Netflix pick for 2/1/16 – ‘Nightcrawler’

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.”

From my original review of “Nightcrawler:”

But while all of this is going on, the movie still works if you ignore a lot of this stuff and just watch it as a thriller about a guy who gets in deeper and deeper into something none of us know anything about, hence murky waters made even murkier by Lou Bloom’s actions. Much of the movie takes place at night, and nighttime Los Angeles definitely has a unique feel, one that just works for movies like this, with the wide open streets and the hillside views of the expansive city laid out beneath them, full of possibilities and opportunities and people just waiting to be maimed by other people. These dark streets have a menace to them, a palpable sense of danger, made more dangerous by the presence of the movie’s lead character, and it all makes for a wild ride of a movie, one that will be very interesting to revisit down the road.

Looks like it is time for that revisit, which we can all do now with that Netflix Instant Watch, though I am sure it is available on other services, don’t feel left out Amazon primers and iTunes Diehards. One love.