I saw Rian Johnson’s Brothers Bloom a couple of months back when the movie was right at the tail end of editing, and afterwards Rian asked me for my thoughts and critiques, whether there was anything that I thought needed to be changed or trimmed. I really wanted to have something smart and useful to say, something that I could point to later and tell others ‘I saved Rian Johnson’s sophomore feature,’ but the truth was that the movie was great. I loved every minute of it. The only thing remotely critical I could come up with was ‘Needs more Mark Ruffalo.’ ‘I say that about every Mark Ruffalo movie,’ Rian sagely replied.
Anyway, Bloom is a totally different movie from Rian’s debut, Brick*, and his next movie, Looper, looks to be completely different from the first two. IGN talked to Rian recently and got the scoop on the violent, dark sci-fi picture he’s recently finished writing.
“It’s sci-fi, but it’s very much — well, I think people toss out
Philip Dick sci-fi when they mean ‘small, dark’ sci-fi. Although, when
I think of Philip Dick’s books, it’s something very different. I think
people are confusing it with the movie Blade Runner,” he told Todd Gilchrist**. Rian used the first Terminator as a point of comparison in that it’s very small and character based, and said that time travel is involved in the story, “but only as a plot device.”
Rian’s a complete and total film nerd, so expect his career to encompass a lot of different genres as he gets the ability to make the kinds of movies he likes watching. In the meantime, get excited for Brothers Bloom, hitting in October. I’m going to see the film again hopefully soon and will have a review for you guys, and I’m sure CHUD will have a whole bunch of Rian in the months leading up to the release.
*which this writer dismissed on the site when we premiered one of the posters! I think I said it looked like sub-Veronica Mars junk. It’s astonishing how wrong this job allows me to be.
** I love that Huttlet.