reviews – Page 5 – Late to the Theater

Gyllenhaalin’ Skincrawlin’ Entry: Nightcrawler (2014)

Nightcrawler is an absolutely brilliant film. It’s a modern noir take on a generation raised by journalism and the internet without being preachy, and I can’t recommend it highly enough for fans of dark humor and incisive social commentary. Since they are both about sociopaths, it inevitably draws comparisons with films like Taxi Driver and American Psycho, with good reason.

[SOME SPOILERS!]

Nightcrawler surprised me. I had read the reviews on a few sites and knew it was good, but it also looked like the kind of dark thing I’ve been trying to avoid lately. A veteran of some pretty weird and extreme cinema, I wasn’t interested in spending 90 minutes with a Jake Gyllenhaal who keeps dead babies in his freezer or something. I barely leave the house as it is.

But as I said, it surprised me. For one thing, although it explores the pathology of sociopaths, it wasn’t as violent as I thought it would be. Gyllenhaal’s character of Lou Bloom is certainly a dangerous person, incapable of empathizing and soon begins leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, but the movie is almost like an origin story for a serial killer who hasn’t quite gotten started yet. Instead, it posits something even scarier – not a killer who hunts and pursues prey, but an opportunistic predator a little lower down on the food chain. Bloom is the kind of predator who has the patience to cultivate relationships and then strike when people are at their most vulnerable. In the Wiki entry, the filmmakers said that they were trying to characterize Bloom as a jackal, and I think they really succeeded. Some opportunistic predators are the last thing prey sees before they die, just as happens in the story.

The story is thin but more than balanced by the brilliant characterizations and performances. As mentioned, Gyllenhaal plays Bloom, a sociopathic autodidact who aggregates data like an algorithm, a metaphor fitting for the internet age without being overbearing. Just like Gmail doesn’t understand the context of some of the weirder terms in my personal emails (true story: years ago in my Google ads sidebar an ad for a white supremacist website came up because I was lamenting the existence of neo-nazis- No Gmail, that was wrong) Bloom fails to understand meaning or context. A junk metal scrapper and small-time thief, he wanders across the path of some freelance videographers and scents opportunity. Soon he’s haunting the police radio band and rushing to the scenes of crimes, sometimes before the first responders themselves arrive (another horrifying point, how late the cops sometimes are to the party) and capturing all the gory details with no concern for personal boundaries or the law.

He hires an employee played by Riz Ahmed, a sort of shiftless stoner guy. I’d never heard of Ahmed before but I loved the vague, ‘wait what’ tone of his performance. I hope he goes far. The scenes where they’re tearing around L.A. in Bloom’s sweet red SRT (and somehow not being noticed by the cops) are so well-done.

Rene Russo, perfectly capturing the world-weary newscaster with decades of bad road behind her as Nina Romina, is Bloom’s connect for buying footage. Although she senses the sickness behind the smile, she needs his footage and can’t cut him off, and soon finds herself strong-armed into a “relationship” with him.

As I said, the trope’s familiar but the strength of the performances saves it. If you’re going to have a film about a sociopath, your lead has to have the right kind of eyes, and Gyllenhaal does.

The Abyss Stares Back! — When the abyss stares back, it will have Jake Gyllenhaal’s eyes.

Bloom has studied human behavior and empathy, and on the one hand he is absolutely earnest in his desire to please Romina. He knows all of the notes of the symphony but none of the meaning, and everything he does is calculated to benefit himself, so it makes sense that he really believes he can help her, because by extension he’s helping himself. Of course that’s not the problem; the problem is that he is forcing her into a relationship with him and leaving quite a trail of bodies in his wake.

BAH. There was a scene that I can’t find a .gif of that is just hilarious and shows the weirdly playful side of the movie, and it occurs during their disastrous and deeply unsettling “date.” Ah well! I’m curious to know if other people laughed the way I did at a certain line.

Bill Paxton shows up as a competitor of Bloom’s, who is obnoxious at first but comes to recognize Bloom’s talent and suggests a partnership, which Bloom blows off.

Look again at that gif up above. Look at the beautiful eyes, the self-assuredness, the complete confidence that Bloom emanates: He is right and she is wrong, he knows what’s best, and she just needs to accept it. Sociopaths are known for their charm and charisma.

Now look at this:

I hate that I made such a pat point, but it really is amazing, his performance. He was nominated for a Golden Globe, but not an Oscar. There are so many great, passionate actors in the world! I would give them all Oscars if I could! Heh, and then everyone would be special so no one would be special.

Anyhoodle, Nightcrawler is an absolutely brilliant film. It’s a modern noir take on a generation raised by journalism and the internet without being preachy, and I can’t recommend it highly enough for fans of dark humor and incisive social commentary. Since they are both about sociopaths, it inevitably draws comparisons with films like Taxi Driver and American Psycho, with good reason.

