Silent Boarding, MoviePass, Looper

Last week, taking a flight on Alaska Airlines from Los Angeles to Seattle, I found myself taking part in an experiment in "silent boarding." Agents entered into a laptop the cellphone numbers of ticketholders on that flight. You could then watch for announcements on prominently placed electronic signs, or you could wait for a notice to be sent to your phone as a text message.

The problem was that there were no audible announcements of pre-boarding, which is usually the signal to put away your laptop or book and get ready to board when your section is called.

Thus I had to keep checking my watch to see how much time I had left, keeping me from fully concentrating on writing last week's column for this paper. I couldn't really see what was happening at the gate, so when the official boarding time neared, I packed up and moved near the gate.

This early clotting near the gate is one of the problems silent boarding is supposed to alleviate. Instead, it was as bad as ever.

When I saw the overhead announcement for my group to board, six people lined up ahead of me. That was fine – the plane leaves at the same time for everyone. The problem was that I had not yet received the promised text message. What if I had been relying on that as my only notice? Only when the agent was actually scanning my ticket did I finally get the text message.

If all the gates had been practicing silent boarding, it would have been lovely to enjoy the quiet; only the Seattle flight out of LAX was involved in the experiment, however, and so we did not really have that much less background chat.

Meanwhile, I had no reason for confidence in timely notices, and my lack of confidence was justified in the event. Had I waited for the text message, I would not have been able to pack up my computer and reach the gate before the group after mine began to board. Since the seats had unusually small spaces under them, and I had to stow my laptop bag overhead, the delay might have resulted in real inconvenience in having no overhead space by the time I got on, since I was counting on being able to use my computer in flight.

Add to that the fact that it is often easy to miss the arrival of a text, unless you have your phone set to a loud alert, and we might have ended up with an amazing number of cellphone alarms going off at the same time. Would that be better than the regular loudspeaker announcements? Or would it merely be a change from one noise to another, along with an increase in uncertainty, anxiety and inconvenience in the boarding process?

At the moment, then, I must cast a vote against silent boarding.

....

Speaking of experiments, there's a new company called MoviePass, which offers what amounts to a monthly fee for unlimited theatrical movie attendance.

You pay a flat monthly fee, ranging from $24.99 to $39.99 per month (based on local area ticket prices; the national average is $29.99). You're given a special movie card, which you use to buy a regular, full price ticket at the box office or kiosk.

You also have to have your cellphone with you, because the card is linked to an app. If your cellphone isn't within a hundred feet of the theater when you try to use the card, the card won't work.

This is how they prevent people from using a single MoviePass to pay for a dozen different people. They're assuming – correctly – that cellphones are so personal and indispensable that most people won't lend their phone along with their MoviePass card.

The theaters are getting the full ticket price, so the fact that you're paying MoviePass a flat monthly fee has nothing to do with them. They get their money.

So how does MoviePass make money?

The same way gyms profit from memberships. Most people don't actually use their gym memberships very much. They pay for a year, show up a few times, and that's it.

Those of us who do use our gym memberships (or I did, anyway, before Gold's bought out my local gym and closed it down – That's why I will never go to Gold's, not just because their location is too far for me to run or bike to, but also because I think this is an evil business practice) are getting a great bargain, because we are subsidized by all the people who pay but don't come.

MoviePass is charging you for the convenience – having prepaid, you can always afford to go to the movies. Some months there might be six movies you want to see, and you save money. Other months, there'll be nothing, or maybe just one; for that month, you lose money.

It spreads your movie-attendance costs over a whole year, and MoviePass is betting that most people won't use the full number of tickets they pay for.

So is it a rip-off? Absolutely not. You know what they charge; you decide whether to go to the movies; it's entirely up to you whether they profit from you or you profit from them.

It's like movie insurance. You're betting there'll be a lot of movies you want to see; they're betting that the movies will suck and you won't go. Given how movies get scripted and green-lighted, they'll probably win. But you always have the convenience of knowing your movie tickets are prepaid.

