Salon.com > Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Eight best time-travel flicks

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 14:30:00 +0000

Film critics and the social media grapevine are gushing about recent cinematic release "Looper." I won't be quoting any of these reviews thanks to a tweet by the New York Times Magazine's Adam Sternbergh, which warns us off of them: "I'm generally not super-spoiler-averse but Looper is worth going into as blind as possible (beyond what's in the trailer). It pays off."

I am spoiler-averse, so instead, the barest summation of the trailer: time travel is illegal in the future, but a mafia-esque organization hires a hitman (Joseph Gordon Levitt) in 2078 to eliminate all the foes they send back in time. All goes swimmingly until one day the kneeling man who materializes before him is...himself, older, in the form of a weathered Bruce Willis. What does it mean? Who sent him? What did he do? The shit hits the fan, or at least the future collides with the past, and it looks like at some point a bullet might hit a body, too. Check it out:

Pick of the week: A tough, smart time-travel thriller

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If there’s any consensus to be drawn about the future from recent trends in science-fiction movies, it’s that it doesn’t seem worth waiting around for. The idea that the future will suck incalculably worse than the present did not begin with “The Hunger Games,” of course. It goes back at least as far as the Cold War and the A-bomb. (It’s not as if the dystopian vision was brand-new then, either – Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” was published in 1932.) Authors, screenwriters and directors are always future-casting based on the most visible present-tense trends, which is no doubt why the chaotic years from the late ‘60s through the early ‘80s produced so many memorable futuristic nightmares, from “Planet of the Apes” to “Soylent Green” to “Escape From New York.”

Famous face behind a tiny project

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 16:01:00 +0000

What began as a personal project -- an online screening room where actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt could share the fruits of his creative labors with the public -- has, over the past few years, morphed into an impressive, interactive online salon.

HitRECord.org, where tens of thousands of contributors now bring their original music, text, illustrations and footage, lets people really "share" their work -- not in the YouTube sense of simply posting something and hoping for an enthusiastic response, but in the true spirit of collaboration. Work posted to the site is regularly adapted or "remixed" by other users. Next week, a new book from HarperCollins's It Books -- "The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories" -- collects some of the best pieces.

When he's not working on a movie (you know, small films like "The Dark Knight Rises" and "Lincoln"), the actor still posts material to the site himself --including several hours of raw footage from his visit to Occupy Wall Street on the mid-November night when protesters were evicted from Zuccotti Park.

Pop Torn: 10 pieces of culture we’re feeling iffy about

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 13:01:00 +0000

Wednesday in New York, it managed to snow, hail and be passingly warm out, all at the same time. Now imagine that these little tidbits of cultural news from this week were like the weather in New York. Now you see what we're getting at, right?

1. Lindsay Lohan dropping her last name: Problem is, we'll still know those are her parents.

2. Michael Scott proposes to Holly on "The Office": Good episode, but it really took this much hype to get people talking about "The Office" again? Not a great sign for when Carell leaves.

3. "The Big Lebowski" Monopoly game: Awesome when we thought it was a real thing. Turns out to be a Photoshop from Reddit. Which is still cool, but someone out there needs to market this!

“Inception”: A clunky, overblown disappointment

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:01:00 +0000

Director Christopher Nolan is such a master movie technician -- a combination of engineer, architect, game designer and God -- that it's startling to realize how constricted his vision is and how clumsily he tells stories. "Inception," Nolan's first film since his mega-googolplex hit with "The Dark Knight," and his first as a solo writer-director since the now-legendary puzzler "Memento" in 2000, is supposed to be a dreamscape movie. At one point, in fact, we travel with its central Scooby-gang of characters into a dream within a dream within a dream, and then into some deeper, still more unconscious, psychological limbo-state below that.

Sundance: An Ozark noir; Pat Tillman revealed

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:25:00 +0000

PARK CITY, Utah -- It's only Day 4 of Sundance, and I'm already reduced to blurbage. Here are quick hits on the films I've liked so far this weekend, one of them an early contender for the much-coveted O'Hehir Sundance Grand Jury Prize, handed out annually by a committee of one with no rewards attached, either on earth or in heaven.

