Nightcrawler

If you have never seen Tina Fey's brilliant show 30 Rock, do yourself a favor, stop reading this, and immediately start streaming it now. Go straight to the season where she dates Jon Hamm, this good looking doctor who can seemingly do anything. At first everything seems perfect as he is the charming, successful, and perfect boyfriend but then one day she realizes that he has absolutely no clue what he's doing or saying. He's terrible at being a doctor, he can't play tennis to save his life, and he might actually kill himself on his new motorcycle. But no one has the heart to tell him these things because he's so dreamy.

Well for the longest time I thought this same principle applied to Jake Gyllenhaal, a nice looking dude who was in a few cool movies but in reality he just played himself over and over again and no one had the heart to tell him. That was until I saw Prisoners and now Nightcrawler; with these two performances alone he has completely changed my view of him.

In Nightcrawler he plays Louis Bloom, a driven and seemingly desperate man who you are given absolutely no background information on. You immediately see him stealing copper, watches, and bikes just to get by; so you already kind of have a feel for what kind of person you are dealing with. One night while he is on his way back to his hole in the wall apartment he notices a fiery car wreck and a small camera crew filming it. The camera crew seems a little too close to the action but he can tell from the reaction of the police officers and the injured people in the wreck that this is no movie. He finds out that the crew filming the wreckage calls themselves nightcrawlers and that they sell this bloody footage to local networks for money.

It's at this point Bloom decides that this profession is perfect for him because he is a fast learner and it's relatively cheap to get into. So he buys himself a camcorder and a police scanner and sets off chasing whatever police calls sound like they are emergencies. After a few missteps he finally gets the hang of it and eventually becomes successful as he forms a relationship with a local news producer in Nina (Rene Russo).

What you eventually pick up on is the fact that Bloom doesn't value humans or human life at all, he merely sees them as currency for transactions; and this explains his oddball behavior to a point. He is almost Rain Man like in how he gathers knowledge and immediately uses it as leverage over others. And Gyllenhaal does an amazing job of using voice inflections, mannerisms, and awkward facial expressions to show just how detached from humanity Bloom is.

Dan Gilroy (writer/director and brother of Michael Clayton's Tony Gilroy) has come a long way since his days of Freejack and Two For the Money and you can tell that he has little to no respect for nightcrawlers as they show little to no respect for the victims in the movie. All they care about is getting a bloody shot of people on the worst day of their lives so they can profit from it. He creates a dark world that reminiscent of the Wire's 5th season where lines are blurred between reporting the news and actually creating it. You are amazed at some of the lengths Bloom goes to to get what he wants. He is basically the modern day version of There Will Be Bloods' Daniel Plainview.

This is an original and audacious take on this part of news reporting and I have to say that I was thoroughly entertained. I rate this movie as FRESH!