Always follow the Quentin Tarantino/Spike Lee rule: always put your most interesting actors up front even if they aren’t well known. The magnetic & powerful Tracie Thoms appears briefly as a waitress then disappears. The riveting & focused Bruce Willis, though his appearance is slightly absurd when the movie initially shows him (“Hey, is Mickey Rourke in this film?”), does bring joy when he isn’t acting monstrous. I like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but he is shackled with absurd prosthetics to make him appear more like his future self. Because I missed the first 5-10 minutes of Looper, I wasn’t able to fully abandon my analytical mind and immediately started destroying the plot with questions and soon thought it was the most absurd film that I’ve seen. There should be another rule: you can only have so many sci-fi conventions in one film before it collapses beneath the weight of your suspension of disbelief snapping as the movie progresses: flying vehicles, time-travel, telekinesis. It is Terminator meets the Matrix meets I honestly don’t care because I’m too old for this malarkey. At one point, the movie abandons its clever narrative technique and becomes a different movie. Perhaps I should have followed my own rule–sometimes there is one scene in a movie that really reveals what the filmmakers really thought of the movie: “Try not to think about it too much.” Because if you do, you’ll be disappointed. I see that we have another Damon Lindehof–if the filmmakers don’t know the answer then make a mystery, it isn’t clever, you’re sloppy!