It's like paying for HBO and other premium cable channels. How much do you actually watch their offerings? Do you get your money's worth? I do – because I pay every month in case there's something I want to watch.

The trouble is, you can't just buy it. You have to be invited to sign up.

This is smart, because otherwise they'd be flooded with sales to people who will use the MoviePass seven times a month, and they'll go broke right away.

Instead, it has to spread socially. They have a hundred thousand members or so. Each of them can invite "ten more movie lovers." During the Christmas season, MoviePass is going to "do a big push to encourage people to make MoviePass a gift for friends and neighbors, pre-loaded for a month, 90 days or a year for all-you-can-watch theater attendance, with a limit of one movie a day" (Hollywood Reporter, Oct. 3, 2012, page 2).

It's a gift I'd love to give to other people – I have a list of 10 in mind already. But I'm not a member, so I can't. So if anybody from MoviePass reads this column, do yourselves a favor and let me buy my own pass now, without waiting for somebody else to invite me. I'll have half my Christmas shopping done in a few minutes.

So maybe that invitation-only policy isn't such a great idea after all. National Geographic used to do that, too – I would have subscribed for years, but nobody invited me.

(And to any friends of mine who are MoviePass subscribers, don't give me a gift card. Just give me an invitation. I'll buy my own!)

....

Looper is a brilliant sci-fi movie. One of the best ever. I'm glad I saw it.

But I'm not sure I ever want to see it again.

It's so powerful and raw and brutally real, and I cared so much about the characters, and the moral situations were so complicated and fascinating and painful that the experience can be devastating.

The ending is perfect. It took my wife and me completely by surprise, and yet it was the only viable choice.

...continued on page 2

...continued from page 1

And it's almost impossible to talk about the movie, mostly because sci-fi plots always sound so stupid when you don't have two hours to set everything up and make it feel completely plausible.

Also, I can hardly tell you anything about the story without giving things away.

What I can tell you without spoiling anything is that this is one of Bruce Willis' best performances ever.

Because Willis does such a good job of portraying wise-cracking, too-cool-to-live characters, he often isn't taken seriously as an actor. But he has the full range, and he always has.

This isn't a too-cool part. Willis plays the part of an aging hit man who has killed and killed and killed. But in the last five years of his life, he found love and a kind of redemption, and then suddenly an old debt came due and he loses everything.

It's not that he wants it back. He knows he can't actually get it back. He just wants to undo a terrible harm that was done to a good, innocent person in the process of the debt collection.

Which brings us to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is one of the best young actors working. Gordon-Levitt plays the same character as Willis – only 30 years younger. Old Joe and Young Joe.

Gordon-Levitt is generous enough as an actor that he is willing to hide his face – he wears several prosthetics to make him believable as a younger version of Bruce Willis. Doesn't matter – it does not interfere with his brilliant performance.

Never have two actors played the same character with such perfect equality. Both of them face terrible moral choices; both of them get to explore a wide range of emotions and responses; we completely understand both of them and yet dread the terrible things we know they're going to do.

There are also wonderful performances by Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Piper Perabo, and above all Jeff Daniels as a world-weary old criminal boss.

It is impossible not to mention the best performance by an actor under the age of 10, perhaps ever. Pierce Gagnon doesn't enter the movie until quite late, but the entire emotional truth of the movie rests on his performance. He is up to the task.

Writer-director Rian Johnson did everything right. It's his vision from beginning to end. Not only is the script exceptionally clear and powerful, but also Johnson works with actors and draws superb performances from them.

When you can work with a child actor and get the results Johnson got from Gagnon, you really are the kind of actor's director that Woody Allen and Martin Scorcese are only purported to be.

Time travel stories are usually full of contradictions and paradoxes. The rule set chosen for this one has a couple of logical weak spots, but nothing as laughable as the "fading photograph" from Back to the Future.

My wife and I talked it through afterward, and no, there are no internal contradictions. They live by the rules they chose.