We've all acclimated to the altitude by now, and to the fact that it's apparently going to keep on snowing throughout the festival, rendering traffic and transit issues between the sprawling Sundance venues even more fun than usual. Various actors and directors seem to be skipping out quickly, or not showing up at all; I've had two interviews fall through at the last minute, and other journalists report similar results. Honestly, though, no complaints from this quarter. It's a terrific Sundance to this point, and the dramatic conditions outside only heighten the indoor dramas in those nice, warm theaters.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Caught between two worlds

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:17:00 +0000

At the ripe old age of 28, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is simultaneously a showbiz old pro and one of the hottest young acting talents to emerge in this decade. When Gordon-Levitt played his first high-impact dramatic roles in edgy, independent films like "Mysterious Skin" (2004) and "Brick" (2005), there were a handful of snickers at first: Wait, isn't that Tommy, the teenage kid from "3rd Rock From the Sun"? It was indeed, but Gordon-Levitt has been acting since early childhood. He had an extensive TV résumé long before the first of his 133 "3rd Rock" episodes -- with recurring roles on "Roseanne," "The Powers That Be" and the early-'90s "Dark Shadows" reboot -- and he damn sure hasn't let that role define his subsequent career.

Jim Carrey’s epic romance (in prison)

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:15:00 +0000

Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey in "I Love You Phillip Morris," (left) and Carey Mulligan in "An Education."

PARK CITY, Utah -- From somewhere in the middle of the 1,300 people packed into the Eccles Center here after the premiere of "I Love You Phillip Morris," somebody yelled out to Jim Carrey, "What was it like to kiss Ewan McGregor?" Wearing clunky, '70s-style glasses and his trademark pert expression, Carrey considered this with the attentive manner of a hunting hound. I wanted him to ask the questioner why every single straight actor who ever plays a gay character has to be asked the same stupid thing, but he didn't. Like all celebrities Carrey seeks to remain genial but vague in his interactions with civilians. Then a response came to him. "A dream come true!" Carrey crowed. "I mean, look at the guy!"

“Pictures of Assholes”

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:00:00 +0000

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt ("Brick," "Mysterious Skin" and the upcoming "The Lookout"), who sat down with Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, maintains a very cool little Web site (hitrecord.org) that includes some journal entries, correspondence and a nice collection of video shorts, including our favorite below. Here, Gordon-Levitt turns the tables on some marauding photographers who cornered him and a friend (the "La Dolce Vita" moment is a classic). After describing the event on his site, he writes, "I do believe that the myth of 'Celebrity' is not just innocently shallow entertainment, but a powerful and fundamental part of a larger movement revolving around greed, apathy and hierarchy that is currently dragging us down, down, down, lower and scarier, and perhaps weaker than we've ever, ever been. Smile!b

“Life’s not simple”

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:00:00 +0000

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been acting professionally for 18 of the last 20 years, which would be a remarkable statistic for someone twice his age. But he's 26, and has made the highly unusual transition from adorable child star to complicated and even dark adult actor.

Essentially, Gordon-Levitt has had two different and almost diametrically opposed acting careers. He began appearing in films when he was just 7 years old, but attracted wide notice for his role in Robert Redford's "A River Runs Through It," released in 1992 when he was 11. Then came an extensive cute-kid television career, on "China Beach," "L.A. Law," "Quantum Leap," "Roseanne" and 66 episodes of "3rd Rock From the Sun," in which he played Tommy Solomon.

“Mysterious Skin”

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 20:00:00 +0000

The sexual abuse of children is such a potent subject that anyone who attempts to make a work of fiction about it -- whether it's a book or a movie -- ought to be required to get a license first. It's far too easy for an artist to gas up on dime-store victimology, or, worse yet, to keep his story running on the fumes of cheap pathos. But Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin," which traces the intertwining but distinctly different strands of how two young men deal with their shared history of sexual abuse, doesn't fall into either of those traps.

The film has a weird buoyancy -- it's not a light picture, and it does include a harrowing (adult) rape scene. And it doesn't diminish the suffering of either of its two lead characters. But Araki doesn't make "Mysterious Skin" -- which was adapted from Scott Heim's novel -- about suffering; it's really a picture about getting on with things, about the freeing benefits of coming to terms with the past instead of being a slave to it.