Elizabeth Sandifer

Looper is a flawed film in ways that neither Brick nor The Brothers Bloom were. This is not to say that it’s a bad film; it’s not at all. But after two films that were notable in part for their impressively taut discipline the fundamental sloppiness of Looper stands out. There’s not a lot that follows from this – everybody who’s made more than one film has a worst film, after all, and most directors have one that’s far worse than this. There’s still a number of things it does well, and well in ways that confirm where Johnson’s talents lie. There’s just also whacking big problems, most of which have a reasonably obvious source.

The biggest and most fundamental problem is that the join between two halves of a script completed at very different times. The first hour – basically everything up through the diner scene – was written in 2008 during the shooting of The Brothers Bloom. The second half, starting with Sara’s introduction, came in 2009. And it shows. The first half is a well constructed film about a man in gripping contact with his older self. The second half, on the other hand, is a well constructed film about a creepy psychic kid. Both are good, but on a very basic level they’re not the same film, and the second half feels as though Johnson realized he didn’t have quite enough ideas to get over the finish line and so arbitrarily decided to raid Akira.

That Johnson should have this problem is admittedly a bit strange. Cid (the psychic kid) is little more than a MacGuffin – the thing over which the two iterations of Joe, the main character, must fight. It doesn’t seem like it should have been that difficult to find one that extended out of the existing time travel concept instead of adding a whole second set of big sci-fi ideas. Instead, the premise around Old Joe seems to abruptly shift as he’s suddenly revealed to have been planning a campaign against futuristic crime boss “the Rainmaker” since before he was sent back in time, a plot point that doesn’t really fit with how his being sent back in time is initially shown. More frustrating is the fact that Sara, the female lead, who ends up being the viewpoint character for the final scene, doesn’t show up until the halfway mark. It’s not that any of this is easy to fix per se, but it’s at least pretty straightforward what you need to do.

But it’s still a problem that only really means that the film never quite manages to hit a point where everything clicks and it starts really getting impressive. Instead, Looper simmers along on the brink of greatness without ever crossing the line. But in many regards it’s less productive to look at what holds it back than what almost gets it there. First and foremost is the most elegant premise of Johnson’s career to date. The basic jist of Looper is that there are hiit men who kill people sent back in time from the future.…

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Those who listened to our Doctor Who podcast series will have noticed that I had new theme music this year. Some also noticed that I never actually said what it was. My stock answer was that it was a secret transmission from the future.

The future is here. 

Seeming’s new album, Sol, is out on August 4th. You can pre-order it here. It’s absolutely incredible, and like nothing else you’ve ever heard. I’ll be talking more about it and how it’s the secret soundtrack to Neoreaction a Basilisk closer to when it’s out, but for now let’s all just enthusiastically watch that video again and again.

(Oh, and if you don’t know Sammus, the guest vocalist on “Stranger,” she’s absolutely phenomenal as well and you should check her music out. Her new one, Pieces in Space, is brilliant, but her older more nerdcore stuff is solid as well.)…

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OK. First off, announcements. The Patreon very did not hit $320, so no Game of Thrones reviews. It’s currently at $295; if it gets back to $300, I’ll do a season wrap-up post. You can contribute here.

This week’s post will be on Tuesday, as there’s a small but very fun thing to announce tomorrow. I’m going with the teaser “the future arrives” for that one.

Which brings us to the news of the day, which is that Jodie Whittaker is the Doctor and the Chibnall era might be worth getting excited for after all. Discuss amongst yourselves in comments. I’ll be moderating the fuck out of sexist trolls, including deleting all replies to them. So go ahead and enjoy a comment section free of that shit. …

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At first glance, there are relatively few similarities between Brick and The Brothers Bloom. Brick is a self-consciously dour noir film about ruined masculinity. The Brothers Bloom is an ostentatiously colorful heist film about the power of stories. There seems very little that one can conclude about things like Rian Johnson’s style based on them. This is, of course, pretty much all a director can hope for after their second film. Make two similar films or, worse, more or less the same film twice and you’re pigeonholed. Make a surprisingly dark high school noir and then turn around and make a quasi-Wes Anderson heist film, on the other hand, and you’re well on your way towards seriousness.

Brick was a good film. The Brothers Bloom, on the other hand, is a great one – one I instantly fell in love with when it finally came through Gainesville on its meandering limited release tour. Looking back at it, I realize it must have been a small and quiet influence on TARDIS Eruditorum, with “there’s no such thing as an unwritten life, only a badly written one” getting to the point a solid year before “we’re all stories in the end; just make it a good one.” And it is with this closing moral that the connections with Brick also become clear. Brick, after all, is also about storytelling – a fact most explicit in its closing scene, where Brendan’s revelation that Laura was behind Emily’s downfall is framed explicitly as a story, with Brendan’s accusation called a “tale.”

