Looper

I didn't decide I wanted to see Looper until after it stopped showing in theaters. I saw it last week and I liked it. There haven't been many good time travel movies recently, so it was a relief to finally get one. Both the present and future versions of the protagonist are played by good actors (Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis), and they even used some subtle makeup to make JGL look a little more like Bruce Willis. It was a bit distracting at first, but once you get used to it it helps since JGL doesn't look much like Bruce Willis. That didn't bother me too much though. The plot turned out to be a lot more complicated and interesting than the trailer let on. In the trailer, we see that the protagonist is a hitman who kills targets sent back from the future until he meets his future self. There's actually a lot more to it than that, which is good. Time travel movies are best when they have complexity and confusing paradoxes, which Looper also has. I don't want to spoil the ending, but something happens that could potentially change the future that Bruce Willis comes from and cause him not to get sent back in time. But if that happens, he doesn't change the past, so the future doesn't change, but if that happens, he does get sent back and change the past (x infinity). It's similar to the paradox of killing one's own ancestors since the end result prevents itself from happening. So first Inception and now this. I get the feeling that JGL likes confusing movies. I still think of him as somewhere between Robin and Arthur though. His character in Looper didn't make a big enough impression for me to change that. Looper was outshined by some other 2012 movies, but it was still good. Final Verdict: This movie gets 4.3 bars of silver!

Arrow

Judging from the first four episodes, I think Arrow is going to be a pretty cool show. Oliver Queen starts out as basically Tony Stark, then becomes Tom Hanks from Castaway, then ends up somewhere between Hawkeye and Batman, which I like. They do a good job making a green hooded archer cool, even though I think sometimes it can be hard to get Green Arrow right. They haven't actually called him the Green Arrow yet, and most of the villains are corporate scoundrels instead of costumed criminals. Deadshot made an appearance though. He didn't have a costume, but he never missed a shot and had a wrist gun and that cool targeting thing over his eye, so I think he had plenty of Deadshotness. Unfortunately, he dies. But Deathstroke should be coming into the show soon. The other thing I like about the show is all the little references they make to the comic books just because they can. For example, Oliver mentions a train to Bludhaven (Nightwing's territory if you didn't know that), and one of the characters was nicknamed Speedy, even though something tells me she's not gonna become his sidekick. Wait a second. Now that I think about it, she does have some issues with alcohol and drugs and stuff, so I guess that's a parallel. But that character kind of annoys me, and so do a few of the other ones. I feel like a lot of them are just cut from common character templates. But overall, I'd say this is one of the better live action comic book based TV shows I've seen. It's better than Smallville, better than the Blade series, and don't even talk to me about Adam West era superheroes. Final Verdict: This show gets 4 trick arrow heads!