Selma (2/5 Stars)

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen an incompentent movie in a theater. I don’t like seeing incompetent movies. They make me mad. So I do my homework. One tool I have is RottenTomatoes.com, a website that aggregates the film reviews. “Selma” had a 99% rating on RottenTomatoes before I went and saw it. Another tool is the endless slew of awards handed out at the end of each year. “Selma” garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and another for Best Song. That is an odd pairing of nominations. Best Song is generally a bullshit award (because of the lack of movies that have original songs) and Best Picture should in theory be the hardest nomination to get (because every movie is up for it). The newspapers (I read NY Times) went to work in decrying a racially based snub for this movie’s director (Ava Duvernay) and starring actor (David Oyelowo) among others. The evidence: Selma was directed by a black woman and was about a black civil rights leader. What was striking about the dialogue going on in the NYTimes is that emphasis was put on the fact that there are no black actors nominated in any of the top categories this year from “Selma” or any other movie. This allegedly is proof that the Academy has a diversity problem. What did not receive much emphasis is whether the movies or performances were any good. And in not paying any attention to that, people got hurt. And by people, I mean me. I spent an uncomfortable two hours watching this movie when I otherwise wouldn’t have if there had been more of a discussion of the movie’s merits. There is a difference between what I found wrong with “The Imitation Game,” a biopic I felt was competently made but focused on the wrong aspects of the story and “Selma,” which is not competently made period. Is this an affirmative action honoree for Best Picture? Well, not exactly I think, but I will talk about that last. In the meantime here is a list of some things that are wrong with this picture.

Let’s start at the beginning:

Two scenes start this movie that have little to do with Selma, Alabama. One is Martin Luther King, Jr. accepting a Nobel Prize in Sweden. The second is a bombing of a church that kills four little girls. Now, these are important moments in Civil Rights History but the movie shows a confusion of scope by using them to introduce this particular story. What is this movie about? Is it a biopic of MLK in which the Nobel Prize scene would make sense. Is it about the Civil Rights Struggle in general in which a church bombing that does not take place in Selma and does not involve MLK would make sense. Or is it about MLK’s actions in Selma to call attention to vote discrimination and the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (I argue that it is) in which neither of the above scenes would be a relevant introduction. There is a scene about five-ten minutes into this movie in which an old woman (played by Oprah Winfrey, a producer as well) is denied the right to register to vote. Ditch the first two scenes,  open with that, and then stick to Selma (or make an entirely different movie). I will give two examples of great movies that are about the same subject. One is “Ghandi” which is a biographical epic that does a very good job of telling a large story with many people over the lifetime of its main character. The second is “Bloody Sunday” which concerns itself with one day of a civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland. A story with MLK could have gone either way. This movie tried to do both and weighed down by the mass of material it cut corners to the point that neither type of story worked.

The antagonists do not make any sense. Now we all know that Southern white people in the 1960s hate black people. I’m not debating that reality. But for a movie to work, the bad guys need to be explained. Remember the rule of biopics: Would this movie be any good if it were completely fictional? And I suspect it would be utterly confusing and impossible to follow if one did not already know what was going to happen (I did). The reasons why white people hate black people do not have to be persuasive but they do need to be understandable. Leonardo Dicaprio’s phrenology presentation in “Django Unchained” is especially prescient. “In the Heat of the Night” and “Burning Mississippi” both do great jobs of explaining the white characters in it. Or if you really want to understand racism, I mean really understand it from the inside out, watch “Birth of a Nation.” It is all right there. The takeaway from “Selma” is that white people don’t like black people just because they don't. This black/white treatment renders a scene 3/4ths of the way into the movie inexplicable: the appearance of plenty of white people who want to take part in the civil rights march. Who are these white people? Where do they come from? What makes them different from every other white person in the story?

