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. 

Edge of Tomorrow (4/5 Stars)

or: All You Need is Kill!

Roger Ebert once caused an Internet firestorm by declaring that video games can never be art. Boy did he get hell for that. He had a point though and it was that video games because since they had rules, points, objectives, and an outcome that is preordained. Of course, this all denies the massive amount of artistry that generally goes around whatever is the actual game. For instance if you took out the game elements of a superior video game and kept the visual design, the story, and the characters, perhaps what you would be left with was art in the Roger Ebert definition. And what would such art look and feel like? Perhaps like the new Tom Cruise science fiction action flick, “Edge of Tomorrow” is such an example.      

Cinephiles would generally associate the concept of ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ with such great movies time-loop movies like ‘Groundhog Day’ and ‘Source Code,’ but the original manga comic book that this movie is based on, ‘All You Need is Kill!’ is unabashedly a lover of video games and it is possible to argue the movie has more in common with Super Mario than the former. The movie follows the exploits of Cage, played by Tom Cruise, as he is placed in the front lines of an invasion of Europe against an alien foe named the Mimics. Through a freak accident on the day of the invasion, Cage kills an Alpha Mimic and gains the ability to relive each day if and only if he is killed on that day. This is how the Mimics are winning the war in the first place. They can rewind the day of the battle until they learn exactly what the enemy will do. Once they know how the day goes they can plan accordingly the next time they play the game, I mean movie.

This is a video game. You die. You start over. You keep doing it until you get it right. The whole world is at stake. There is a particularly dangerous pitfall to this type of story in that it at some point should get boring if the whole thing just keeps on repeating. This problem is deftly avoided by the director, Doug Liman, the writer Christopher McQuarrie and another great action performance by Tom Cruise. The art in telling this story is knowing what parts to skip. After all, by the story’s logic everything is always the same; so each time Tom relives a day, and the movie suggests that number is in the thousands if not more, we are only shown some of it and most of the time none of it. There is a running joke in the movie where the audience is actually not entirely sure whether Cage has gotten this far into the day or not. Plenty of times you will see a scene for the first time before realizing that Cage has been there one hundred times before and knows exactly what will happen. Other times, he is continually surprised by the day’s developments. The movie keeps the audience out of the know as to what situation it is at most times in the movie and thus retains a sense of suspense as to what will happen further into the movie than one would think is possible.

Another ingredient that helps the movie ride along smoothly is the character of Rita, played by Emily Blunt. Rita’s nickname is “Full Metal Bitch.” She is the army’s best soldier having killed over 100 mimics in her first day of battle. How did she do that? Well, because what happened to Cage, happened to her and she was able to relive the same day over and over again. After Cage goes through the obligatory scenes of trying to explain things to disbelieving army personel it is with a sense of relief that when he gets to Rita, she knows exactly what is going on and sets about training Cage for combat immediately. Nothing really needs to be explained to her, although every day is completely new no matter what. So in plenty of scenes we see things for the first time through her eyes, even though Cage has been there before. In this way, the movie gets away with the former conceit of not needing to show the first time Cage sees something to the audience. In that case, we can follow Rita who knows as much as we do.

This is another great performance by Tom Cruise who, dare I say, is one of the most underappreciated actors of the last decade. It has been almost ten years since Tom Cruise had his Oprah Winfrey “meltdown,” which wasn’t really a meltdown but a crash collision between old media (the interview was 43 minutes long in front of the craziest audience of Tom Cruise fanatics the show could possibly shove together into the same room) and new media (the YouTube clip was about 16 seconds long and completely devoid of context). New media destroyed Tom Cruise’s image in a way that has made it impossible for him to do what made him one of the most admirable movie stars in the 80s and 90s, that is to say take on edgy roles in small ambitious movies like Born on the Fourth of July, Rain Man, Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, Vanilla Sky, etc. But what is extraordinary now is how he is using his image as a hated celebrity to his advantage in his current action hero bent. “Edge of Tomorrow,” is perhaps the best example of this so far. His character is introduced not as a soldier but a marketing spokesman for the army. He sits in TV stations and sells the strategy to the public. He is suave and charming and utterly superficial with that classic/cliché Tom Cruise smile. He is then called to the general’s office and informed that he will be part of the invading wave. Tom Cruise’s reaction is just utter conniving cowardice. This is a man who can go in front of TV cameras and with 100% certainty declare that they will win the battle but is going to do everything he possibly can to get out of actually fighting. If you think Tom Cruise is full of shit, you will enjoy like hell the first half hour of this movie. But that’s just the thing that is so extraordinary about Cruise. He seems to know everyone thinks he is full of shit and so is deliberately taking roles that exploit that image in the best way to tell whatever story he is trying to tell. Cruise is such a strange example of humanity. That this guy, an ardent believer of Scientology, one of the most ludicrous religions ever invented, can also side by side possess a brilliant ability to communicate with an audience is amazing to me. How is that kind of compartamentalization even possible? Anyway, another thing that is generally underappreciated is how well a physical performer Tom Cruise happens to be. This movie is stunt heavy and though I’m sure Cruise did not do all of his stunts, some he obviously done plenty of them and that particular type of skill takes a level of dedication and coordination most actors are simply incapable of. I wouldn’t go so far as to say his performance here deserves an Oscar Nomination like I said of his performance in “Mission Impossible IV: Ghost Protocol,” (a position I still hold to) but it is definitely worth noting. Try spreading the word about how good of an actor he still is because I miss the Tom Cruise that could, between larger blockbuster movies, help smaller stranger movies get made. I like this Tom Cruise too, yes, but I want my old Tom Cruise back as well. What I’m trying to say is I miss my Tom Cruise.

p.s. ‘All You Need is Kill’ is a much better title than ‘Edge of Tomorrow’