If there's a flaw, it's a small one: Looper suffers from Delaware Syndrome. That is, there's an entire future world with all the variety of the state of Delaware. We have to buy the premise that the only people using time travel are criminals, and they only use it for one purpose, and everybody who matters lives in one city within an easy car ride of everyone else.

But it's OK – movies are short stories, and they take place in compressed universes. We don't miss the wider world because it's not relevant to the tale being told.

Also, there's some pointless nudity and completely unnecessary F-words. But they don't last long. The movie would have had an R rating anyway, because of the casual brutality and really savage things that happen. This movie is not light-hearted. I can't even say it's "fun." It's just powerful and brilliant.

That's all I can tell you without committing a semi-spoiler. But there is a seeming contradiction that may be confusing, and I want to clear it up for you now, so you don't wonder about what's real and not-real when you watch the movie.

If you hate it when people give away anything vital about a plot, stop reading this column now. But if you like it when people warn you about confusing bits so you can sail right through them, then keep reading. I won't give away any actual surprises.

There are a couple of times in the movie when we're shown the consequences of a choice Joe is about to make. That is, we flash forward to what he believes will happen, so we can understand why he makes the choice he makes.

One such flash-forward happens very near the end. It's quite clear that this is what would happen, but hasn't yet, so we absolutely understand what he does next.

But early on in the movie, there's a time when we seem to see the same event twice. In this one case, however, it really happened twice.

It's not a flash-forward, it's just that because of time travel, we come to the same moment twice, only the second time, one character behaves differently, which changes everything.

Specifically: Young Joe works as a hit man – a looper. When a victim is sent back in time by future criminals, for a looper to murder him and dispose of the body, a load of silver bars is attached to the victim. The looper keeps the silver and spends it (or saves it, or gives it away).

But when a looper "closes his loop," they send back his own future self. This time, when he kills the person – himself as an old coot – the young looper is paid off in gold bars.

Then he's done. That was his last job.

He then has 30 years or so to live on that gold, until his time runs out and he is forced to go back in time and be murdered by his younger self.

The first time around, Young Joe kills his future self, closes his loop, and then lives for 30 years. He did it without hesitation – but it also makes him miserably unhappy, as you might imagine.

So when, as Old Joe (Bruce Willis), he is sent back, he changes his behavior and doesn't get killed. Thus he diverges from the timeline that created the version of himself that made this choice.

Under one set of time travel rules, this would simply not be possible. Any change you make changes everything; Old Joe, by changing what Young Joe does, makes it so Old Joe could never exist as the person that he is.

But Looper is working under the rule set in which causality has inertia.

If your older self kills your younger self, then of course, you're dead, so you couldn't exist and you couldn't kill yourself so it didn't happen – the rule against that paradox is preserved.

Any injury your young body sustains does show up as a scar or maiming of your old body.

Other, lesser changes, though, don't change everything. Causality "wants" to flow in the old channel, so your memories of events aren't immediately erased as long as there remains a chance that they might still happen.

Your memories start to get foggy as things change, but you can still hold on.

As a movie-goer, though, all that matters is that both versions of that scene are real within the movie. They both happened. The first one, where Young Joe kills his old self, results in Young Joe getting all that gold and then leading a life of continuing crime and addiction, turning Young Joe into Old Joe.

...continued on page 3

...continued from page 2

The second time through the scene, though, Old Joe has a new agenda. He saves his own life and then sets out to prevent a terrible thing that happens to the world in the future that he comes from.

Young Joe has to close the loop – he has to kill Old Joe or they'll hunt Young Joe down and use him to force Old Joe to come back. (We're given a cruel demonstration of how that works.)

The whole movie depends on our understanding that everything has already happened once; this is the second time through (for Old Joe) and this time it's different, and he means to make it even more different.

All I have done here is clarify: I haven't even begun to tell you the cool stuff and absolutely-right discoveries we make along the way.

But you can't turn off your brain for a second. Everything matters. Things we learn transform the meaning of all the scenes we've already seen.

If you're looking for mindless adventure sci-fi, this isn't the movie. If you're looking for morally deep, challenging storytelling, though, you've hit the jackpot.