Police are investigating the death of 28-year-old actor Johnny Lewis, whose credits include AVPR: Aliens vs Predator – Requiem , The Runaways , Lovely Molly , TV’s Drake & Josh , The O.C. , and American Dreams following the apparent murder of his elderly landlord in Los Angeles. Lewis was best known for playing Kip ‘Half Sack’ Epps on Sons of Anarchy . The body of 81-year-old Katherine Chabot Davis was found inside her Los Feliz home, where Lewis was renting a room. Per reports, Lewis fought with at least two people at the site before taking a fatal fall. According to TMZ, authorities believe “Lewis was either on PCP or meth at the time of the murder. The two people who fought Lewis before he fell to his death from a roof told cops the actor exhibited ‘superhuman strength.'” More details of the sad, bizarre incident here . [ TMZ ]
If time travel is ever to be invented, wouldn’t we already have had evidence of it? The question is enough to give grammarians seizures, let alone filmmakers. As Jeff Daniels’s world-weary time-traveling crime lord says in Rian Johnson ‘s Looper , “this time travel shit fries your brain like an egg.” And the film, out this Friday, is far from the most brain-frying cinematic treatment of time travel. To help make sense of a genre riddled with paradoxes, I contacted Tim Maudlin, philosophy professor at NYU, who has written extensively on time travel, and quickly rattled off my preconceptions on the matter.* According to Maudlin, there are two types of time-travel narratives in fiction. The most common, which he calls “inconsistent time-travel stories,” are about a traveler who goes back in time and changes the course of events, à la Marty McFly. To Maudlin, movies of this type— Looper included—“literally make no sense.” If the character goes back in time, then there would never have been a past without him. In “consistent” time-travel stories, however, the time traveler was always a part of the events he affected (e.g. Twelve Monkeys, or Robert Heinlein’s classic mindfuck of a short story, — All You Zombies—, in which the main character is both his own mother and father). These are Moebius strip narratives. There is no first time around or second time around. There is just one past that contains the traveler. Stories of this type, Maudlin says, “are more like clever crossword puzzles, where all the various threads fit together in a satisfactory way. They appeal to the logician rather than the sentimentalist.” With that distinction in mind, we can determine just how logical Looper and the other nine best time-travel movies are. (Another paradox: the more logical the treatment of time travel, the more it makes your brain hurt.) Looper (2012)[ Spoiler warning! ] Plot: Joe, a young gun-for-hire, must kill his future self or be killed, but Bruce Willis, naturally, has another outcome in mind. Consistent? No. We see a whole timeline in which Young Joe kills Old Joe, then lives out the rest of his life before coming up with a plan to stop Young Joe from killing the now Old Joe. If he succeeds, he would never have been able to live the life he lived theretofore. And the ending raises an even bigger paradox. Back to the Future (1985) Plot: Marty McFly, a kid with a mad-scientist friend and a loser dad, travels from 1985 to 1955 in a souped-up DeLorean, fools around with his hot teenage mom, inspires his dad to grow a pair and knock Biff the bully out, then returns to 1985. Consistent? No. If Marty goes back in time, then there would never have been a version of the past without him. The other thing is, for Marty to still be born after his disruption of his parents’ courtship, his mom and pop need to time the moment of fertilization to the microsecond. But that’s more a question of probability (and staying power) than logic. Back to the Future II (1989) Plot: Marty travels to the future, buys a sports almanac, which falls in the hands of elder Biff, who travels to 1955, and gives it to his younger self, thus helping Biff become a sports-gambling gazillionaire, and transforming Hill Valley into a seedy dystopia. Marty goes back to 1955 to destroy the almanac, without interfering with his previous time-traveling exploits from the first movie. Consistent? No. In the words of Doc Brown, writers Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale weren’t “thinking fourth dimensionally.” Narratively, it’s fantastic. Logically, it’s all over the place, where multiple timelines coexist and alternate. Back to the Future III (1990) Plot: After reading that Doc, who traveled to 1885, died in a duel against Biff’s gunslinging ancestor, Marty finds the DeLorean Doc had hidden away and goes back to save him. Consistent: Of course not. As with the first two, the multiple timelines are irreconcilable paradoxes. Plus, as several obsessive geek sites have pointed out, when Marty finds the DeLorean and goes back to 1885 with it, there should by all logic be two DeLoreans in 1885. The Terminator (1984) Plot: In a last-ditch effort to win the future war against mankind, Skynet’s intelligent machines send the Terminator back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor and prevent her from giving birth to John Connor, who would grow up to lead the successful human-led Resistance. But the Resistance sends Kyle Reese back to protect Sarah. Overstepping his duties, he impregnates her, and she gives birth to… John Connor! Consistent? Yes. It’s circular, chicken-or-egg logic, but it holds together.