The writer Paul Webb and the Director Ava Duvernay do not do the black characters that much justice either. Like most poorly written movies, there are at the same time too many characters and not enough of them. That is to say that the amount of people milling about without proper introductions or job descriptions make for a confusing mess and at the same time only MLK Jr. is given enough screen time to render an impact. Halfway through the movie Cuba Gooding Jr. starts talking with Martin Sheen about something. I had no idea who they were or how they were involved in the story. In a later scene we see them in a courtroom. Cuba is a lawyer. Martin is a judge. ANYWAY, generally speaking when a movie introduces a character halfway through a movie, they do it by having them meet a character we already know. This gives the two of them the opportunity to shake hands or something and exchange names or whatever. That does not happen in “Selma.” Instead two unknown characters just start talking to each other.

There are also a disconcerting amount of scenes wherein supposedly smart people explain basic things to other supposedly smart people who for some weird reason don't know these basic things. There is one scene where a character (whose name I did not remember) is debating with another person (who I had never seen before) the choice between violent and nonviolent protest. What is astounding is when this takes place: right after the police turned violent on the bridge. The movie makes it seem like the second guy never considered that the police would get ugly and is only thinking of fighting back with violence now. How the hell does a violent police response surprise a grown black man in the South? And would not a scene concerning a discussion of nonviolence vs. violence make more sense before an organized march begins. After all, the whole point of the march is to provoke the police into being violent against non-violent protestors and get the national media to take pictures and report the oppression to the rest of the country thereby turning around popular opinion and pressuring politicians to pass Civil Rights legislation. That is the plan. It is a very good one and MLK Jr. is nothing if not an articulate man. Why did this protestor not know the plan?

Pundits in the NYTimes have made a big deal over how President Lyndon Johnson is portrayed in this movie. Basically he tells MLK Jr. to slow down on Voting Rights so he can implement his War on Poverty. Historians don’t like this because Lyndon Johnson did no such thing. However what is more troubling (as a movie critic) is why it seems the writer made the decision to turn Johnson from a real life ally and into a fictional villain. It seems the writer did it to save himself a big pile of work explaining to the audience how it is that a bill becomes a law. In this movie, the Voting Rights Act becomes a reality once Lyndon Johnson stops stalling and gives a speech to Congress asking them to enact it. It seriously does not get more complex than that. It is a stunning example of political ignorance to suggest that a presidential speech is all that is needed to pass a landmark law. To explain it properly would have not been easy but I submit it was possible and a well-written movie could have done it. Instead we have a movie that may just make people stupider by watching it. 

There are basic problems with editing in some scenes. In one, a conversation between MLK and Johnson is ended with the phrase, “I want you to do something for me.” A scene follows this with Johnson’s aide and an associate of MLK’s. I am now expecting the aide to tell the associate what Johnson wants. Actually the conversation is about something else entirely, a supposed assassination plot. The movie then goes back to MLK and Johnson so Johnson can explain to MLK what he wants. This is called a fake-out and if there is not a good reason for it (I did not see one) it bespeaks incompetence. Another fake-out occured when the editor decided to jump back and forth from a nighttime scene to a daytime scene without immediately explaining that the daytime scene takes place the next day. These are the sorts of things that employ the people at Rifftracks. Now take the big scene, the confrontation on the bridge in Selma. It is an utter mess logistically speaking. Given how fast the horses move and how far we can plainly see them down the bridge in certain wide shots, it makes no sense at all how the movie shows the episode unfolding. It seems that the movie is taking moments from the beginning, middle, and end of the confrontation and mixing them altogether hoping on slow motion action shots to obfuscate the lack of continuity. Even weirder, the scene is narrated IN THE PAST TENSE by an UNINTRODUCED reporter who is not present AT THE SCENE. We later learn that he is narrating into a phone booth after the fact. Who the hell is he? Where was he during the bridge scene? How the fuck does he know what he knows if he wasn’t there? I am getting angry!

Okay I could say more but that is enough for one review. Let’s go back to the previous question: Is this an affirmative action Oscar nomination? Well, not necessarily. The Academy has long had a lack of imagination concerning what kinds of pictures deserve nominations. Notoriously, comedies and blockbusters are always disregarded, whereas inspirational biopics are generally over represented. This year there are four in the Best Picture Race (American Sniper, Selma, Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything). I have only seen two of these (Selma and Imitation Game) but neither deserves to be in the running. It just so happens that it is easier to judge the accuracy of something that has happened (for instance David Oyelowo sounds like MLK Jr.) and it feels right to honor a movie about honorable people (MLK and Alan Turing.) So Affirmative Action, that is certainly not the whole story here. The genre itself is generally subsidized. Who knows, maybe it was Chris Rock that got snubbed. I have not seen “Top Five” but I heard it was very good.

