This week promises more troubles with time travel — even though most Bruce Willis movies are pretty solid. It’s also a glimpse at the controversies involved in last week’s Chicago teachers’ strike. If you’re in the mood for something sillier that’s bound to include fecophilia jokes and urine, check out Adam Sandler’s most recent cartoon. Enjoy!
Looper: In the future, time travel is illegal and operated by the mob, who use it to send their enemies into the past to have them terminated. Eventually, the mob decides that Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) should also be eliminated so that all ends of the loop are closed. Thus, the action, drama, morality tale ensues. Looper looks interesting enough to catch in the theaters, but I’m always wary of any film with a time-travel premise. There are often holes in the narratives and illogical consequences of time travel. Even some solid films shoot themselves through the use of time travel. Terminator is a prime culprit: John Connor sends back Kyle Reese to protect his mother, but John Connor is the result of an intimate night that Sarah and Kyle spend together. Thus, if Kyle doesn’t travel back in time, he doesn’t sleep with Sarah, and Sarah doesn’t get pregnant. But, if John Connor isn’t conceived, then he doesn’t send Kyle back. The first event cannot be the latter event in linear time. My concern for Looper is that it will succumb to a similar paradox wherein an enemy of the mob is sent back in time, but if all of this enemy’s actions are obviated through his assassination in the past, then how can the mob be certain that their existence remains the same in the present?
Won’t Back Down: Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis play two mothers determined to improve their children’s failing inner city school. The premise here is endearing, and the acting should be solid from these two Academy Award nominees, but this is one of those films that reminds me of rubberneckers on a highway, grotesquely intrigued by the burning vehicle – so much so that they stop to watch it and wait for a larger, bell- and hose-equipped vehicles to remedy the situation. The state of education in this country is a sad one: quantitative tests designed to create funding-generating, momentary success have taken away from actual teaching and studying, replacing it with cramming and memorizing. The recent teacher’s strike in Chicago exemplifies that backasswardness of the situation: teachers calling for improvement, but refusing to allow themselves to be replaced for underperformance. Won’t Back Down might be a wonderful tale of triumph and determined parents striving for their children’s future, but it’s hard to see the silver lining here in such a concrete fiction.
Hotel Transylvania: Bad news: it’s got Adam Sandler. Good news: it’s a cartoon, so his “Whoopidy do!” voice and silliness is a bit more acceptable here. In general, the premise is cute: Dracula operates a resort where a handful of creatures that bump in the night reside. One day, an average man stumbles upon the place, and a love story is bound to materialize. All in all, this film is bound to be a pedestrian one that simultaneously lauds itself as preaching tolerance and panders to children with gross humor and loud noises.
