I usually don't post along the lines of 'movie I just saw that you should, too', but "Nightcrawler" is easily the best film of the year, the best performance of Gyllenhaal's career, and the best piece of scathingly indicting cinema since "The Truman Show." See it!
quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Anyone else seen Nightcrawler yet? I saw it last night and was really, really impressed. It's a film carried by an extremely well written main character absolutely played out of his skin by Jake Gyllenhaal. The strength of the character carries you through the occasionally incredulous moments in the plot, and the tone is really daringly poised between black humour and deeply macabre drama. It's one of those films where you're laughing one minute and appalled the next, which is a really hard balance to strike. My only mild complaint is with the ending, which doesn't bother to resolve a couple of glaring questions the story sets up. But you all know how much of picky plot bastard I am. |
A hard balance to strike, and for a movie that tries to pull off tonal shifts this dramatic, one that I don't think can be struck without it still being too jarring to the audience. But I also think the shift from horror to humor plays smoothly into the meta-purpose of the film, as if the camera occasionally pulls back in order to reveal the surrounding, satirical environment in which all of this is happening.
Funny enough, my only complaint (spoiler alert, I guess) is actually with the very beginning, when Bloom overpowers and mugs the security guard, stealing his watch. Bloom is not a physically but psychologically violent person, and aside from threat of violence much later in the film, we see no other instance or even suggestion of it.* I just felt that one particular scene was inconsistent with the slick, scrawny sociopath we would meet and see develop over the next two hours.
*EDIT: Actually, that's not entirely true, but that also just means more spoilers so whatever.
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He traded sands for skins, skins for gold, gold for life. In the end, he traded life for sand. Afari, Tales
Last edited by Paradox Lost on Nov-18-2014 at 23:35
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