Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis & Emily Blunt

REVIEWED BY RESIDENT CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

After trying my first Macca’s lamb burger, minus the egg, and pronouncing it ‘Good’ (red onions add something, don’t they?)  Our party went into the Xtremescreen.

Previews for Killing them Softly and Lawless , both of which seem to involve lots of shooting, with the latter seasoned by a Prohibition garnish.  Paranormal Activity 4 is on the way, providing yet another outing for handheld cameras, poor lighting and acting so bad it would be edited out of a crime re-enactment in a true crime expose.  These provided hints that Looper was going to serve us a lot of ballistics, greased up with a bit of weirdness.

And so it was.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt who has been around since being the almost normal alien on Third Rock from the Sun , is a ‘looper’.  This is not the same as being loopy* but means that one is a well-paid cold-blooded killer of total strangers.

The strangers arrive in a field, dressed in suede jackets with bullion bars attached to their backs and bags over their heads, and the looper blows them away, disposes of the body and passes all or some of the loot on.  A bit like selling used cars, I guess.  The strangers arrive from the year 2042 where time travel has been invented but is only used by serious crooks wanting to get rid of people without a trace.

On occasion, the stranger is, in fact, the older version of the looper who wants to take him** out.  Why these clever folk don’t ensure that old retired loopers are killed by people other than their younger selves is a bit of a mystery.

Anyhow JGL recreates by going to noisy clubs full of semi-clad young women and – I’m not making this up – using eye drops to get himself high.  The whole looper scene is run by a bloke who looks like he could fill in as a drugged out old guy who once played with the Beach Boys when their usual guitarist was in rehab in 1971 and who has been living ever since on the memory of his fortnight of fame.

Bruce Willis is the older JGL – same man, mortal enemies.  Yeah, but no but, yeah?  Bruce gets all shooty and Die Hard , killing improbable numbers of bad guys with ridiculous ease.

To the everlasting credit of the writers, the major time travel theme that comes into play is the classic need to take out someone who goes bad in the future. But instead of using these powers to kill Hitler or Pol Pot or Alan Jones, Willis is hellbent on finishing off himself.

The ending is sort of intelligent and grown up and non-American because we can’t all end up happy all the time, even with eye drops.

And so to beer.

 

* – for which see Mental and the upcoming thing about the bloke doing psych rehab who meets up with a kindred spirit.  Heart-warming index finger down throat, perhaps.

** – they all seem to be blokes, which is a bit at odds with the Soviet experience that women make better snipers and hit persons.  So far as I know, the late, great USSR was the only place to make a serious study of this important issue.

 

Oh Grenfell ! You were the place that nagged at the heart of Australian poet, Henry Lawson, his birthplace. To read the monument to his birth just outside this centre of this NSW country town, you get the sense that Lawson felt a little guilty about his departure from the town. His poem, Said Grenfell To My Spirit , opens with the town itself berating him for his disloyalty -

Said Grenfell to my spirit, “You’ve been writing very free Of the charms of other places, and you don’t remember me.”

4 hours out of Sydney, this historic gold town has known a few celebrity ex-pats (notably the bushranger, Ben Hall) and surrounded by flowering canola blossoms and rambling Patterson’s Curse, it’s probably no prettier than it is in springtime. But it wasn’t the history, the view or the pub that caught my eye on a recent exploration of the town. It was Grenfell’s lovely typography.

I was struck by the many painted signs, some old some new, and wondered if perhaps Grenfell was also home to a typographic talent, yet uncovered?  Whoever the one or many sign-writers are, their legacy adds a particular flair to this  town of 2200 people.

After gold was discovered in the area by a shepherd in the 1860’s, the town boomed as miners flocked to the area to get their piece of shiny. By the 1870’s it was producing the most gold of any town in NSW.

The Weddin Mountains fringe the village, and in them are caves and hideouts of bushrangers from these boom times.  The locals will tell you, in that traditional country Australia, laconic style, that there’s gold in the caves still – bushranger loot –  stashed away right before they were shot by police or dragged off to the lock-up, a hundred-year-old secret.

Apprently it’s hard to get to, though, on account of the mini-avalanches that have resulted in the entranes being blocked by fallen rocks.

So, there are hills in which to hunt your fortune. But if you prefer a more leisurely exploration, try sign-watching and enjoy Grenfell’s typography treasures.