As heard on episode 160 of Cinema Crespodiso.
“Nightcrawler” is five-minutes-into-the-future satire, a look at our news media culture and what that machine entails, an indictment of the “blood and guts” mentality of selling newscasts to an ever fearful public, wrapped up in the guise of a darkly comedic noir thriller. Simultaneously gorgeous and ugly, funny and cruel, hopeful and horrified, this is like a modern day “Network,” but if Howard Beale was less an angry prophet of a god and more of a purveyor of socially acceptable smut.
Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom will go down as one of the creepiest, most disturbing and of course fascinating characters from this era of movies, an ugly antihero for an ugly world, he of singular purpose and such incredible drive and determination, put to such horrifying use. It pays to be soulless and self serving, this sayeth “Nightcrawler.”