Nightcrawler is available on Instant Watch.

Terrible Decisions Entry: The Babadook (2014)

I’ve always preferred horror that was multileveled, and The Babadook DEFINITELY delivers on that front. Mature and atmospheric, it ambles along at its own speed but draws you inexorably to the climax. There were times when my skin literally crawled, and others when I cried or gasped or wrung my pillow in anguish. At one point my eyeballs dried out because I was afraid to blink.

All these statements are true times a billion.

(Watching the movie was not a terrible decision: it was great and deserving of all the acclaim it’s received lately. Watching it alone, in the dark while a thunderstorm raged during an absinthe-related hangover – not one of my best decisions as an adult.) In this entry from a while ago, I lamented the state of modern horror movies and how much of a slog it can be to find good ones. Imagine my excitement to hear about The Babadook, and then imagine me being too damned lazy to actually see it when it came out.

THEN imagine me scrolling through the ‘What’s New’ queue on Netflix and finding that the mountain has come to me, so to speak. The story is a trope familiar in horror movies lately: a single mother, a weird little kid, a big spooky house, subtext of mental issues. Social isolation, inept cops, and a boogeyman monster that is terrifyingly effective in its simplicity: a hulking outline in stovepipe hat, its hands ending in spiky talons, and its face a white suggestion with a huge toothy grin. It’s a manifestation of everything we expect to find upon opening up a darkened closet, in the shadows under your bed, or in the rearview mirror of your car at night.

Just… just let me have a moment here…

Seriously I'll be all good in a minute. — Seriously I’ll be all good in a minute.

Ahem. All right!

So all that stuff I mentioned before is in the movie, and it’s totally effective and scary and atmosphere and underlying themes of trauma and maternal guilt and Freudian, possibly Oedipal stuffs also. Mom* is a widower, she was in labor with Samuel when she and her husband were in the car accident that killed the latter. The movie blew up the way that it did based on the performances of Essie Davis, who plays Mom/Amelia, and Noah Wiseman, who played Samuel. Wiseman is going places. I mean I hope making this movie didn’t traumatize him and make him never want to act again because he’s really gifted. He doesn’t go in for the precious, cutesy stuff at all. He reminds me of Luka Haas in Witness, actually. Samuel is strange and spooky, but also sweet, awkward and undeniably loves his Mummy, and at one point in the movie promises to protect Amelia from the Babadook if she will protect him. For lots of reasons, it’s an incredibly poignant and effective moment, with not an iota of schmaltz to be seen.

Yes! Yes that's it exactly! — Yes! Yes that’s it exactly!

I’m not going to spoil it and I don’t want to describe it too much, but it DOES NOT have a downer ending; it worked as both a horror movie and as as dark drama, and it doesn’t go in for the cheap scares. It’s the kind of horror that stays with you, that will come back to you in the middle of a meeting at work or in a well-lit restaurant. Although I WILL leave you with this pleasant little image, because you really ought to know what you’re in for. People who are well-versed in horror will like it, people who aren’t but like good movies will like it, and people who don’t like horror movies at all and are easily scared are encouraged to AVOID AT ALL COSTS.

Living alone, I find situations like these are best met head-on with the shovel I keep under my bed.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some windows to board up.

*You could easily make a drinking game where you take a shot every time Samuel shouts ‘Mam!’ in his adorable accent, but you’d also kill yourself because half his lines are him doing that. Somehow it never got old, though!

Glorious Golden Blonde Entry: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

In the life of a film fan, there are only two times you watch a Marilyn Monroe film: There’s the first time you see her, in all her glory, and realize what the big deal is all about, and there’s the time you realize you’ve watched all the movies she ever made; that there are no more. Barring someone having some old home movies they release, or maybe some stills or cut footage from the finished films that were forgotten in someone’s attic for sixty years, there will be no more. I think this applies to any other actors and actresses who died young, but the first time I became aware of this phenomenon was with Marilyn.

You know who she is.

Growing up, you knew her face, even if you had never seen any of her movies. You saw her everywhere, on all kinds of products and in all kinds of places. You heard her name in movies, cartoons, songs, read it in books, magazines, and on billboards or perfume bottles. She has been written about, studied, photographed, filmed, re-imagined, marveled at, and explored literally more than the bottom of Earth’s oceans. And due to her untimely and mysterious death, she went from being simply famous to a legend.

Maybe, like me, you reached a point where you wanted to know just who the hell Marilyn Monroe was, and what the big fuss was about. WHY was Madonna trying so hard to be this person in the 80s? And why was everyone so skeptical about her achieving it? At the time, the similarities to me were more numerous than the differences: they were both blonde, white, and famous, both were beautiful, and both were paid vast sums of money for doing things that sometimes involved taking their clothes off. I readily admit that at 10, many nuances about life were lost on me.

