Dearest Blog, yesterday I spent the final day of my vacation as you might expect: at the cinema with Nightcrawler.
Spoiler level here will be mild, nothing you wouldn't know from the trailers.
An unemployed but highly-motivated young man shoehorns his way into the LA video news business, but blurs the line between covering a story and becoming part of it.
Nightcrawler finds Jake Gyllenhaal on point as Louis Bloom, utterly mesmerizing from start to finish. Regular reader(s) will know that I worship Gyllenhaal's Donnie Darko performance as well, despite the fact I think the movie itself is grossly overrated.
The moral of the story is: Creepy Jake = Amazing Jake. Nightcrawler sets a dark, gritty tone, filled with nighttime skylines and some seedier bits of Los Angeles. The film's humor is darker still, uneasy graveyard laughs that keep the movie enjoyable without turning it silly.
Nightcrawler is an uncomfortable watch. At face value, it's unnerving to see Bloom using whatever means he deems necessary to achieve his ends. On a deeper level, it puts a spotlight on our society's willingness to exploit misery for entertainment. It's a fascinating, if unsettling, ride that hooks you for the duration and ends at exactly the right spot, suffering neither a hurried, contrived finish nor (as is annoyingly common in this day of three-hour non-epics) dragging on long after it should have said farewell.
Nightcrawler runs 117 minutes and is rated R for "violence including graphic images, and for language."
Nightcrawler is a terrific crime drama that should be considered a contender in at least the Best Picture and Best Actor categories come awards time.
Of a possible nine Weasleys, Nightcrawler gets eight.
Until next time...
Happy Jake = *sigh
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