Listen now | Today’s movie is Nightcrawler written and directed by Dan Gilroy. We’ve ended up watching another of Casey’s favorite movies! Nightcrawler is a fantastic film. Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance as Lou is chilling. Both the script and the score come together to tell the story from Lou’s perspective, and the end result is pretty brilliant.
Really enjoyed this movie. There is a morbid sense to this movie that can get too thick at times but all in all it's perhaps one of the best movies I've seen. I do think it needed more polish and it really falls apart in certain scenes, which is a bummer because 90% of this movie feels so on point.
Also really enjoy this movie, if I have to point out some minor flaws I do think the LAPD/detective storyline is the weakest part of the movie, and I found the conversation between the news director and the other news person at the end about the triple murder actually being a drug shooting was a bit heavy-handed.
On the topic of how the movie is shot, I really appreciate that as far as I could tell they actually shot most of the night scenes at night. A ton of movies and TV, even huge super expensive productions, tend to shoot day for night for most night scenes, and once you learn how to spot it it kinda ruins a lot of night scenes in movies.
I agree about the detective storyline! Everything else was great, and felt very real, but the detective seemed to be a detective from a fake police show like CSI or something. Her bursting in at the end made me feel like she was the journalism police instead of murder police.
The Wire has made me see most TV/Film police characters as having completely made up motivations. No, their job is not to find the truth no matter what. They are workers who are overloaded and have a lot of pressure on them to do a job: wrap up the cases they are assigned, so that arrest rates go up, so that their bosses can look good. They are not heroic crusaders for truth, and don't have time to go around unearthing potential crimes of news camera men.
All that said, it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the film too much, since the detective didn't actually affect the plot in any way.. But I suppose its purpose was to say "Ah you think the law is going to come and make this right? It won't" - that felt flat a bit since it seemed so unrealistic... Still really enjoyed this film.
I agree with everything you said about Jake Gyllenhall’s performance. He’s incredible and you can’t take your eyes off him. But I’m not as sold on the screenplay as you were. I did like it, but it felt more like a B screenplay elevated by an A+ performance.
The movie is so unsubtle that it often felt like a lecture, which kept me from getting fully invested. In the dinner scene, Jake Gyllenhall directly stares into the camera and recites statistics about how the news spends more time on crime than anything else. Half of the reporter’s lines are essentially “Bah, I don’t care about ethics!”The detective stuff felt kind of underwritten, like it was only there to lead up to one of them yelling into the camera about how bad Jake Gyllenhall is. Even the musical dissonance felt over the top to me. My attitude in a lot of scenes went from “Wow, this is unsettling” to “Okay, I get it”.
I also didn’t totally buy the escalation to (essentially) murder. The movie tries to have a Breaking Bad sense of corruption and gradually crossing more lines, but without actually having Jake Gyllenhall change as a character, and it’s kind of an awkward fit. If he’s always been capable of that, why did he start the movie by stealing scrap metal and manhole covers? Why not sell drugs or guns or participate in human trafficking or rob mansions or something that would bring in way more money than selling scrap? I don’t think this is a plot hole or anything. It just felt a bit underdeveloped.
I guess I would disagree mainly on two points there.
The first is that I didn't see there as being any escalation. The character starts off (at least) assaulting a security guard and stealing his watch. We do not even know what happens to the guard, for all we know it was *already* a murder in the opening scene. So I took this as a sign that the character was already fully sociopathic, but just hadn't been able to find stable work, either legal or illegal. I believe he would have been a drug dealer, perhaps, if the opportunity had arisen. This story is about the opportunity that did arise, which is network news.
The second is that I didn't take the dialogue to be preachy. It felt like an honest character trait to me. I assumed the character had no social skills (which seems obvious) and so he parrots whatever he has recently read on-line or in self help books. I actually really liked this aspect of the writing, since a performance without these oddities would likely be rather boring to watch. Had these been one-off lines from a character without that trait, I would agree it might be a bad idea. But since the entire character is built around this idea,I thought it came off as quite believable.
I felt like the movie was trying to escalate his behavior. The gradual increase from moving a photograph, to moving a body, to waiting to call the cops until the criminals were at a restaurant, to finally getting his partner killed, all felt like taking piecemeal steps into ever murkier territory, Walter White style.
If he’s fine with murder from the beginning, why didn’t he start staging extreme scenarios as soon as he got his camera? Why not call the cops on random passersby in the hope of starting a shootout, or cut the brakes on random cars and film the wreckage, or film his own home invasions, or shoot his partner directly and make it look like gang activity? There does seem to be some limit to what he’s willing to do, and that limit seems to change over the course of the film, but he himself doesn’t seem to change. It feels like there’s a bit of disconnect. I’m curious if anyone else feels the same way, or if this is just my own problem. Maybe I just want everything to be like Breaking Bad?
As for the preachiness, I might not have minded if it was just Jake Gyllenhall doing it, but the reporter and detective also felt like they were often saying the themes directly to the camera. I think if the reporter had been more genuinely conflicted, or was more believably lying to herself about what she was doing, it would have worked better for me than just overtly saying “I don’t care about ethics! My job is to lie and sensationalize the news.”
In any case, I did enjoy the movie on the whole, and the episode. It’s nice to get a good balance of rants and raves!
Well, I took that not to be escalation, but rather proficiency. Again, the movie is trying to tell the same story as a heroic one, but with horrible things instead of heroic things. So at the outset, it is not that he wouldn't be OK with moving a body. It's that he hasn't yet learned enough to think of that. Moving the photograph is like an "aha" moment for him, so it is not escalating his immorality, but rather showing him gaining proficiency at being an unscrupulous stringer.
