I get where he's coming from -- a lot of "nitpick" stuff is just obsessive people finding justifications for their pre-made conclusion about something they didn't like, usually because that "something" didn't give them the artistic or thematic payoff they wanted.

(personally I think a much better film to discuss than Looper would have been Prometheus, because I think Prometheus is a great sci-fi film with great sci-fi themes but for some reasons there seems to be all kinds of people who want to call it crappy for reasons totally unattached to the core thematic elements of the film, and it really tracks with the "finding justification for a personal reaction" since the theme is really "God is a lie, there are no answers" so naturally many viewers would be frustrated by that)

as far as Looper goes -- I wouldn't call my personal problems with Looper "plot holes" or "logical inconsistencies" or anything else HULK rails against, and I recognize the filmmakers' right to construct whatever he wants in a sci-fi world, but when your fiction is so easily problematized by simple questions ad nauseum it does end up distracting from the movie (fuck the "Ocean Solution," why have Loopers kill themselves? why not just have someone else do it? why do we pre-suppose the Rainmaker is "evil" when the film shows us that Bruce Willis is a homicidal criminal? because another homicidal criminal told us so? why are the gangsters so conversely forgiving at times yet brutal in others? isn't it just too idiotically convenient to say the "good" path involves a mom and the "bad" path doesn't? why the fuck can Bruce Willis just break out of being held by the gang and essentially wield god-like criminal powers himself? etc. and so on). at the end of Looper I *understood* the theme and intention, but I wasn't moved by it because it felt like too conveniently a created and forced little drama for me to take any greater meaning from it. it was too trite and too convenient in too many places, which is why viewers who didn't like it take to nitpicking, because those questions they're asking distract them from enjoying the core theme of the film.

and yeah, I was similarly distracted from the end-piece in Skyfall, for example, because it was so ridiculously artificially constructed to serve as a large action piece despite the fact that it seemed to bear no logical cohesion (they have a chopper with a heavy machine gun but they approach a cottage with the deadliest man in the world inside just by walking in line alongside each other across a wide open field? I mean CMON) they're not "plot holes," but when simple questions of motivation and predictable results plague the viewers' imagination to the pont they distract from the film they are a problem.

so yeah -- if you like a movie like Looper or Prometheus or any other he mentioned, build the case for why it WORKS and don't waste too much time playing defense against those people that are just pre-disposed to not liking it. as he says, if it has value it should be able to be constructed out of the thematic and storytelling elements of the film.

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