What bothers me most about the storyline of these Oscars is the idea that having all Caucasions automatically makes the choices conservative. The three front-runners are movies by Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel), Richard Linklater (Boyhood), and Alejandero Inarritu (Birdman). These movies are nothing like each other, are especially innovative, and the makers have never won Oscars before. Anderson and Linklater in particular have been around for decades refining their very unique style of movies into truly impressive art that can no longer be ignored. Ava Duvernay on the other hand hasn’t done shit. To say she was snubbed disrespects those that were nominated.

The Imitation Game (3/5 Stars)

‘The Imitation Game’ suffers from ‘Mighty Ducks’ syndrome, a disease of storytelling born of its namesake. “The Might Ducks” is a Disney movie starring Emilio Esteves. It was a popular movie that made a lot of money and spawned several sequels, not to mention many ripoffs that seemed to change nothing but the sport i.e. The Little Giants, The Big Green. Ostensibly ‘The Mighty Ducks' is about ice hockey, but curiously the more plausible it seems (and thus more enjoyable) is inversely related to the viewer’s knowledge of ice hockey. That is to say the syndrome refers to a movie that is more effective the less the audience is familiar with its subject matter. Perhaps not coincidentally when the NHL expanded to include a team called the Mighty Ducks their home was Anaheim, California, a place that has never had and never will have ice.

“The Imitation Game,” is a biopic of Alan Turing, the British code-breaker responsible for cracking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. I am not a code-breaking expert. However I can tell when a movie is deliberately not engaging with its subject matter because it either is not smart enough to explain it or does not believe I am smart enough to understand an explanation. If I were a code-breaking expert, and wanted to see this movie about a famous code-breaker, I would expect to be appalled by the sheer lack of attention paid to the science of breaking codes. It must have taken quite a bit of smarts and hard work to crack Enigma. The movie at least explains why it would be so hard. It is a code that has 150 million million combinations and resets every single day. Alan Turing’s great idea was to create a machine fast enough to go through the combinations in a single day. I have not the slightest clue how Turing came up with that idea or how the machine worked. Here is what the movie was concerned with instead: Turing was not very good at making friends and the people he worked with did not like his dismissive and arrogant attitude. Therefore, according to the movie, in order to break the code and win the war Turing has to draw up enough social grace to give apples to his colleagues and tell a joke about a bear in the woods. That (and not his genius) is what won over the room so they could finally work out his idea.

Anyone with some concept of how dangerous the World War going on outside will understand how petty this movie’s insistence on the importance of social drama was to the greater scheme of things. And anyone with some concept of how code-breaking machines work will be eternally frustrated with how the movie completely sidesteps any discussion of code-breaking theory. And anyone who has some respect for the intelligence of past generations will roll their eyes at the way the screenwriter has chosen to dumb down the characters in order to help what they must have assumed to be a pitifully ill informed modern audience. A good example is when the codebreakers are first presented with a stolen Enigma machine. One of the men asks why they don’t just type an intercepted radio code into it. The makers of the movie (Director Morten Tyldum, screenwriter Graham More) are under the impression that the audience does not know that Enigma is more complicated than that, so not unlike a sacrificial lamb given unto slaughter to sate the gods of idiots a real historical figure has been made to pretend he is not smart enough to know not to ask stupid questions. A little later in the same scene the head of MI:6, the British secret service, is introduced. Another poor bastard asks, “But the military only has five divisions.” No shit. The Secret Service is secret. Why would a person hired to break a top secret Nazi code be adamant about the impossibility of a secret intelligence division in the army when he is literally already apart of it? Quack, Quack, Quack!