Really enjoyed this movie. There is a morbid sense to this movie that can get too thick at times but all in all it's perhaps one of the best movies I've seen. I do think it needed more polish and it really falls apart in certain scenes, which is a bummer because 90% of this movie feels so on point.
Cracks me up when one of the vans at the end drives through the red light immediately after he says the final line. Great movie!
Also really enjoy this movie, if I have to point out some minor flaws I do think the LAPD/detective storyline is the weakest part of the movie, and I found the conversation between the news director and the other news person at the end about the triple murder actually being a drug shooting was a bit heavy-handed.
On the topic of how the movie is shot, I really appreciate that as far as I could tell they actually shot most of the night scenes at night. A ton of movies and TV, even huge super expensive productions, tend to shoot day for night for most night scenes, and once you learn how to spot it it kinda ruins a lot of night scenes in movies.
I agree about the detective storyline! Everything else was great, and felt very real, but the detective seemed to be a detective from a fake police show like CSI or something. Her bursting in at the end made me feel like she was the journalism police instead of murder police.
The Wire has made me see most TV/Film police characters as having completely made up motivations. No, their job is not to find the truth no matter what. They are workers who are overloaded and have a lot of pressure on them to do a job: wrap up the cases they are assigned, so that arrest rates go up, so that their bosses can look good. They are not heroic crusaders for truth, and don't have time to go around unearthing potential crimes of news camera men.
All that said, it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the film too much, since the detective didn't actually affect the plot in any way.. But I suppose its purpose was to say "Ah you think the law is going to come and make this right? It won't" - that felt flat a bit since it seemed so unrealistic... Still really enjoyed this film.
I agree with everything you said about Jake Gyllenhall’s performance. He’s incredible and you can’t take your eyes off him. But I’m not as sold on the screenplay as you were. I did like it, but it felt more like a B screenplay elevated by an A+ performance.
The movie is so unsubtle that it often felt like a lecture, which kept me from getting fully invested. In the dinner scene, Jake Gyllenhall directly stares into the camera and recites statistics about how the news spends more time on crime than anything else. Half of the reporter’s lines are essentially “Bah, I don’t care about ethics!”The detective stuff felt kind of underwritten, like it was only there to lead up to one of them yelling into the camera about how bad Jake Gyllenhall is. Even the musical dissonance felt over the top to me. My attitude in a lot of scenes went from “Wow, this is unsettling” to “Okay, I get it”.
I also didn’t totally buy the escalation to (essentially) murder. The movie tries to have a Breaking Bad sense of corruption and gradually crossing more lines, but without actually having Jake Gyllenhall change as a character, and it’s kind of an awkward fit. If he’s always been capable of that, why did he start the movie by stealing scrap metal and manhole covers? Why not sell drugs or guns or participate in human trafficking or rob mansions or something that would bring in way more money than selling scrap? I don’t think this is a plot hole or anything. It just felt a bit underdeveloped.
I guess I would disagree mainly on two points there.
The first is that I didn't see there as being any escalation. The character starts off (at least) assaulting a security guard and stealing his watch. We do not even know what happens to the guard, for all we know it was *already* a murder in the opening scene. So I took this as a sign that the character was already fully sociopathic, but just hadn't been able to find stable work, either legal or illegal. I believe he would have been a drug dealer, perhaps, if the opportunity had arisen. This story is about the opportunity that did arise, which is network news.
The second is that I didn't take the dialogue to be preachy. It felt like an honest character trait to me. I assumed the character had no social skills (which seems obvious) and so he parrots whatever he has recently read on-line or in self help books. I actually really liked this aspect of the writing, since a performance without these oddities would likely be rather boring to watch. Had these been one-off lines from a character without that trait, I would agree it might be a bad idea. But since the entire character is built around this idea,I thought it came off as quite believable.
- Casey
I felt like the movie was trying to escalate his behavior. The gradual increase from moving a photograph, to moving a body, to waiting to call the cops until the criminals were at a restaurant, to finally getting his partner killed, all felt like taking piecemeal steps into ever murkier territory, Walter White style.
If he’s fine with murder from the beginning, why didn’t he start staging extreme scenarios as soon as he got his camera? Why not call the cops on random passersby in the hope of starting a shootout, or cut the brakes on random cars and film the wreckage, or film his own home invasions, or shoot his partner directly and make it look like gang activity? There does seem to be some limit to what he’s willing to do, and that limit seems to change over the course of the film, but he himself doesn’t seem to change. It feels like there’s a bit of disconnect. I’m curious if anyone else feels the same way, or if this is just my own problem. Maybe I just want everything to be like Breaking Bad?
As for the preachiness, I might not have minded if it was just Jake Gyllenhall doing it, but the reporter and detective also felt like they were often saying the themes directly to the camera. I think if the reporter had been more genuinely conflicted, or was more believably lying to herself about what she was doing, it would have worked better for me than just overtly saying “I don’t care about ethics! My job is to lie and sensationalize the news.”
In any case, I did enjoy the movie on the whole, and the episode. It’s nice to get a good balance of rants and raves!
Well, I took that not to be escalation, but rather proficiency. Again, the movie is trying to tell the same story as a heroic one, but with horrible things instead of heroic things. So at the outset, it is not that he wouldn't be OK with moving a body. It's that he hasn't yet learned enough to think of that. Moving the photograph is like an "aha" moment for him, so it is not escalating his immorality, but rather showing him gaining proficiency at being an unscrupulous stringer.
- Casey