But in Brick this was more or less a silent thematic element. It’s present in the mix, and entirely sensible – a detective’s job is, in many ways, to uncover the story of events. But it’s fundamentally subdued. But, unsurprisingly given that the heist film is already an inverse of the detective film, The Brothers Bloom takes the latent metaphor and expands it wildly. Stephen’s cons are written “the way dead Russians write novels, with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and shit.” His explicit goal and vision of the perfect con is to “tell a story so well it becomes real.” This is entirely straightforward and true: a con is a story, and all stories are cons.

Obviously this gets very meta very quickly. The Brothers Bloom demands that we understand it as a con, and Johnson as a con man. But this is not in and of itself significant without some understanding of what a con is meant to be. Once again the film is happy to go for text instead of subtext as Stephen says that “the perfect con is where each one involved gets just the thing they wanted,” a line that’s repeated over the ending because this is not a film that’s shy about making its aesthetic points. So obviously Stephen’s central con around which the plot revolves is judged a success. Stephen gets to die on a job (Bloom had earlier suggested he’d like just this), and Bloom and Penelope get each other.…

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It’s the sort of week where the Waffling’s a day late, basically. The extra work of Doctor Who S10 has me typically behind on everything, and I’m scrambling to get back going on things. (I’m working on long-term fixes for my workload, but they’re necessarily long term.) Anyway, in light of the fact that I’m awful and behind on everything I can’t really complain too loudly that we’re $17 a week shy of me doing Game of Thrones reviews, but I figure I should be clear that those look like they’re not happening and like I’ll get to actually watch the show with Jill consistently.

But I did want to mention some other Patreons. For instance, Sam Keeper’s Patreon, from which you can get her fabulous new book on Star Wars. Or Jack Graham’s, which is $14 away from dragging him kicking and screaming back to watching Doctor Who. If you don’t decide to throw money at the likely doomed Game of Thrones goal, well, those are great places to throw it instead. (Of course, you could also just fund all of us. But I know that’s not an option for everyone.)

Back tomorrow with a post I only just got around to sending to my Patrons. Until then, I usually wrap these up with some sort of question for the comments section, so let’s go with this: for you personally, what’s the most awful aspect of the Trump era (whether you’re American or not).…

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I sit down with one of my favorite nonfiction writers, John Higgs, to talk about The Doctor Falls. Then, after a brief secret message from the future, I interview him about his new book Watling Street: Travels Through Britain and its Ever-Present Past, a psychogeographic tour of the oldest road in Britain. One that, notably, runs up Shooter’s Hill and through Northampton. You can download that here, and you can buy Watling Street on Amazon here. It’s not got a US publisher, so if you’re US based you’ll have to import it. It’s worth it.…

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I first encountered the work of Rian Johnson while reading about Terry Gilliam’s My Neighbor Totoro remake Tideland on Wikipedia, where I stumbled across the factoid that Johnson had declared it and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain to be the two best films of 2006. This claim was notable for being A) self-evidently correct and B) a completely insane statement that nobody but me would actually make. And so I was immediately fascinated by this previously unheard of filmmaker and decided that, on the basis of his taste alone, I’d check out his existent film, a high school noir called Brick. (Also, it was only like $5 on Amazon.) Since then I’ve followed his career on the general logic that he was going to get really big some day. Which, sure enough, he did, so let’s put that knowledge to populist use. (And I’ll just spoil it up front, my favorite Johnson film is The Brothers Bloom, my least favorite is Looper.)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Brick is that it isn’t funny. Sure, there are moments that are humorous – the recurring urgent discussions about who people eat lunch with, for instance, or any scene whatsoever with the Pin’s mother. But although these things are funny, Johnson makes no effort whatsoever to actually get the viewer to laugh. The scenes are not played with comic timing, the humorous aspects are not pushed to the foreground, and none of the actors deliver their lines as if looking for the laugh.

What’s unusual about this is not that it’s an incongruous genre mashup played straight. What’s unusual is that one of the genres is high school. When you take the other great incongruous high school genre mashup to launch its creator to directing a major Disney franchise film, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it took place not only in a high school, but in an overtly funny high school of the sort familiar from Saved by the Bell or Ferris Bueler’s Day Off or, if you prefer to go back further, Happy Days or Grease. It’s not that Brick is the only serious high school movie ever made, but the core texts of the genre are those comedies or ones like them. So to do a genre mashup that is an objectively funny idea when one of the genres is largely comedic and have it be deadly serious is, on the face of it, interesting.

