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Looping Looper
Editor's Note: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS but I had to run this. JDobbs has blackmail photographs.
Hey, Fanboys! It’s your old drinkin’ buddy, JDobbs here. I know it’s been Seven Years in Tibet since I’ve been around these parts, but I needed to share this craziness. So, Friday night I was recording demo tracks for my upcoming debut album, "Str8 Outta Stars Hollow: Songs From and Inspired by Gilmore Girls", and then I guess I sorta blacked out with the recording still running.
Now, I’m no stranger to a little whiskey fueled time jump here and there, but when I played back the file things got weird. Today I realized I needed to transcribe the recording here to make sure people read it and it becomes a fixed point in time just like I learned about in "The Angels Take Manhattan", this weekend’s rad episode of Doctor Who.
(Recording is a little scratchy, but we can hear JDobbs lightly snoring and then a door opens.)
Voice: Hey dude. What’s up?
JDobbs: Who the hell are you? Besides a devastatingly handsome man.
Older JDobbs: I’m you from the future, dork. I’ve been working on time travel technology non-stop for this very mission.
Younger JDobbs: Really? And you aren’t out there doing the Lord’s work making sure Morgan Spurlock is never born or pantsing Lincoln?
OJD: No, this is much more important. Listen to me. Don’t. See. Looper.
YJD: What? But everyone says it’s rad.
OJD: They’re wrong. They couldn’t be wronger if they thought a swig of orange juice was the best way to rinse mint toothpaste out of their mouths.
YJD: Ick. How can they go that wrong though? They got Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his perma-smirk to play a young, perma-smirking Bruce Willis. JGL was the bomb in Premium Rush, yo!
OJD: Premium Rush was the bomb, (sound of high fiving) but this is no Premium Rush. First of all, you know how JoGo has pretty much that one expression?
YJD: Yeah, I trudged through his SNL episode. You’d think a guy that made his bones for a decade on a popular sitcom would know how to do comedy or at least deliver a line.
OJD: Yeah, I remember that bummer. Well they try to fix some of that with stick-on t-zone appliances that are supposed to make him look more like Bruce Willis, but it means his eyebrows never move between cuts. They just swap out different brows for different emotions like a Bajoran Mr. Potato Head. Hell, I’ve seen Worf do better forehead acting.
YJD: Yikes, two Star Trek references in a row do I really become a Trekkie late in life? Never mind. Whatever, I can just ignore him what about the rest of the cast?
OJD: Remember that chick from Coyote Ugly?
YJD: No.
OJD: Yeah, me neither, but some people do I guess. She plays a future whore/stripper whose characterization is light as a feather and flat as a board.
YJD: Wait, a flat-chested stripper? That is the saddest clown at the circus.
OJD: Yeah, I guess that’s how they like ‘em in a hobo-strewn dystopia. She is rode hard and put away wet, too. I know she’s only like 5 years older than him, but she looks like she’s more likely to pick Go-Lev up at soccer practice than dribble his balls.
YJD: Nice one.
OJD: Don’t be impressed by your own humor, kid, that’s like joke masturbation. It’s weird and creepy. Speaking of weird and creepy there is a kid in this movie who is a mutant monster.
YJD: Like he has powers?
OJD: Yeah, that too, but I just mean I’m pretty sure the actual child playing him is a mutant monster. He makes Kid-El from Superman Returns look like Nicolas from Eight is Enough.
YJD: Huh?
OJD: Stick with me here. The plot makes less sense than that simile.
YJD: Well, it’s a time travel movie. There’s bound to be some shagginess there. We love Doctor Who and that gets all timey-whimey a lot.
OJD: Sure, I’m not talking about “a-wizard-did-it” stuff. We have to roll with that stuff, but you know the general set-up right?
YJD: Sure. Future bad guys use illegal time machines as cement shoes to hide bodies in the past because future tracking tech makes disposing of a body in the future virtually impossible.
OJD: Right. Except time continues to travel forward so presumably the bodies disposed of in the past or at least the unbeatable tracking tech will continue to exist for the next 30 years and then the authorities can find the body at that time albeit 30 years older than it should be.
YJD: Hmm. Well that should freak them out.
