Nightcrawler: Dan Gilroy writes & directs, Jake Gyllenhaal stars (October 2014)

and as an allegory it's not very interesting or revealing. movie was distracting enough, i guess.

JG's character may be corporation as psychopath manifest, but also what happens to someone who self-educates from the internet... Sociopathic. All relationships transactional-based. Is into disrupting established business practices. Bet you he's got some Ayn Rand books somewhere in that Elysian Park apartment of his.

yeah that whole set piece, from the argument with his underling that sets the stage, through the chase, crash and aftermath was amazing

I also liked Rene Russo pulling the strings on the fly for the broadcast of the home invasion footage

yeah, very Network

Rene Russo was runnerup for best supporting actress in the LA Film Critics awards; she's fine, but that strikes me as faded-movie-star comebackitis.

Dumb movie. Gyllenhaal reads lines as if off cue cards. Thriller bits strictly Sat afternoon cable. Modish cynicism about ratings, etc.

it's a fairly effective junky movie pretending to be something more; the poverty of mallplex fare lets it pass.

by the second half the mood in the theater seemed as cold as it could be and it was oddly quiet when it was over

― linda cardellini (zachlyon), Monday, 3 November 2014 15:44 (2 months ago) Permalink

This is how it was in the theatre tonight when I saw it.

Way, way bleak, and effective.

This was a fun film!

Dumb movie. Gyllenhaal reads lines as if off cue cards.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, December 21, 2014 3:17 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Surely this is the point?

This ruled

Surely this is the point?

― this is just a saginaw (dog latin),

he shouldn't have sounded like polysyllabic words were new to him!

surely this was the point

Nah. This was a sub-Network exercise with a dumb chase.

otm. not even superior trash

this more or less has the same relation to modern refn-ish autism as freejack did to cyberpunk (for a while i almost thought it was a send-up, as if he were deliberately juxtaposing it with beverly hills cop ii)

at least freejack was honest tho, and therefore remains unsurpassed

i hadnt seen photos of him before but gilroy really ought to have starred himself in some stuff rather than the missus; like a young peter weller aging into manhunter's francis dolarhyde

no, it was superior trash

films like this getting elevated while The Homesman dies at the box office still make me shake my head tho

it's not even the best Jake movie of last year!

i think the homesman thing is down to westerns (nobody cares about them anymore) + swank (nobody cares about her anymore)

wait Morbz what did you think the best Jake movie of last year was? Enemy?

thought this was way funnier than network, jake's secondhand mba shit was great

ppl cared abt no country and truggert! turgitt. turdgrit

i have not seen a single piece of ad for homesman

yeah, the distributor seems to have dumped it.

Let's not forget the fact that The Homesman is turgid shite.

wait Morbz what did you think the best Jake movie of last year was? Enemy?

hell yeah. nightcrawler was fun though.

^ not morbz ftr

"Superior trash" is right, and for once I found myself falling victim to falling back on "that would never happen" dismissals.

Still, Gyllenhaal was great fun.

i do think that the film was pretty invested in its satire and it cheated the target way too much to be remotely effective as such

what i was left with was a compelling lead performance and a very mildly gripping thriller

i mean the /limits/ of tabloid journalism (self-imposed and in terms of what audiences will take) are at least as interesting as what it /will/ do, but the film had no sense for the former.

yes Shakes, Enemy

the overtly funny stuff in this one was best, incl the Mexican restaurant scene no matter how funny you thought that was.

I liked the look Jake gave Russo when she guzzled the margarita.

like with whiplash it may or may not be fair to its ostensible subject, but i thought it did a solid, lively job of mixing metaphor and melodrama. both made me realize i don't really sweat whether it would happen irl if there's an enjoyable payoff to it happening in the film

call it the son of flubber rule

"yes everyone would freak out if a basketball team suddenly could leap insane heights but would you have been more entertained by the alternative"

forgot it's football in son of flubber, basketball in absent-minded prof, but anyway

well, sure, i love jackie chan movies too.

it's not the plausibility per se, it's the idea that the scenarios in the film were supposed to sustain some kind of critique of—media, capitalism, whatever.

well he was an autodidact mba who saw a chance and took it - a dark success story - but it wasn't haranguing or pious enough for me to be annoyed with it, or demand a strong thesis.

yeah, not a lotta depth there, and the ante-raising doesn't match Network, where each act is progressively more outlandish. What you see is what you get.

I do think JG should do a zany comedy again, say The Soupy Sales Story

i don't think the movie was trying to give us the state of the media any more than whiplash was trying to give us the state of conservatories

I'd have appreciated using the media as merely cool backdrop/framework if Russo wasn't allowed a point of view.

have you seen any Dan Gilroy interviews? he appeared to v much have that ambition. xp

ante raising p massive here imo

you always know where its headed but still, how much further did it need to go

i read some oscar promo he did for deadline and didn't notice too much hot air

http://deadline.com/2015/01/dan-gilroy-nightcrawler-interview-jake-gyllenhaal-1201343460/

pertinent bit: The idea came in pieces. I think the first piece is when I became aware of a crime photographer in New York City from the 1930s, a guy named Weegee. I actually collect his photographs. He was the first guy to put a police scanner into a car and go to a crime scene. He sold his photographs to tabloids in New York. I moved to L.A. and realized there would be a modern equivalent where these nightcrawlers drive around at 120 miles per hour with 10 scanners going, and it seemed like an interesting backdrop for a film. It was when the character of Lou Bloom (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) came into the picture that I realized it was ultimately more of a character study than it was about this unique world.

reservations aside, I'd be happy if Jake got an Oscar nod; dude's been doing solid work for a few years.

have you seen any Dan Gilroy interviews? he appeared to v much have that ambition. xp

― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, January 14, 2015 4:34 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah and the audience identification figure in the newsroom (the "mad men" guy) was a dead giveaway as to the film's underlying moralism too.

he was definitely there to express the familiar journalistic moral, i don't think we were supposed to identify with that dude too much. he's not walter matthau in a face in the crowd

morality, rather

i'm not saying the film didn't think network news was worthless, just that i don't think it was particularly hand-wringy about it, or that the point of the film was that network news sucks

it's also possible that after pro blogging and mba school, nothing this movie assumed about business or media struck me as unfair

Didn't feel like reviving the thread but I saw this last year and loved the hell out of it

I didn't get an incel vibe from Jakey boy in this, more like someone for whom sex is strictly a transactional commodity or something

when I think of proto incels I think of Seth Rogen in Observe and Report

Started watching this last week - got as far as Gyllenhaal (sp) negotiating with Russo for the first bit of footage he sells but bailed out because it didn't suit my mood. Will come back though - he's really unnerving in it. Maybe the best performance I've ever seen from him.