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.
********************
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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