Anghus Houvouras with his cinematic confessions on Looper and Guillermo del Toro…
It’s a new year and time for a new column. This year I decided it was time to share some of the dirty little secrets that I don’t often discuss. To bare my soul each week, reaching into the deepest recesses of my coal-black heart.
These are my confessions…
Confession #1: I thought Looper kind of sucked
Since the polarizing release of The Last Jedi, fans of Star Wars have been discussing their love/hate relationship with the film. So often when Rian Johnson’s name is brought into the discussion, they mention his body of work to bolster his filmmaking credentials. You’ll hear a few people cite Brick, but the vast majority of fans use Looper as the Rian Johnson calling card of quality. ‘He made Looper. LOOPER!’ they cry like Stellan Skarsgard in bemoaning the Fields Medal.
But I thought Looper was kind of bad. And not just ‘it tried something lofty and failed’ bad. Like ‘this is some cartoony, dumb science fiction’ bad. We could spend days talking about the goofy idea that time-travel is invented and then controlled by organized crime. Or the rather silly idea that the hit-men of the future eventually have to kill themselves to ‘close the loop’ presenting enough paradoxes to make Stephen Hawking blow a gasket. I can forgive fundamentally flawed time travel, but even the basic elements of Looper were chock full of cheese. Joseph Gordon Levitt’s strained attempt at being young Bruce Willis. Goofy plots about a future where a super-powerful telekinetic dude takes over everything (why didn’t they make that movie?).
I was underwhelmed by Looper and don’t think it’s all that good or entertaining. And yet somehow in the geek community it’s become this overused gold standard for quality sci-fi filmmaking in the 21st century. I must confess, I fail to understand why.
Confession #2: I find Guillermo del Toro films grating & ridiculous
del Toro has been the darling of the online film community for years. He’s a larger than life figure loved by hardcore film fans, writers and fans of his over the top style. But I think he’s made two good movies and a whole lot of overrated crap.
I like Cronos and I think Pan’s Labyrinth is a marvelous motion picture. But everything else del Toro has touched feels like extremely simple stories focusing on style over substance. He has this blunt, simplistic storytelling style. The cinematic equivalent of a foreign traveller screaming loudly and slowly in their own language trying to be understood. There’s a child-like quality to his work that I find irritating. It works in small doses. Using Pan’s Labyrinth as an example, the over the top elements feel perfectly balanced with the stark realities of the real world. But so many of his films feel over-indulgent to a fault with laughably over the top characters.
So many of his films suffer from being so far removed from reality that they never really feel believable. He lacks the ability to ground the characters and drama while making these overblown flights of fancy. There are filmmakers capable of doing both: creating fantastic worlds AND delivering identifiable and realistically rendered characters: del Toro isn’t one of them. I admire the man’s mind, but his movies often feel like picturesque children’s books with no sense of character.
But in conversations about The Shape of Water, pointing out its lack of originality by comparing it to Splash or Lady in the Water (or Abe Sapien) feels like wasted breath by the online legion of del Toro fans.
That’s it for this week’s confessions. See you next week.
Anghus Houvouras
Originally published January 6, 2018. Updated January 7, 2018.