Full disclosure right off the bat here, some die-hard Romney fans and those with hyper-sensitivity to the F-Bomb and haters of politics generally may not want to proceed, so if you do, go at your own peril. A tidy little vid starring Barack supporter-extraordinaire Samuel L. Jackson has hit the internet, and though a tad longer than the typical 30 second political spot flooding the airwaves in this election season, it is quite a bit more clever and funnier – though it helps if you’re a supporter of the incumbent, naturally. And while it is unabashedly supportive of Obama, the prez does not come in and say he “supports this message” like in most other political ads. In this version, Jackson invades a home of a quiet suburban family of lackadaisical Obama ’08 supporters to tell them to, “Wake the F**** Up.” The three-minute, forty-second video is sponsored by the Jewish Council for Education and Research and is a riff on a reading the Oscar-nominated actor did last year of a satirical “children’s book” called Go the F*** to Sleep , a charming little diddy that went viral. The book’s author, Adam Mansbach also wrote the script for the pro-Obama version of the story, which opens with a young girl who lies awake in her bed fretting that her complacent family will sleep the election away, when just four years ago they were taking to the streets. The video premiered on Yahoo! Little Suzie gets out of bed, but not far from sight is her political ally in-waiting with political rhymes and a final “Wake the F*** Up” as she traipses through her house encountering her listless family members. First off, she goes to her parents who are falling asleep watching TV in the living room. And like an angel, Jackson appears with a riddle urging little Suzie’s parents to get involved. Next she heads into her older brother’s room, who is sitting with his feet up on his desk. Suzie blasts her brother saying that the election is about their future and recalls how he was on the front lines in ’08. Her brother replies that all politicians are “the same” and like magic again, Jackson appears giving a friendly warning that goes something like this: “They’re all the same? Please! Obama’s sent SEALS to Bin Laden’s place, Romney sent jobs overseas. And how about that student loan overhaul? It’s going to save you thousands of bucks. Mitt will cut that sh** in a second. Hey dude, Wake the F*** Up!” Next she heads to her older sister’s room with more prose about planned parenthood etc., Jackson appears, gives his two cents with another riddle and another, “Wake the F*** Up!” And finally, it’s off to grandma and grandpa’s room who are, incidentally, proving that older folks do have good times, until they’re interrupted by you know who… Medicare is the big theme here, naturally, and one more “Wake the F*** Up!” [Source: Yahoo! News ]
It’s a good fall for ambitious movies. In the wake of the September release of Paul Thomas Anderson ‘s The Master , Warner Bros will open Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings’ Cloud Atlas to theaters on Oct. 26, and a trio of TV spots has begun building awareness of the film adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel. Check out the clips after the jump and stay tuned for Jen Yamato’s upcoming report on the film’s debut at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX on Wednesday night. Mitchell’s story featured six interconnected stories that spanned from the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future. Judging from the TV spots, which feature Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Hugo Weaving, among other cast members, Tykwer ( Run, Lola, Run ) and the Wachowskis have remained true to the book’s central themes about the cyclical nature of life and the universality of human nature. What do you think? Follow Frank DiGIacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
2011 is turning out to be a strong year for what can only be awkwardly summarized as films about aging hipster couples. That’s dire, dismissive-sounding shorthand for what are actually plangent, pensive works about people facing the realization that time is making their carefree choices to forgo a more mainstream path into hard facts.
