Trouble with the Curve is a sure-fire slow-paced, minimalist film centering on a father-daughter reconciliatory road trip, and to a lesser extent, baseball.
Gus, played with a combination of helpless volatility by Clint Eastwood, is a talent scout for the Atlanta Braves whose job is being taken over by computers. So when he growls to his superiors we share his distaste for the game’s evolution. One of his bosses is played by Matthew Lillard, a corporate-hearted creep who bets his office job on a pudgy high-school batter (Joe Massingill); this prodigy is incidentally a kindred spirit to Lillard and like him, he’s held hostage by the dazzle of his imminent celebrity status, rather than the game.
Most of Trouble with the Curve stays and strays within the safe-played orthodoxies of a regular sports movie.
Gus’ feisty-haired daughter Mickey (Amy Adams) is a workaholic lawyer who is one deal away from partnership at her firm. On face value, she’s an ace legal eagle who prefers a semi-cordial distance from her father. However, a phone call from Gus’ pal Pete (John Goodman) sets her out to help out dad. A few days tops, Pete promises.
As it turns out, Mickey, also a baseball buff with a keen sense of the game, fancies her father’s job more than office work. Not that she accepts it easily.
Their road trip soon introduces Johnny (Justin Timberlake). He’s an old find of Gus’ who burned off his career fast and is now a rookie talent scout for the Red Socks; and I don’t need to tell you that he’s soon smitten by Mickey.
Debuting director Robert Lorenz, and first-time writer Randy Brown, mimic Eastwood’s directorial lack of gloss here. Trouble with the Curve is rated PG 13; there’s a minor car crash, some mid-night lake diving and a growl or two from Eastwood.
Looped in circles
Rian Johnson’s Looper is a thinking man’s thriller with a solid sci-fi punch. It loops around time travel, characters and plot in tatted circles and stops inches before becoming too loopy for its own good.
Set in the dystopian future of 2044, Joe Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) works for the mob as a Looper. Loopers are a select group of killers who kill people sent back from the future because in 30 years’ time, time travel will have been invented and illegalised, and killing people is tough business.
So the mob in the future tie, gag and cover their prey’s faces and zap them back to 2044 to Loopers, who shoot them down, dispose of bodies and collect payment (silver bricks) off their hit’s back.
The dead’s checklist is maintained by a future traveller stationed in the past, called Abe (Jeff Daniels) — and of course, he runs the local mob here as well.
Loopers continue their day-job till they find themselves “Closing of the Loop” — meaning their future self is sent back only to be killed by themselves; think of it as a retirement plan and an exit of business for them.
Failing to close the loop means deathly torture for the present self — and his physically connected runaway from the future (slice one finger off of the Looper in the present, and the future one loses that finger as well).
As it happens, Joe gets his Loop closed sooner than expected, when his future self, played by Bruce Willis, zaps into the present without a gag or a mask, beats up his past self and runs away.
Looper may sound tricky to grapple — and we’ve only scratched the surface with the summary above — but don’t fret. The jumble is a smooth mess that unfolds uncomplicatedly enough, even with its pretzel-y twists.
Rian Johnson has written and directed an engrossing sci-fi with noiric tones that is sensitive to humour, drama and human characters; even though Looper’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day-like climax (featuring Emily Blunt as a late addition), and a stuffed sub-plot about finding a telekinetic mutant in the second half, did take it down a notch for me.
Released by Film District, Looper is Rated R for violence, language, nudity and drugs. — Farheen Jawaid