Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 105: Mon Apr 15

Brick (Johnson, 2005) & Looper (Johnson, 2012) double-bill: Prince Charles Cinema, 6.50pm
Director Rian Johnson will be in attendance for a Q&A following this double-bill screening.

Chicago Reader review of Brick:
For his debut feature Rian Johnson meticulously re-creates Dashiell Hammett's brand of gumshoe noir but transplants the blind-alley mystery and rat-a-tat dialogue to a modern SoCal suburban high school. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (a sitcom veteran who's been quietly building up an impressive body of work in movies) stars as a world-weary student trying to unravel the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend, and Lukas Haas is his nemesis, a ruthless, clubfooted heroin dealer who does business out of a paneled den in his parents' basement. It's a limited conceit—gone is the noir sense of being trapped by bad life choices—but it's worth seeing for the tightly coiled plot, well-realized characters, and novel take on rapacious teen culture.
JR Jones

Here is the trailer.

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Chicago Reader review of Looper:
This noirish time travel saga by Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom) brims with visual detail and imaginative camera set-ups, though it doesn't leave much of an aftertaste. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a contract killer in the mid-21st century whose targets are sent back to him from 30 years in the future; things get hairy when his latest victim turns out to be an older version of himself, played by Bruce Willis in his rueful hangdog mode. The dystopian setting, in which all U.S. infrastructure has eroded and everyone has a price on his head, makes for some bold cultural commentary, but as usual with Johnson, the engaging ideas feel like affectations rather than products of a fully developed sensibility.
Ben Sachs

Here is the trailer.

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