This stupid pandering to modern sensibilities reaches the level of questionable storytelling ethics when it concerns the homosexuality of its subject Alan Turing. We all know now that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, the key word being ‘now.’ They did not know that then. Alan Turing probably did not even know that then. The way to honor the experience of real people is to show what it was like through their eyes. But here whenever a character learns of Turing’s homosexuality they not only know what it is literally, but also act as if they do not believe it is a moral choice of Turing’s. Furthermore are sympathetic to him even the policeman who, more than anybody else, has no historical reason to be. These are reactions that supposedly take place side by side in a time period where Turing would later be chemically castrated by the government for his homosexuality and eventually commit suicide. If you want to see how a movie should treat something like this, I recommend “Far From Heaven.” Or not pay attention to it at all. If you asked Alan Turing what he felt was most interesting about his character, do you suspect he would mention his homosexuality or the giant precomputer he spent day and night developing for years. How about we focus on that a little?

There is a reason to see this movie though and that is the always-superb performance by Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. The man has made a career out of playing geniuses such as Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein and here he does another version of a very smart man. His Turing is a far less smooth and confident as his Sherlock, but the underlying intelligence is immediately apparent. Turing apparently had a stammer and Cumberbatch performs it well. So that’s good. But hold fast, and I wonder if anyone else picked up on this. Take the character that Keira Knightley plays. She gets a job as a codebreaker by filling out an extremely hard crossword in the London paper and finishing an unfinishable test before a classroom of other applicants. So she too is super duper smart. Amazingly though, she is not beset with the quirks and characteristics of a genius that Cumberbatch brings to his role. She spends a great more time on screen being a love interest/plucky feminist than being a nerd that's very good at math. What’s going on there you may ask? Or not ask. I don’t think anybody but me has.

What stops these performances from being awards worthy has more to do with the mediocre movie that they are attached to. This one has been getting awards buzz lately. I don’t agree with that. And I also think it was a rip-off of “A Beautiful Mind,” to have the breakthrough in the code-breaking take place in a bar in a scene concerned with the unspoken code of human mating habits. For fuck's sake Hollywood not everything is about sex.

 I think Mark Zuckerberg said it best when he was asked about, “The Social Network.”

“The whole framing of the movie is I’m with this girl who doesn’t exist in real life who then dumps me…and basically the whole reason for making Facebook is because I wanted to get girls or get into some social institution…It’s such a big disconnect from the way people who make movies think of what we do in Silicon Valley, building stuff. They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.” (cue wild applause from audience of engineers)

Exactly.

Inherent Vice (5/5 Stars)

I have waited too long to review this movie. As I sit down to write I am reviewing in my mind what happened where when and how and this is a huge mistake because I hardly had a grasp on that when I was watching the movie in the theater. But dig this: during the movie I did not care because like the best of Chandler-esque pot detectives (see The Long Goodbye and The Big Lebowski) this movie makes its money moment to moment not in the grand scheme of things and boy is this movie filled from top to bottom with moments. It’s stacked with jokes like the flattop of Flintstone proportions that neatly sits on Lietuenant Detective (and SAG member) Christian F. “BigFoot” Bjornsen’s fat head.

Inherent Vice was adapted from a Thomas Pynchon novel and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. It is like a bonus movie from this guy in that his last two movies each took five years to make and market. Not only is this one coming to us within two years of his last (‘The Master’) but it is also a comedy and certainly the funniest P.T. Anderson movie to date. There has been an extraordinary amount of effort made here to include at least one visual gag in every scene. Some are very good like say the “welcome” “Doc” gets to the LA police department, Bigfoot’s son pouring him a drink, and the parking technique of his assistant. Roger Ebert once said of Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Ocean 11’ that it felt like a virtuoso classical pianist went down to the local honkytonk and started riffing on some ragtime melodies for fun. That’s what this feels like too. P.T. Anderson is slumming it with the low culture comedians. That’s probably why this movie will not be recognized for anything even though it should be on par with all his other high class movies.

