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" Here in Toronto, the sun is shining and the proportion of beautiful people in this ordinarily pretty homely city has reached its annual zenith with the start of the Toronto Film Festival. Outside the theaters, lovely women and rich men and ridiculous parties and free stuff are everywhere. Inside the theaters, despair. Everywhere despair. Onscreen, the future is unanimously bleak. Dredd 3D is showing, as is Cloud Atlas. I&amp;#039;ve just come from seeing the Bruce Willis/Joseph Gordon-Levitt vehicle Looper, which offers a range of dystopias. The ugliness of the future will be a given at the movies this fall. The six-word review of Looper: Live Free or Die Hard with added confusion. It&amp;#039;s a time-travel film, in which Bruce Willis actually says to his younger self, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to talk about time travel. We&amp;#039;ll be here all day.&amp;quot; To which I can only add: Amen. Admittedly, I saw this movie in the early morning, and have no doubt it would be improved by the application of marijuana and/or alcohol, but I found myself missing massive chunks of plot because I was trying to figure out how the last bit of plot worked. The guy carves something into his arm so that his future self will read it, but then wouldn&amp;#039;t he have lived with that bit of scarring all the time, but then... You get the picture. Or, rather, you don&amp;#039;t. What&amp;#039;s remarkable about Looper is how, even with various futures to choose from, the world always ends up unbearable. The best-case scenario \u2014 not to give too much away \u2014 is a globally dominant Chinese state not ripped apart by a superhuman mutant. America, in Looper, is so done, so over, that not even the most ludicrous fantasies of its characters can imagine a recovery. In its despair, at least, Looper is of its time. Our moment has been defined as post-hope, but all the despair is getting boring and also slightly unbelievable. The rottenness of the future has become a dominant clich\u00E9, and not necessarily because it&amp;#039;s true. Last night, Bill Clinton gave one of the speeches of his lifetime in a lifetime filled with incredible speeches. He didn&amp;#039;t mention hope. (In fact, the avoidance of the word &amp;quot;hope&amp;quot; at the Democratic convention has become a fascinating rhetorical act in itself.) But he did say this: I know we&amp;#039;re coming back. For more than 200 years, through every crisis, we&amp;#039;ve always come back. People have predicted our demise ever since George Washington was criticized for being a mediocre surveyor with a bad set of wooden false teeth. And so far, every single person that&amp;#039;s bet against America has lost money because we always come back. We come through ever fire a little stronger and a little better. This may read like ordinary politicians&amp;#039; blather, but the simple fact is that it happens to be true. America has always come back \u2014 it really has. Betting against America has been a mug&amp;#039;s game. The current brand of despair that&amp;#039;s filling the movies and television is every bit as lazy as the unthinking optimism of the science fiction of the sixties and seventies. The future has a tendency to be completely surprising. It may turn out to be not so bad after all.  TORONTO 2012: Read Marche and More Live from the Film Festival on The Culture Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a15676/looper-toronto-review-12440858/?click=pp>