OJD: Not really. Everyone knows time travel exists. It’s just been outlawed. Not sure if that’s a gun control parable or not, but it would be sort of like outlawing guns and then not being able to figure out why this dead guy has a hole in his chest. It couldn’t be a gun. Guns are illegal.
YJD: Yeah, that’s stupid, but then there’s this whole closing the loop thing I heard about in the trailer. That sounds clever.
OJD: Right, that’s how guys are retired. They get sent themselves from the future, they put him down and collect a nice severance and have 30 years to enjoy it until they are sent back to pasture.
YJD: Okay. Well that is sorta trick I guess.
OJD: Sure, but then there’s this super villain called The Rainmaker in the future who is taking out all the gangs. He’s closing all the loops, and sending all the old loopers back.
YJD: Why is he doing that?
OJD: For some reason, but that’s not the issue. He’s sending the old loopers back to their young selves like it’s business as usual back in the past, but then the young loopers are freaking out about fulfilling their contracts and keep letting themselves get away.
YJD: Why do the young loopers have to kill their future selves? Couldn’t you send Old Looper A to Young Looper B and vice versa? Strangers on a Train, yo.
OJD: Kris Kross will make you jump, jump, my good man. Now you’re getting bathed in the wiggity, wiggity, wiggity wack.
YJD: But the whole looper thing in general still makes sense. I mean only the bad guys in the future know about the whole looper arrangement right?
OJD: No, everyone knows about loopers. JGL shows up on a farm and Emily Blunt takes one look at his future shotgun and pegs him as a looper.
YJD: Who’s Emily Blunt?
OJD: Don’t worry about it. You haven’t seen any of her work and you aren’t missing anything. But if some random farm girl knows about loopers then probably everyone else does or at least enough people to tell stories that’ll be heard 30 years from then.
YJD: She’s a farm girl?
OJD: Yeah, her hobbies include raising a free-range monster tot, robot cropdusting her sugar cane fields that have already gone to seed, and chipping away at a stump with an axe.
YJD: Like in Shane?
OJD: Sort of, except it serves no purpose to the plot other than to set some of the interminable conversations outside and to give her some “character.”
YJD: Well maybe it’s a metaphor for the film as a whole?
OJD: Sure, that could be. It is a story that doles out little bits and pieces of information eventually accomplishing nothing. So that could be true. Rian Johnson is already failing all of his other meta-self-commentary so bad that it could just be more of that.
YJD: Like what?
OJD: Well at one point a Beardy Jeff Daniels busts GoJo’s balls saying, “Those movies are you trying to dress like are just copying other movies. Do something original.”
YJD: Sound advice.
OJD: Says the guy who dresses like he’s going to an audition for Sha-Na-Na. It is good advice, but he burns himself by calling his shot like Babe Ruth pointing to the wall and then striking out with a movie cobbled together badly from a bunch of better movies. It’s like Time After Time mixed with some Terminator and a dash of The Shining and 18 other better dystopian flicks.
YJD: Please tell me there aren’t future blimps.
OJD: There are.
YJD: Future blimps are the worst! Wait, so Bruce Willis is Old Joe and he gets his 12 Monkeys on in the past yeah?
OJD: Right.
YJD: So, why don’t the bad guys just shoot the youthful smirk off of Kid Joe’s face and wipe Old Joe’s smirk out of the timeline?
OJD: Beardy Daniels says something about that causing some timey-whimey issues when the first loop runs. Which I suppose makes sense. If you kill the young looper the old looper didn’t continue on to run.
YJD: Okay I get that. So they have to be real careful to not hurt the young loopers then?
OJD: No, if you carve a message on a young looper it’ll scar up on the old looper and apparently if you hack a young looper down to a limbless stump he will clearly live enough of the same life as his alternate timeline fully armed and legged self to avoid those dire paradoxical consequences.
YJD: That’s doesn’t make any sense.
OJD: Welcome to Looper. A movie that will make you angry enough to devote the rest of your life to building a time machine just to avoid all this.
YJD: But if I don’t see the movie then this will never happen.
OJD: Probably true, but if I learned anything from Looper about time travel it’s that when someone asks these questions one should change the subject. Joey G You’ll Love It At Levitt proudly cruises the future streets in a cherry Mazda Miata.
