallenback has still lost his best friend, Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans) isn't getting his murdered girlfriend back, the football players ground down by the professional sports machine aren't escaping their fates.

Willis is really great in this as perhaps the bitterest private eyes I've ever seen, and his dialogue (courtesy of Shane Black, I suspect) is hilariously cynical. The action is intense yet just on the right side of believable, well-shot and edited, with gritty, violent, believable consequences. I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would. 

'Round the Looper

time. Time, the final - or perhaps first - frontier to be breached by science. Time travel movies are often confusing and illogical, but Rian Johnson's Looper presents viewers with a coherent time-jumping story that includes two well-realized futures.

The main action of Looper takes place in 2044. An unnamed American city is awash in poverty and violence, and it seems as though only criminals enjoy a decent standard of living. Loopers are among the criminal elite, men who are paid to kill people from the future, victims of organized crime in the 2070s, sent thirty years backwards in time for elimination since bodies are too hard to hide in the future.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a Looper who dreams of escaping third-world America by relocating to France. But his plans are derailed when his own future self (Bruce Willis) appears as his own latest victim. Young Joe and Old Joe are forced to fight for their own versions of their lives, chasing each other while being chased by the mob bosses who want them both dead.

It sounds confusing, but Johnson takes pains to keep the chronology consistent and understandable, allowing the audience to enjoy the characters and the crumbling America they inhabit. One of the film's greatest strengths is its vision of the near future; the world looks much the same save for a few logical extrapolations of current technology. It's quite convincing.

Johnson handles a number of time travel tropes quite cleverly, particularly the problem of what happens to the future version of a character when something happens to the present version.

To elaborate further would spoil some rewarding surprises, so I'll conclude only by noting that with its clever plot, inventive setting and complex characters, Looper is well worth your

Loopy New Trailer

Thanks to Stephen for alerting me to the imminent release of a new time travel movie, Loopers. Time travel stories can be sublime when well-crafted, painful when not, but director Rian Johnson has already been acclaimed for his high school noir film Brick, so I'm hopeful that this film will achieve some level of greatness. And hey, I'll see practically anything with Bruce Willis in it, even the upcoming G.I. Joe sequel.