Now for your reading enjoyment I will attempt to summarize the plot. May the gods of Imdb guide me! This movie is about Larry “Doc” Sportello a hippie private detective in the early 1970s of Los Angeles. I am assuming he got the nickname ‘Doc’ because he works out of a doctor’s office. One night Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston) shows up needing his help. Her boyfriend, the married real estate devloper Mickey Wolfman, may be the target of a kidnapping plot by his wife and her boyfriend. Doc can’t turn this request down as that girl has a hold of him the way that certain women often do. Thus the convoluted journey begins where a murder at a whorehouse brings him in contact with Lt. Det. Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (a perfect Josh Brolin), which necessitates the appearance of Doc’s maritime lawyer Sauncho Smilax, Esq. (Benicio Del Toro) and his current girlfriend Deputy D.A. Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon). The FBI gets in on the case and something called the Golden Fang, which might be a boat or something bigger leads the increasingly convoluted storyline through other bright character spots such as Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd D.D.S (a manic Martin Short) and Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson). The conversation that Doc has with Coy is perhaps the low point of clarity in the movie since it takes place after at least an hour of hard to follow and might consist of codespeak. I don’t know I’m not sure because I probably would not know what they were talking about even if it wasn’t in code.

The confusing aspect of Inherent Vice is medicated quite a bit like the confusing way of The Big Lebowski is medicated: that is with lots of drugs and enough great stuff going on in the moment that the viewer does not necessarily need to have a big picture in order to enjoy himself. Perhaps the best self-contained ten minutes of the movie is the introduction and dispensation of Martin Short, a dentist who may or may not be one small cog in a vast conspiracy to get hippies on heroin and then sell them everything they need to get off of heroin (heroin apparently does awful things to your teeth). ANYWAY it is a manic creation of unbridled lust and hard drugs before we are informed in the subsequent scene that the dentist has broken in his neck in a trampoline accident. Of course it may not be an accident but we’ve already moved on.

I haven’t read the book but I get the feeling that it is an irretrievably unadaptable source and the fact that P.T. Anderson has made a good movie from it makes the adaptation itself extraordinary. He should at least get an Oscar nomination for the screenplay. The movie is filled to the brim with memorable characters but Josh Brolin’s performance is one flattop head above the rest. He too should get an Oscar nomination. Joaquin Phoenix does a wonderful job of holding his own among the nutcases. Oh and I forgot that the movie is narrated by a character that is kind of tangential to the whole thing. Someone explained to me that she knows everything via stoner ESP or whatever. It works just as well.

I liked this movie quite a bit and will probably have to see it again to get most of the jokes. I hope you see it at least once and don’t feel bad if you can’t entirely figure what is going on. I suspect nobody can, especially the hippies.

Wild (4/5 Stars)

Best-selling memoirs based on a solitary exploration of one’s self can be apt for cynical ridicule. Take the example of whoever wrote “Eat Pray Love.” Once I heard that she was paid upfront to write a book about going on an exotic vacation to become enlightment I sort of lost all interest. I mean how can someone plan enlightenment and what kind of enlightment could it possibly be it was already in he works to sell the experience. I can give Thoreou a pass for ‘Walden’ because of its novelty; there was no expectation that it would make money. I can also give a pass to Christopher McCandless from ‘Into the Wild’ because somebody else wrote that story about him. He was not about to share it with the world. Finally I am going to give a pass to Cheryl Strayed whose bestselling book ‘Wild’ was the basis for this movie. The main reason is that even though this is a chronicling of her hike on the 1,000-mile Pacific Crest Trail, the heart of the story is not really about her. It is about the untimely death of her mother, which precipitated in Cheryl a self-destructive cycle of heroin addiction. Her hike and the book she wrote about it was an attempt to for lack of better words, get over it.

This movie was directed by Jean-Marc Vallee and adapted for the screen by Nick Hornby in a surprisingly cinematic way given that Hornby is a novelist (High Fidelity, About a Boy) and not a screenwriter. What is not surprising is that the movie’s writing has a preternatural sense of rhythm to it, one of Hornby’s distinctive strengths. Many lines of story are blended together with the main voyage of the Pacific Crest Hike with flashbacks and past dialogue and music coming in and out in a seemingly unorganized (but actually very probably meticulously organized) way. It feels like you are on a hike. You know, you are walking alone along a path in the wilderness. Everything is quiet but your thoughts and they meander in and out from present thinking, past memories, and the music you are playing in your head. I think Nick Hornby has done a very wonderful job of adapting a story that could easily be stilted and confining into something that feels like a seamless meditation of past, present, and a little of the future. If the book is anything like the movie in terms of structure, I would be very interested in reading it.