When I was about 19, I worked in a retail video store called Suncoast. If you wanted to buy a movie that wasn’t on the top 10 rack at Target or the grocery store, that’s where you went. We had thousands of movies, including foreign films, imported anime (which was where you had to get it before places like Cartoon Network showed it), informational stuff, old tv shows, and softcore pr0n.

My boss was a man whose encyclopedic knowledge of film was nothing short of staggering. Did you see something once where a guy had a dangerous operation while his wife looked on and she was crying and wearing a red hat? That guy with the mustache was in it? I just made that shit up and Bill would have recommended a movie to me. A movie with that exact scene in it. SERIOUSLY. He was that good. “Oh Bill, I saw this German made-for-tv movie that only played twice on one channel in Berlitz and it may have starred a man with two legs. It was about the history of the xylophone, but not really, it was all just a metaphor. There was a scene with a basket of figs. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

And he would.

He only looked up things to get serial numbers when he ordered them for people. He often described himself as ‘The Jewish Geppetto’ (referring to Pinocchio’s creator) and was a retired phlebotomist. He and his boyfriend had been together longer than I had been alive, and they had a sulphur-crested cockatoo they referred to as ‘the chicken.’ I would like to look him up sometime to see how he’s doing, but I digress.

When I told him I loved movies, but had never seen one with Marilyn Monroe, he told me I needed to do that. That it was important.

So I did. I didn’t watch one right away, it took me a little while to finally sit still and do it (I think of my late teens and early twenties as my fidgety years), but I did.

Man.

Who wouldn't want to be that flower stem? — A candid shot

The first Monroe film I ever saw was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I was hooked.

Blondes is the story of diamond-hungry Lorelei Lee and down-to-earth Dorothy Shaw, the latter played with a charming brassiness by Jane Russell. The two are showgirls, and Lorelei is engaged to Gus Esmond, the son of a millionaire. She intends to marry him, but Gus’s father is opposed to the match, viewing Lorelei as a ‘blonde mantrap.’

Lorelei and Dorothy embark on a trip to Paris so that Lorelei and Gus can be married, but Gus’s father calls him at the last minute and prevents him from going with them. The girls go by themselves, with Gus promising to find Lorelei, and giving her a letter of credit to spend as she likes. Unbeknownst to them, following the two is Sam Malone, a private investigator hired by Gus’s father to dig up dirt on Lorelei.

There are numerous hijinks and some glorious musical numbers, as well as some really hilarious jokes. The writing for Dorothy especially is great, as is Russell’s performance as a sultry, sharp-witted brunette to Monroe’s wide-eyed ingenue balances the movie well.

What I especially like about this film is how my appreciation of it has grown over the years. In the beginning, I was mostly enjoying the songs and the banter and the clothes. Now, I look at Lorelei’s somewhat pragmatic approach to life by marrying rich with a new perspective. I’ve struggled to make ends meet, and I know what it is to be panicked that you have six dollars to your name, barely any food in the house, and another thirteen days to go until payday. I had a lot of fears and nightmares in that situation; for example, what if my cat got sick? Or worse, what if my parents became ill or were in an accident and I flat out didn’t have the gas money to drive the 85 minutes to see them? My friends would have helped me out, and I am fortunate for that, but I can’t help but feel that it would be failing as an adult to find myself in a situation like that, and not be able to do anything about it, especially when the amount of money in question is so little. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have an ill spouse or child and find myself in the same circumstance.

“If a girl spends all her time worrying about the money she doesn’t have, when does she have time for love?” is her logic, and it’s not entirely as warped or materialistic as it sounds; most relationships and marriages break up in times of financial crises, showing that the strain of financial straits isn’t to be dismissed. It’s one thing to never have any money because of your own bills and spending habits; it’s quite another when you’re broke because of someone else. So, while it might not seem to be the most altruistic rationale, it’s definitely realistic. It’s better to have money and not need it than need it and not have it, as the saying goes.

Granted, I’m not talking about supporting a Kardashian lifestyle, here. Just covering the bare necessities with a bit left over for savings and the occasional trip or present or meal out is my idea of having made it, financially.

Anywhoo, I digress.

WORK. IT. — Lorelei and Dorothy in the dining room

Watch a Monroe movie, any one, maybe not even this one. Although it is WORTH it to see this one, just for Lorelei and Dorothy strutting through the middle of the ship’s dining room, Lorelei in orange, and Dorothy in shimmering dark green. Especially the ones in color… Marilyn’s ruby lips and sapphire eyes are a special effect unto themselves!