Here’s a short story-slash-monologue thingie that I scribbled out on the planes and buses that I took to get home from a friends recent twenty-first. It is entirely fictional though as you will find out soon enough into it. Apologies for the possibly rough structure, spelling and punctuation; this is still rough. Enjoy?
Comeback is a clever title for this book because it has so many relevant meanings: it is a time travel story, one in which men are hired to ‘come back’ in time to save friends, family members and prominent figures before they die (provided that the death occurred within the seventy-something day period of the past that current science allows travel to), it will without a doubt feature one or more characters making a ‘comeback’ before it closes (and the seeds are set for some in this first issue) but most of all this is a comic that you will want to come back to, not only next month for the second issue but minutes after you finish your read through of the first. See, Comeback is a complicated comic in the best possible way; it’s a puzzle with compelling individual pieces that seem set to come together in a really stunning way.
“That doesn’t matter!” screams Bruce Willis across a barren rural diner, “If we’re gonna get into the technicals of this time-travel shit then we’ll be here all day, making diagrams out of straws. None of that matters”*! He’s right and I agree with Rian completely, the man obviously feeding him the very meta-line. The logic and logistics of a movie’s technology aren’t as important as the tale that they are being used to tell and yet what let me down about Looper was that it put its focus firmly on the latter when the former is what it was best at. The picture plays out like one of its altered timelines; starting in one place and playing out straight before shifting on a sudden to somewhere completely different, making a drastic change and losing a lot of its impact in the translation.
Aubrey Plaza is an actress who was typecast before she was ever given a role, for years now all of her screen-time has been spent playing a specific modern mindset more than characters of any kind. Somehow she was chosen to be pop-culture’s embodiment of contemporary cynicism, she scoffs and rolls her eyes like every teenager to ever exist and she does it wonderfully. It is this fact, alongside her considerable charm and talent, that makes her perfect for playing the lead in Safety Not Guaranteed. Here – similar to her previous best performance as April Ludgate in Parks and Rec - Plaza is not simply placed in the film to be the butt of easy jokes – a stereotyped sigh – but to subvert that status; she stands as both an emotional counterpoint t a different kind of crazy and as someone to be converted. Something made all the more interesting considering that she isn’t just, as usual, embodying disaffected youth here but the very audience in which you sit.
Since the MiB first burst onto our screens back in Ninety Eight we have all of us gone on many great journeys into the secret recesses of the universe – the distant planet of Pandora, the cluttered cosmos of the Marvel Universe and whatever place the Prometheus barges into among the more recent – and so we have since almost gotten used to aliens, no matter how strange and stomach churning their designs. We’ve also proven that nowadays we tend not to love the silliness of space opera unless it is tempered by inner turmoil and deeper political ramifications; so this schlocky farce of a series was going to have to undergo some changes as it traveled forward into our present future and how better to keep things interesting than through the introduction of time travel?
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Looper is the third and latest film from Director Rian Johnson who previous works are Brick , The Brothers Bloom and an episode of Breaking Bad called The Fly; all of which are amazing. Johnson’s directorial effects are all drastically different from one another on the surface – a high school set noir, a modern con-man yarn and a look at two men in a meth lab trying to kill a fly – but underneath they share some commonalities, for one all of his scripts are very complicated: noir films are notorious for not making sense, cons are all about confusing the mark and The Fly was really a tale of dark deception and deep secrets. So though it is a big jump -and his first project without prominent B’s – it also sort of makes sense that his next step would be into the realm of time travel, the most complicated construction of them all. I would attempt to give a synopsis of the film but I think the trailer that follows will do a better job of that; and just that, there are no great spoilers in there, just great imagery. Enjoy it after the jump…
