Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler – 117 min – R

This extremely creepy character is a great tool for commentary on the news media. I had the same affection for the character as I had for Dexter. The main character is not a good person but he is completely hypnotic. This movie gets a green light from me for excellent storytelling on an unsavory subject. I wanted to take a shower after watching it.

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a common thief who stumbles on a car accident. An independent news videographer, Joe (Bill Paxton), is filming and Lou overhears that you can make money by showing up at these horrific accidents and violent crimes. He quickly gets a camera and starts shoving his way into this industry. He hires an Intern, Rick (Riz Ahmed), to help park the car and get some second camera footage. As Lou becomes more successful, he starts to switch from filming the news to choreographing the footage to make a better product that sells better.

Lou's driven nature is one of his biggest character traits but it’s not tempered by any sort of ethics. He talks a great game of high moral standard but it really is only to better his own standing, which I think makes his connection with the news network perfect. Often I feel that they use sensationalism to blow news stories out of proportion to better their ratings. Really liked how Lou is the embodiment of that mindset.

Another good relationship in the film is between Nina (ReneRusso) and Frank (Kevin Rahm). Nina is an aging news person who really relies on the sensationalism to keep her job. Frank is there as a moral or ethical compass. The film uses him to show how far out of the desperation is to drive ratings and at what cost those ratings come.

Sometimes when a writer directs their own film, the movie suffers. This film is an exception. Most of writer/director Dan Gilroy's experience is in writing but this film is an excellent movie to start off a great future in the director’s chair.

This movie can be fit into the category of news drama and joins movies like Network or Natural Born Killers. All of them speak to the evils of sensationalistic news but this one does it in a new way that is more elegant than others in this category. Take a look at this film and get up close and personal to the car collision that is our network news.

What other movie character has made your skin crawl but you were unable to stop watching? 

Source Code

Source Code – 93 Min – PG-13

This movie is a modern thriller with the feel and tempo of a Hitchcock film. From the opening credits the sound track had a North by Northwest rhythm that had me excited to see this film. It starts off at a great pace and does not slow down until the end. It blended the tension with plenty of humors relief points and mixed in quiet a few emotional moments to give the viewer a full emotional journey in 93 minutes. Seeing this movie makes me believe in the magic of movies again. I get worn down with the canned and formulaic rehash of movies that a wonderful film like this is just want I need to build up my faith in the industry. Definitely take some time and see this movie.

The movie takes place on an eight minute loop right before an explosion on a train. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is sent back to eight minutes before the bomb goes off to see if he can find who set it. Stevens is a military pilot in a new program that lets him go back in time to live the life of someone else, he takes over Sean Fentress’s body as he was on the train when it blew up. In these short jumps back he has to find out who set the bomb and take this information to the future to prevent another explosion. There are hundreds of people on the train and he only has a small window to find who did it. With the help of Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) as his contact on the outside of his pod, he works to find a solution fighting two deadlines, the eight minutes he has in each jump and the ever passing of time outside the pod before the second explosion goes off.

The cast and crew did a stupendous job of building the right amount of tension and fun in this film. Some of the other members of the crew did a marvelous job of bringing this story to life. Michelle Monaghan and Jeffry Wright performed well and I appreciate the nod to the Quantum Leap-esque story line by having Scott Bakula play Colter’s father. Well done. The crew was led by Duncan Jones and as his third directorial project he shows great potential. I look forward to seeing more films from him. The story is from Ben Ripley another relatively new comer with only four projects under his belt. I really liked how Ripley did not cop out to stereotypes or pander to the fear mongers. It’s a fresh and exciting story. Jones and Ripley need to work together again they make beautiful movies together. Don Burgess was the Cinematographer and he has a great eye for setting the viewer right in the middle of the action. It’s sometimes hard to shoot a film on one set and make it as visually dynamic as he did. I think this crew and cast worked so well together they need to make another film.

One hallmark of a good movie is how much discussion it generates. There was a lot of rich conversation about this movie and the ramifications of what this technology would mean and how it fits into real quantum theory. We talked about what we thought the science probabilities were and the ethics of them. I recommend a good talk over pie at the end of a good movie, it makes the experience that much better.

Man! I truly enjoyed this movie. It was a beautiful gem that was a complete story and was well told. As much as I liked it I really hope they end this with just one perfect story. It’s fine as a one move event that needs not be explored or exploited with sequel after sequel.

This review’s question is going to have you watch the movie to answer this one. Please let me know what you truly think? What do you think happened to Sean Fentress? Please be as detailed in your response as you can. That was one question we could not answer after the movie, what do you think?