Nightcrawler and The Drop

sovay asked me to write about the movies, and while my reviews will not hold a candle to hers (seriously, go read them and learn), I do have thoughts on the two I've recently seen, which I might put in a three-film mini-fest with Drive (2011) or expand it to an all-day event with Enemy (2013) (this might make it a little heavy on the Jake Gyllenhaal) and American Psycho (2000).  That by itself constitutes kind of a major spoiler for one of the films, so beware.


Nightcrawler - Actually, it's about Ethics in Journalism.

I think to really do my experience with this film, I have to relate how it was sold to me.  darkpaisley told me she wanted to see this movie, but was evasive about what it was or why she wanted to see it.  This sets of alarm bells for me, since my formative experience for movies d|p wants me to see but about which she is evasive is Oldboy (2003).

"Actually, it's about ethics in journalism," she said, referencing #gamergate, letting me know that Erik is going to be watching this movie through his hands, because while I lack his eloquence in media consumption, I have the all the steely reserve of Mark Oshiro when he's watching things.  The reference to #gamergate is apt for this movie in a lot of different ways.  Jake Gyllenhaal plays Louis Bloom, a hollow eyed mansuit who begins the film as a player's avatar in a video game.  See him, caught stealing chainlink fence by a private security guard, assault the guard for his fancy watch.  See him exhaust dialog trees with the scrap dealer (ask for a higher price for scrap.  Ask for a job).  Bloom's dialog is just so - a tree, but unlike modern games where you can choose aggressive, kind or douche, he's stuck with the kind of language you pick up from online business courses and a steady diet of whoever is the new Steven Covey these days.  When he sees a stringer covering a fiery car crash (hey, it's Bill Paxton!  Always a welcome sight, bearded, sleazy and perfect for the part of the more experienced "nightcrawler"), he begins his journey, as controlled by some external, unseen game-player who has no fucks to give about what happens as a consequence of his avatar's actions.

Turns out that a total lack of humanity makes for meteoric success as a stringer for lurid-footage-hungry local news, and his early attempts to get that footage really do take on the cast of an action-adventure sort of videogame.  Here's the puzzle solving, there's the mandatory stealth section.  Here's the capture and the points earned.  He uses the points to upgrade his camera, his ride (a mid-80s Tercel to a red Mustang) and get a $30-a-night intern (Rick Garcia, who has been acting for as long as I have been, according to IMDB and looks like he's 25), with whom he interacts as the nightmare boss that far too many of my friends and relations know.  He levels, gains more points and continues to level.  He sabotage's his rival's van and films the resulting crash.  Acheivement unlocked.

But don't think we've dodged what #gamergate is actually about, as Bloom begins to show the main theme of that misbegotten fuckstorm in his interactions with Rene Russo's local TV station morning news director.  She's close to the end of her contract, a former field reporter whose graceful aging is just aging in LA, and hungry for the kind of news (and she makes no bones about what it is - the kind that scares white people in the suburbs with the specter of CRIME) that spikes ratings and that Bloom seems very good at getting.  He's hungry for her, and he uses his footage, in dialog tree fashion, to coerce her into a relationship with him, which, thank fuck, we never see.  As his footage garners more and more cachet, he becomes more insistent, sea lionish, and not only doesn't seem to show any grasp on what a person should do in any given situation, but the fact that the way he behaves is probably justification for homicide.  But then, he's perfectly willing to employ the threats of violence that show up in his dialog tree, as well as tipping information that he's gotten clearly from stalking.  Though Jake Gyllenhaal is much different in appearance than the specter conjured to mind of the synechdochal #gater, he's got the personality, the view of women and the hatred of everyone and everything that is not resources for him to own that suits them to the ground.

And he gets away with it.  With everything.  When he arranges a home invasion that he filmed to turn into a next-day bloodbath and chase, during which he extemporizes the murder of his increasingly balky intern at the hands of one of the home invasion suspects, the police do try to pin it on him, but his dialog tree holds the poison apple that gets him out of trouble.  We last see him having leveled up again, stolen watch still on his wrist, three interns and two vans, setting off into the night.




