NIGHTCRAWLER

Quick film review of NIGHTCRAWLER (with spoilers)

'When Lou Bloom, a driven man desperate for work, muscles into the world of L.A. crime journalism, he blurs the line between observer and participant to become the star of his own story. Aiding him in his effort is Nina, a TV-news veteran.'

Jake Gyllenhal is great as a sociopath with glassy eyes and a cheesy grin, spouting get-ahead business buzztalk as he films crime scenes and sells the footage to a news channels hungry for gore and sensationalism. He re-arranges corpses to get a better shot, pursues villains and arranging for their arrest so that he can film it, and keeps on getting away with it. Unlike, say, Travis Bickle, he's found an arena where his lack of empathy and morality are advantageous. 

He lives in an empty apartment, his only friend is his plant, and he constantly negotiates, pressurises and blackmails all around him - principally, an amoral newscaster hungry for footage and his weak-willed partner. But the best scenes are when he's behind his camera. For instance, when he orchestrates a shoot-out in a diner: we see the shoot-out, but we also watch him watching it, trying to remain hidden... Voyeurism works really well in cinema. Think PEEPING TOM, REAR WINDOW. Maybe it's because, we, the audience, are voyeurs too, sitting anonymously in the dark, and observing, rather creepily, with impunity.  

Go see it, it's a genuine noir. Like the great noirs of the 40s it deals with the underside of the American dream and has a protagonist who is willfully evil and escapes justice. I guess it's the kind of film people normally complain about them not making any more - maybe it gets away with it because it gets labelled as satire.