A genre mashup, done well, is about liminal spaces. In Brick, the key one is the tunnel where Emily is murdered. It’s where the film opens, and it returns there constantly, with Johnson’s camera endlessly cycling back to open mouth and to characters sinking into and emerging out of its darkness. It also returns constantly to the image of Emily’s arm lying in the water, her murder being the key event to take place in this space. This image also features on most of the film’s posters, becoming, along with the line drawing that represents the tunnel, the film’s main visual icon.…

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There’s probably a few people who wanted something more like Blink (or, more plausibly, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang) out of Moffat’s last finale, but it’s hard to imagine what more you could actually ask from it. It’s an episode that has at least one big moment catering to virtually every sensible aesthetic of Doctor Who and one or two of the dumb ones too – the rare thing that manages to solidly delight both GallifreyBase fandom and queer Tumblr fandom. (Although the Moffat Hate crowd is managing to treat Harold’s misogyny as the voice of the author because of course they are.) Entirely separate from any questions of ranking or comparison, it’s self-evidently successful as a finale, anchoring Series 10 as firmly in the “good” column.

Now for comparisons. The obvious point of comparison is The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, the equivalent “finale before the era-ending regeneration” story from the Davies era. It’s not that it’s quiet per se – it’s a multi-Master story, after all. But it’s quiet in comparison. Its defining decision, in many ways, is having the Doctor’s big speech be delivered to Missy and Harold, a quiet speech about kindness and decency in which the Doctor explains why this is the hill he’s going to die on. It’s not aiming to outdo Hell Bent or The Day of the Doctor. Like Extremis, it is visibly a work of late style. It’s aiming small and careful, relishing in its details.

Which isn’t quite everything. The Doctor’s reluctance to regenerate is unearned – there’s a line of dialogue with Bill that’s clearly there to set it up, but it’s a pro forma bit of foreshadowing as opposed to something that feels genuine. Heather probably should have come up somewhere, even if only in dialogue, since April 15th. And, perhaps most fundamentally, there’s not actually a reason for Missy and Harold to be here other than so they can listen to the Doctor’s speech – they’re not actually part of the same story as Bill’s salvation. But these are all small problems. It’s not like Missy and Harold clash with the Bill plot, after all. This is an episode that moves between two things, deft at both of them and, for that matter, at the transitions between them. The parts don’t quite add up, but that’s kind of how the whole being greater than the sum of its parts works.

More to the point, though, the whole is more than the sum of some absolutely astonishing parts. This is a story where the details are exquisitely crafted. The switches between the human and the Cyberman versions of Bill were done perfectly, maintaining the agonizing horror of it while not getting in the way of Mackie’s farewell performance. There’s a lot of coasting on the body horror of World Enough and Time, but the point of a forty-five minute windup is surely that you can coast on it after, wringing vast amounts of emotion out of a few seconds of carefully deployed Tenth Planet voice.…

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I’m joined this week by Chris O’Leary, author of Rebel Rebel, to talk about World Enough and Time. You can get that here.…

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I should probably link the book I wrote on Wonder Woman, A Golden Thread. Which I just cut the price of. Buy that here.

I saw Wonder Woman opening night, with a big group of friends. Standing outside the theater afterwards, everyone in the group – mostly female – expressed their love for the film, until eventually all eyes turned to me, and I confessed that I kinda hated it. Since then, I have largely opted to shut up about it. What I want out of a Wonder Woman film is, after all, by definition idiosyncratic, and in no small part incompatible with mass audiences. More importantly, however, despite having literally written the book on Wonder Woman (or at least a book), this was very clearly just not my conversation. I didn’t, and indeed still don’t want to be the guy who shits on the first superhero film to actually offer serious female representation largely untainted by the male gaze. There are widespread reports of women crying with joy at seeing a female superhero on screen, including ones who don’t even like superheroes that much. That matters more than a weirdo blogger who happens to have written a book.

Still, it’s been a few weeks now, and we’ve got a nice little lull between seasons of Hannibal, so let’s finally tackle this. First, I want to reiterate that nothing I say here is intended to take away from the basic importance of representation, both in front of and behind the camera. The elation female audiences have had for this film matters. It matters a lot more than tracking the particular movement of Wonder Woman as a signifier within the larger context of superheroes and specifically DC Comics. Nevertheless, tracking that movement is a thing I do, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least sketch my thoughts on the matter. Consider this a distant appendix rightfully buried at the end of the cultural report on Wonder Woman; an obscure dissent that’s gone at least three contrarian twists too far.

Let’s start with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Longtime readers of mine will know that I am a Zack Snyder apologist. And while Batman v. Superman is a hot mess of a movie that either needed to be an hour shorter or two hours longer and a TV series (preferably the latter, really), it remains in fundamental ways more interesting than the bulk of what has by this point definitely become an obscene glut of superhero movies. Much of this – indeed essentially all of it – is down to the bizarre cynicism of Snyder’s view of superheroes. Batman v. Superman spends its first half hour in outright fear of its title characters, treating them as objects of horror, an idea inherited from Man of Steel’s controversial resolution in which Superman kills Zod after a city-wrecking battle. And it never really backs away from this view. This is a film that views superheroes as at best morally dubious, embracing the Grant Morrison “superheroes as gods” take while viewing gods as awful intrusions into the world of mortals.…

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