The Drop - Literally Everything is a Spoiler

Tom Hardy plays Bob Sagonowski, a bartender at his cousin (James Gandlofini in his last credited film, doing the kind of things you expect from him, and doing them very well)'s bar, which happens to be where drops of money from the various and sundry illicit things happening in Brooklyn sometimes come.  Bob is low-key.  And by saying he's low-key, I mean he is low-key like the previous mentioned film's protagonist is lacking in conscience.  He's low key to the point of immediate alarm.  He's pretty satisfied with his place in the world (while his cousin rails against it).  Then a couple of things happen, the first being a robbery on the bar, that nets a fairly trivial sum from the bar's Chechen mafia owners, and the second being a puppy Bob discovers in the garbage can of a young woman (Noomi Rapace, the other bright spot in Prometheus [2012]), who has the kind of ex-boyfriend who would buy a puppy, chip it, beat it and then stick it in his ex-girlfriend's garbage as a message to her.

And everything after that is a spoiler.  And everything before that is a spoiler.  Now, I was fine to spoil Nightcrawler, because that film doesn't surprise you with anything.  Bloom is a less-human Patrick Bateman, and the terrible things he does are well warned and being surprised by them or expecting them does not change your reaction.  The Drop, well, you shouldn't be surprised what happens, and the film has a bunch of weird interpolations that I want to talk about that makes me think that folks in charge of the movie were afraid you'd be too surprised by what happens, but the film does thrive on uncertainty.  You know how this is going to go, but you don't know if you're right.

It's a spoiler to tell you Bob is a lot smarter than he comes off, but there's no secret about that in the film.  We get to see him be consistently smarter than he might come off.  We see him acting on guilt in a dozen different ways, which Cousin Marv likes to lampshade.  We see him try every trick in his repetoire to de-escalate the inevitable confrontation with the technically legal owner of the dog (and would-be "owner" of dogsitter Nadia).  We see a lingering shot on an oil tank in Bob's basement with an orchestral sting on it.  We see him handle a severed arm returned to the bar with the money stolen from the Chechens, by the Chechens.

The film is full of lampshades; cousin Marv keeps his father and his hopes of returning to the respect he has as the leader of a crew on life support.  It becomes clear quite quickly that he's arranging for the robbery of the bar that he runs (and once owned before the Chechens made him blink), in hopes of putting up enough money to get his former operation back off the ground.  He's ruthless enough to kill the suriving member of the two-man team he got to rob the place in the first part when he refuses to do a repeat.  But he's desperate enough to contact the dog's owner, Eric Deeds, mentally ill and proclaimed killer of a guy whose name keeps coming up for some reason (which is spoily) to rob the bar.

Tom Hardy is great.  Noomi Rapace and James Gandolfini turn in good performances.  The story works, except...  It's a weird thing, but this is one of those films where I was watching it seemed like an extra 20 minutes got slid in, a scene at a time with no other purpose but to give more clues that the final confrontation is going to end up like it did.  There's voiceover, which I always take as a film not trusting in the clarity of its own premise (I forgive it in SF and fantasy, because you need to tell people up front what they're getting out of this imaginary world, but for stuff in our world, I don't normally see the need).  There's also a detective whose investigation scenes go nowhere - they don't give more information, just hint that there is more information to be had, and I don't think any of that information is necessary.  Bob does a perfectly clear and complete job explaining to Eric what that information is at the end, and it's no surprise to anyone who stayed awake through the film.

There's also a completely unecessary and kind of disturbing ending where Bob and Nadia seem to repair friendship/nascent attraction, that did not need to be, and in fact, kind of needed to not be.  I long for a shorter cut of this movie, omitting the scenes with the detective when he's not interacting with Bob or Marv and ending on the closing voiceover.  Because this is a good film, it really is, I liked it better than Nightcrawler, even though it sounds like I do not.  It's just been cluttered up with a handful of crap it does not need, which I suspect was a studio mandate.  This one I would watch again, but probably not Nightcrawler, though both were good films and worth your time.