YJD: Oooh that truly is the darkest timeline. But at least there are badasses running around with guns and shooting the crap outta things right?
OJD: Yeah, there’s a lot of guys shooting guns indiscriminately, but anytime they draw a bead on anyone of any note they freeze up or freak out.
YJD: Well, it takes a certain level morality to shoot someone.
OJD: Sure, and these guys have those balls. There is a Groundhog Day-esque Day-In-Day-Out montage of JayGee shredding an endless litany of anonymous victims with his steampunk cannon. Putting bullets in dudes is just time to make the doughnuts for this guy, but then as an old man he can’t shoot a random kid without puking on his shoes like a rookie.
YJD: He shoots a kid?
OJD: Yeah, he has a plan to get even with The Rainmaker by killing him in the past when he’s a child.
YJD: Wait, they play that old saw? Would you kill baby Hitler?
OJD: Yep, this movie is such a collection of time travel and downer future film tropes they could have called it Now That’s What I Call Dystopia!
YJD: If you liked Timecop, then call this Time Slop!
OJD: Slow your roll, Mr. Shalit. Guess who one of the kids who might be The Rainmaker is.
YJD: Mutant Monster Kid?
OJD: Well, yes, obviously, but also the A-Cup Rental Girl’s kid from earlier.
YJD: Well, that seem convenient.
OJD: Convenient enough for Bruce Willis to get caught.
YJD: If they catch him they dispatch him and then it’s all over right?
OJD: No, he gets caught by an idiot who brings this highly dangerous killer in awake and only in cuffs so that he can get free and take out Beardy Daniels’ base like a Bond film because Bruce Willis. Then he picks up where he left off on his trail of revenge.
YJD: Why does he want revenge on The Rainmaker again?
OJD: His guys killed Willis’ lady.
YJD: In the past?
OJD: Nope, in the future and are clearly stuck with a super traceable corpse on their hands which they will all go to jail for or else the entirety of the time travel wankery means nothing.
YJD: Well hasn’t he stopped killing in the future?
OJD: Naw, he’s been littering the streets of Shanghai with traceable bodies in drive-bys and hits up until last couple of years at most.
YJD: But . . .
OJD: Remember what we when the plot hits one of these logic cul-de-sacs?
YJD: Change the subject.
OJD: The future has lots of lens flares.
YJD: Future blimps and lens flares? At least that means things are shiny and pretty.
OJD: No, everything is covered in dirt and is dull.
YJD: But there are lots of lens flares?
OJD: Yeah, because the future.
YJD: Well, if he’s gonna paint himself into a corner at least there must be a super ingenious way to get out of it. A good slight of hand trick can forgive a lot.
OJD: Not really. Bruce Willis is about to shoot mutant Kuato kid and JG’s rubber eyebrows help him figure out the only way to stop him is to kill himself. Sure he could have just blown off his gun hand or a leg, but he does the very thing that we’ve been avoiding doing the whole time and could have saved everyone a lot of trouble.
YJD: You had the power to take your own life all along, Dorothy.
OJD: Exactly. Rian Johnson also does drop a little Chekov’s gun with 10% of people having TK so that mutant boy can go full Kuato.
YJD: Sounds cool.
OJD: Naw, Johnson even busts himself in voiceover, “We have a bunch of people who think they are blowing your mind while they are just making quarters float.” That should be the poster quote for this stinkbomb.
YJD: Well it sure sounds dumb. Maybe I’ll drive to Burbank to see Dredd instead.
OJD: Yeah, we like Dredd.
YJD: Sweet.
OJD: Okay, kid, I think I’ve done my part. Keep posting on RedneckNamecheck and get back to work on that screenplay, dummy. Anytime you get discouraged just remember these magic words, “It can’t be worse than Looper.”
YJD: Cool, thanks, me!
OJD: Now it’s time to build a sweet casino thanks to this nifty Sports Almanac I brought with me just like Bearded Jeff Daniels should have done. Lates!
(end of recording)
So there you have it, folks. I don’t know about you, but for some reason I trust that guy, and maybe you should do the same. Was I wrong? I don’t know. Maybe I was, but I’ll never know because I took my own advice and saw Dredd. It was fantastic. If you can explain any of this I’d be glad to hear about it.
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