Alistair Harkness asks if Looper any better with the director talking you through it?
I’m OUT of synch and its Rian Johnson’s fault. Sitting in a cinema at an afternoon screening of Looper, the director is in my ears, talking his way through his time-travel mind-melter via a free-to-download “in theatre” commentary track that he released online after the film’s opening weekend a couple of weeks back. The idea is much like a DVD commentary: he talks you through what’s on screen, providing detailed insights into all aspects of the production while you sit rapt/bored (delete as appropriate) depending on your level of film geekiness. The difference is that you listen to it in the cinema, plugged into your iPhone/iPod while normal/sensible cinemagoers (delete as appropriate) watch the film with its production secrets intact.
In theory it should be like having an intimate private screening with the director, the cinema’s digital surround sound (sort of) blocked out by his voice in your head. Instead, thanks to Johnson’s instruction to play the commentary from the moment a specific film company logo disappears – a logo that doesn’t actually appear at the beginning of the British release (they have different distributors) – I’m doing what I despise other people for doing in cinemas: fiddling with my iPhone, frantically trying to fast-forward the track without putting on a Close Encounters of the Third Kind-style light show for my fellow cinemagoers.
Pausing instead of zipping forward, then accidently skipping back to the beginning, I eventually disappear under my coat so I can get things back on track without the ever-vigilant cinema staff thinking I’m trying to pirate the movie (I admit to being a bit of a techno-klutz in this respect). I manage to get to within 20 seconds or so of where I should be and catch Johnson going into great detail about how shooting in anamorphic widescreen allowed him to achieve a specific lens flare that isn’t yet on the screen in front me. Then I listen while he talks about the brilliant diner sequence before Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis turn up in it.
Given the prominence of time displacement in the film, this all feels kind of appropriate, but it’s also annoying as hell, so I attempt once again to surreptitiously fast forward the commentary. I manage to get to within five seconds or so, which means I’m at least in the same scene that’s being discussed for the rest of the film. What follows is a somewhat disorientating, but fascinating (albeit nerdy) way to watch the film as Johnson explains the time paradox at its centre (it’s surprisingly simple), likens his introduction of Emily Blunt’s character to Han Solo’s arrival in Star Wars and encourages little coughing fits to signal to others in the audience who might be listening along that you’re participating in this cinematic silent disco too (no-one coughs).
All of this presupposes you’ve seen the film already and are thus willing to pay to see it again (Johnson comes clean about the fact that he’s effectively supplying an incentive for repeat business). But given that I didn’t pay to see it first time (the perks of press screenings) and that I loved it more than any blockbuster I’ve seen this year, my gullibility for these kinds of things doesn’t feel like it’s being exploited. That said, the film is so dense that by the end I did find myself wishing I’d watched it a second time straight to figure more of it out for myself, which means I’ll probably catch it again before its run ends. And therein lies the film’s genius (and Johnson’s true canniness): once hooked, you don’t necessarily want to close that loop.
• To download the commentary, go to http://soundcloud.com/rcjohnso/looper-theatrical-commentary