My all time favorite movies: LOOPER

I have been toying with the idea of doing a series of posts on my all time favorite movies for a little while now. Working at a movie theater again has started all of these conversations about movies and I always love to hear what people have on their lists of favorite movies. I decided I would take my 20 favorite movies of all time and write a blog entry about each of them. There are no set qualifications for a movie to be on this list. These are simply my 20 favorite movies of all time. They will not be numbered. Do not assume that I am going in order from 20-1. I will probably do that starting at 10, but honestly 11-20 are not numbered. They kind of exist right outside of the top 10. A few things you will realize as the list goes on are how recent so many of them are, and how Americanized the list is. I make no apologies for this. I know most people who are deep into film as I am often have many movies from the pre-1970s on their lists, but you will only find 2 or 3 of those here. I do not dislike "classic" movies in any way, but they have never stuck with me as much. I respect the craft, but I am rarely left feeling like they are my favorite movies. I cannot really explain it further than that. I am not xenophobic, but when it comes to cinema, I just prefer the American Aesthetic. I have roughly 10 foreign films that I love, but they do not make it into this list. Again, it is just my personal taste. Each post will be labeled as "favorite ever" so you can easily find them as I go on. As always, I love to hear feedback, if not on my choices, on your choices for some of your favorite movies of all time. Okay, onto this week's post. Oh and there will probably be spoilers about each title on the list.

LOOPER

I know it seems crazy to put a movie released in 2012 onto my all time favorite movies list. I mean, how will I know if it stands the test of time? Honestly, I have no idea if it will. What I do know is that when it was over the first and second times I watched it, I had tears in my eyes and not really because of the sadness of the movie, but because of the beauty of the crafting of the movie. Looper represents everything I love about movies. It is inventive, full of heart, witty, intense and perfectly put together. Everything fits like this gorgeous and mysterious puzzle piece.

Looper is the story about a guy, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who kills people for a living. It is not under ordinary circumstances though, because the year is 2074 and when the mob wants to kill someone they send that person back in time to have them killed. Joe is a looper. he is in the past killing people who get sent back to him until one day when he is supposed to kill the older version of himself (Bruce Willis). That is the basic story. The final half of the movie involves a woman (Emily Blunt) and her kid (Pierce Gagnon) and Young Joe's attempt to keep them safe from old Joe.

If you are the kind of person who goes into every movie looking for holes or watches Looper and points out that the time travel thing does not make sense, well clearly the movie is not for you. That is not to say I even think there are holes in the plot or that the time travel function of the movie is the point, because it is not. Looper is, at its core, a movie about time, but not about time travel, it is about our time, about how we spend our time and how our time affects those around us. it is also incredibly full of ideas about destiny and fate and nature vs. nurture. it is full of everything life is full of. It asks questions about who we are and what we are and why we are. It digs deep into our humanity and forces us think about our own lives. Rian Johnson has written and directed 3 excellent movies in 3 very different genres with 3 very different tones and they all work, but everything about Looper is incredible to me. I love the creativity involved in the story and I loved the giant chunk of time the movie spends showing us the possible outcome of Joe's life. It was poetic and heart breaking and incredibly interesting. I was invested in Joe on two different levels as two completely different people. It was hard to root for one because you knew that there would consequences for the other. Willis gives his best performance since The Sixth Sense and Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues to blaze a trail of excellence on screen. The two of them together are dynamite. The make up on Gordon-Levitt to give him that Willis looks is astonishing. And Gordon-Levitt really mastered that Willis look and posture and mannerisms. Their diner scene is equal parts funny and tense.

However, the second half, and especially the final third are when the film kicks everything into overdrive. I was pretty stoked with how everything was going and then we get to this house on the edges of a cornfield in the middle of nowhere and the movie just ramps everything up. Emily Blunt is magical as usual as a woman keeping a very big secret and trying to keep everything in her life together and Gagnon is a fiercely talented young actor who really shines in a film full of stand outs. His performance is menacing and scary, but also sad and vulnerable. Gordon-Levitt and Blunt have a wonderful bristling chemistry that comes to a head at exactly the right time. A lot of that is owed to Johnson's sense of pacing in this film. Things move at the exact pace they need to. The movie can switch from slow burn to a fully engulfed flame at the snap of the fingers. But it never feels stilted. Then you add in the crazy effects when the kid loses his cool and Looper succeeds on a whole new level. There is this insane burst of energy that explodes off the screen multiple times and just when you recover, it hits you again, if not with crazy action, then an awesome character revelation.

For me Looper is pure movie magic. It is a film that made me think and feel about everything. It was a master work from a young director who is still on the rise. I did not get up when it ended, I did not quickly grab my phone and tweet immediate reaction. No, I sat there through the credits quietly pondering exactly what just happened. I sat there quietly to reflect on everything. It had such a profound affect on me. I wanted to watch it again for the first time. No joke, it was the kind of movie that made you sad that you could never see it again for the first time. That is not to say that more viewings make the movie less, because they do not. They add to the experience of this fascinating film. Perhaps you were not as enamored by it and that is fine for you. I know Looper is the kind of movie I am going to be telling everyone to watch when they turn to me for recommendations as people often do. The themes in Looper are eternal and so many of those movies with staying power are based on eternal themes. They ask us to think about what our lives mean to us, because that is important. How we see ourselves and how we react to our own lives is what is important. Our lives have meaning, but it is our job to excavate that movie and Looper gets to that in such remarkable ways.