Anchoring the movie is Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed. This is one of those roles that basically guarantee an Oscar Nomination if it is done competently. Reese pulls off a competent performance and probably will be nominated. She does two things particularly well. One seems less about acting but deserves some recognition anyway and that is hiking around a movie set in the wilderness with a 50lb backpack. Reese happens to be 5’1” and movie star thin so there is that. The second has to do with being 38 years old and playing a young twenty-something character. This has less to do with having wrinkles than it is about inhabiting a person who is not mature the way that Reese Witherspoon obviously is in real life (a producer of this film actually) and more importantly in the movie roles she generally gets. This is most readily apparent in scenes opposite Cheryl’s mother (wonderfully inhabited by Laura Dern). The mother obviously adored and glowingly remembered by the child, is a bittersweet portrait. After escaping an abusive marriage, she started over with two kids, supported herself, went back to school (at the same high school as Cheryl) and somehow had a good attitude about it all. Then at age 41 she developed cancer. The doctor told her she had a year to live. She died within a month. And Cheryl absolutely grieved off the deep end of her life. This aspect of the story is what allows it to sidestep the memoir trap I mentioned above. Cheryl Strayed was not motivated to experience the journey as a quest of self-fulfillment but as a way to try to recapture the strength of those she had around her and lost. The story is not so much about her as a strong person as it is about the people in her life she drew strength from. And that lack of self-aggrandizement is what makes the commercialization of the story okay.

There is one other aspect of this movie that needs mentioning and it is in direct contrast to the most obviously comparable movie, Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild.” That too was about a person going into the wild alone, meeting new people, and pushing physical limits. One of the main differences though is that “Into the Wild” was about a young man whereas “Wild” is about a young woman. Without seeing this movie I would not have expected the most noticeable discrepancy is the overwhelming fear of sexual assault in the latter. Meeting new people for Christopher McCandless is a genrally pleasant experience. He gets drunk with Vince Vaughn. He talks philosophy with wanderers. He crashes a barbeque of a couple in the Grand Canyon. These same sorts of encounters happen in “Wild” but first Cheryl has to figure out if the person she is meeting is potentially dangerous. This is constant for every meeting. It really distracts away from watching the scenery. I wish it would just be paranoia on the side of Cheryl and almost all of the guys she meets in the movie (and it is mostly all guys on this trail) are totally cool. But then she does meet this one asshole and it turns out that it is a good idea for Cheryl to be cautious all the time. Come on people, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Nightcrawler (3/5 Stars)

The premise of Nightcrawler is interesting enough to justify a viewing merely on curiosity grounds. A ‘Nightcrawler’ is a particular type of freelance photographer. These men sleep during the day and work during night. They use a police radio to get information on whatever gruesome crime/traffic accident just occurred, drive over, shoot video of the blood in the streets, and sell it to early morning local news stations. Think about it. You wake up, turn on the news, and hear and see about something that happened in the middle of the night. How does that information get to you? This movie explains a lot of that process and the mere procedural nature of this movie makes it worth seeing if you are not already familiar with this universe.

The entrepreneur that we follow is a man named Louis Bloom, played by a very hungry (almost starving) Jake Gyllenhaal. He happens upon a fatal accident one night and witnesses a Nightcrawler named Loder, played by Bill Paxton, edging against the paramedics to get a better view of the gore. Louis has the nature of a man who is immediately intrigued by this sight. He steals a bike to buy a police radio and a small camera and goes right to work. A station head named Nina Romina, played by Rene Russo, tutors him on the network storyline: Minorities from inner cities are spreading into the nearby affluent suburbs and killing white people. That means some black guy killing some black guy in Compton is not newsworthy. A Mexican holding up a white person in Burbank is newsworthy. The more it bleeds, the more it leads.

The noir streets of nighttime L.A. are thrillingly evoked in writer/director Dan Gilroy’s movie. The orange glows of endless streetlights are strangely hypnotic. The white and red tracings of car headlights and emergency vehicles convey the seedy underbelly of the city. Several locations bring up memories of Hopper paintings, Nitehawks at the Diner sort of thing. The score is haunting and there is at least one very good car chase. But the success of the movie hinges on the character of Louis Bloom and here, despite a very daring performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, it ultimately falters. Plainly said, I don’t believe a guy like him can exist.

The job of Nightcrawler is the worst job in the news business. It is generally used as a testing ground for green employees as in, ‘you want to do this job, go the the next of kin whose relative died the same day and ask for a picture of the deceased for your newscast.’ It is a rough job and the people doing it usually have their eyes on bigger things in the business. Otherwise they are freelances who do this job because they will relinquish monetary pursuits for more control over their lives. Loder fits that bill pretty well. Louis Bloom is harder to figure out. When we first see him he is a petty thief stealing metal fences with pliers and hawking them to local scrapyards. He is at home with negotiation and has an upbeat if disturbingly upbeat personality. Importantly it is not established that Louis enjoys the act of breaking the law to make his money. Given that, it is kind of unclear why this particular type of person would find it difficult to find steady employment in any business before the movie begins. After all, he is punctual, learns quickly, thinks on his feet, and does not indulge in drugs or any other vices. He lives like a hermit alone in a sparse apartment where he spends most of his time watering a solitary plant. He has neither family nor girlfriend or even friends. This too is rather important given that it is hard to tell what motivates Louis Bloom. Louis recites a lot of capitalistic platitudes about working hard and climbing the ladder from the bottom and having ambition and what not, but to what end? Who cares about doing any of that if you don’t want to buy things or get girls or raise a family? What does Louis want other than to just work in the worst line of work possible?

Conceivably writer/director Tony Gilroy is trying to make a statement about what type of person would thrive in the business he is shining a light on, but whether he is right drowns in the possibility that he might not know what he is talking about. Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance reminded me most of Robert DeNiro’s performance in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.” In both movies you have these overwhelmingly anti-social personalities that insist on certain things past the bounds of any type of acceptable behavior. The main difference is that Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin though outrageous is understandable. One scene of him in his mother’s basement doing a make believe talk show amongst cardboard cutouts goes a long way to illustrating just how delusional (and rather stupid) are his dreams of being a late night comedian. Gyllenhaal strikes many of the same chords but at the same time is generally the smartest person in the room. Well, if he is so smart, why does he go about climbing the ladder in the most uncomfortable way possible? Why doesn’t he apply his intellect and ambition in a way that will gain traction with normal human beings? My intution tells me that Gilroy is making a connection between capitalism and ruthless inhuman behavior. You know me. I just don’t agree with that. Capitalism is based on agreements between consenting adults. Louis would make more sense if he were purely sadistic or delusional or plain stupid. It does not make sense for him to be completely serious about being a good employee/employer and in the same breath not care at all about working well with other people.

The unreality of the character undercuts a lot of the tension in what would have been otherwise dramatic scenes. A perfect example is the scene in the Mexican restaurant between Louis and his station manager. He has become quite competent at his job and she is under pressure during sweeps week to keep her job. He proposes that he will work exclusively for her station in exchange for lots of money but also sexual favors. That the station head is actually desperate enough to go along with the proposal is kind of beside the point. The bigger question is why Louis would want sex from her? Certainly it is easier to get sex elsewhere given that he is employed and looks like Jake Gyllenhaal but I don’t even mean to focus on that. The big “Why” concerns the fact that Louis Bloom does not demonstrate any kind of lustful behavior. For all practical intents and purposes he is an asexual human being that likes watering his solitary plant in his empty apartment and that is it. The bedroom scene that occurs takes place off camera so we do not see it, but I cannot imagine what would have happened in it. I can’t imagine Louis Bloom having sex. And blackmailing your boss for sex is definitely not a good career move so why would an almost puritanically career obsessed guy insist on it. It did not make sense to me.