BAMF: The Motion Picture

A Review of Nightcrawler (2014)

There's a term I heard on the TV show Hannibal, which is “the stitching of that person suit you wear.” That's Jake Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom. He is a monster barely contained by the suit of skin he wars. It is an incredible performance that bleeds out onto is a film that lives and breathes with its titular character.

Lou Bloom cut from the same cloth as the kind of characters that shambled and limped through Raymond Chandler's vision of LA. He's a low rent hustler, with no virtues save ambition. That's what makes him so frightening, so terrifyingly realistic. He's a man born of disappointment and an indifferent world, and of a society that feeds off of pettiness and fear. He seems like a man capable of anything.That is what Nightcrawler is about. This tension is why the whole thing works.

Nightcrawler is the kind of movie I will see just based on its concept alone. It's about a scumbag, it focuses on a bizarre and dicey vocation, and it takes place almost entirely in Los Angeles at night. That is my kind of movie

So much of Nightcrawler reminds me of the diner scenes out of Taxi Driver. While it is a crime movie, it is more about the characters than it is about what they do (in the back of my mind The Friends of Eddie Coyle, another classic 70's crime film, also jumps to mind). There's a certain loneliness built into both pictures. They are about the men on the periphery. Not only in the periphery of the criminal world, but of the entire world. You can see it in Lou's bed, which seems like an object that is barely willing to accommodate his presence. It also helps that Gyllenhaal plays Lou like the Bickle brother who went out west.

Nightcrawler is more than just an homage or a throwback. Like all good movies, it is smarter than the genre that contains it. While 1970's grit looms in the background and the chain smoke of pre-Code crime films wafts into every frame, it exists as an original, modern film. It's a smart film that doesn't need to show you how clever it is. It's a movie that comes out of a long line of other films (including movies as disparate as Network and Broadcast News, or even Ace in the Hole), yet it has something to say about the seediness of modern news and the depravity of modern society. But, like its heritage, it doesn't wear its themes on its sleeves. It's a thriller first and foremost and like Lou Bloom, there's something hiding beneath the surface.

With all of that said, the score is one of the more lacking scores things I have heard in a good, long while (as I write this, the soundtrack of The Proposition kicked off and does not make me feel any kinder towards Nightcrawler's score).

It feels like a graduate of a Explosions in the Sky School For Ambient What-Have-You Nonsense (and even then it only graduated because its dad donated a new kinesiology center). Besides being sonically underwhelming, it doesn't feel right for the film. Maybe I'm saying this because Drive, the last interesting LA-at-night movie to come out is looming in the background, but I feel like I'm also saying this because the score simply doesn't work. When you're trying to strike a mood, playing the most generic music that you can is not a great start. Say what you will about Drive, it is a movie that strikes a mood. Nightcrawler would have benefited from a much slimier score than what it ended up with.

Another thing the film reminds me of a Neil Gaiman quote. When Constantine came out in 2005, he said that the movie would have been better had Constantine been British and had his signature tan trenchcoat. Why? Because it just would have been. Because Neil Gaiman said so.

I feel the way about the year in which this movie is set. It's supposed to take place in the modern era, but there's just something that doesn't quite connect with me. I don't buy it, which makes me think that it was written as a period piece and brought up to the present to make it more commercial. That's purely speculation, but I do know in my bones that this movie would have somehow been better had it been set in the 1980's or early to mid 90's. Why? Because.I mean, do you believe that there are crews of freelance newsmen roaming the Southland in this year of our Lord Two-Thousand-Fourteen? Of course you don't.

It would have also allowed for the period appropriate synth soundtrack that I want to bad.

Another quibble is that they very clearly shot the same three streets over and over again. That Del Taco must have been on screen at least half a dozen times. Same with the faux-Tudor bank and the Chase building. You don't think I see you, Chase building? I do!

But that's a consequence of what the film is, it's hardly an artistic choice, it's just a result of the film's very meager budget. But part of that is endearing. It kind of shows that the film is closer in its bloodline to film noir in more than its subject matter.

It's fun, it's scrappy, and it tells a kind of story with a kind of character that I don't know if I've ever seen before. It's also an engaging movie that still manages to say a lot about people, the news, and just how messed up this country is. Nightcrawler is something well worth hunting down and checking out, even if you're as late to the scene as I am.

James Kislingbury is Los Angeles deritus. He writes, podcasts, and generally schemes. Support his endeavors.

Wagner's A Space Odyssey

Or "Time is Not a Flat Circle, It's a Sphere"

A Review of Interstellar (2014)

While I've been diddling around reviewing mediocre comics on a self-imposed dare, I have been remiss in my actual calling: Reviewing good movies and telling you to go see them. Ignoring the movies that I have already reviewed, I will say this before I get onto the actual review, the following movies are fantastic and deserve to be seen: Fury, Calvary, Noah, Gone Girl.

Alright. Thanks. Here we go, into the great wide open--

For those of you who worry: This will be a spoiler free review. Part of the wonder of Interstellar is not knowing where it is going and then, somehow, arriving at these amazing vistas. And the rest of the fun comes from figuring out how you got there. So, worry not. Put your adult diapers back in the closet, you won't get them in a ruffle over little old me.

I will also try to be brief.

2014 has been a fantastic year for film and, specifically, it has been a fantastic year for the special effects movie. Between Snowpiercer, Godzilla, Days of Future Past, Guardian of the Galaxy, and Edge of Tomorrow there have been a lot of well done, exemplary films that also happen to involve running, jumping, and blowing things up. We are in a new golden age of special effects pictures and Interstellar fits snuggly in among all of those.

Christopher Nolan, he of Batman and Inception, has crafted a movie that is as much about human relationships as it is about fast things moving through space. That has always been his strong suit. His weakness is that in that ambition, he misses out on the details, yet we are also left with an amazing experience. Interstellar is about human beings interacting with time, space, movements, and sound on the grandest scale possible. It is not so much film as it is opera.

I will come absoluetly clean with you: Interstellar is a movie that I did not understand at all for the last hour and a half, but I know that I loved it. Somehow that feels thematically consistent.

So, the good things--

First of all, the music is incredible. As much as 2001: A Space Odyssey is about melodrama in the Classical sense, so to is Interstellar. The score by Hans Zimmerman sets the tone and the emotions as much as the actors on the screen set them, and between Matthew MacConaugher (Academy Award winner), Anne Hathaway (Academy Award winner), Michael Caine (Acadamy Award winner), Matt Damon (Academy Award winner), and Jessica Chastain (Academy Award nominee), the movie does a pretty solid job on that end.

It's an amazing score, and it underlines what the movie is about, which is motion and emotions. I think I vainly tried to describe this when Gravity came up last year and I failed. I think the same feelings apply, though. Interstellar in many ways is about feelings and movement in the grandest sense possible. Again, this is opera that we are dealing with. Zimmerman's score, mixed with everything else in the film elevates it to something more, something much more precious than the sum of its parts.

Space Man, Dude

A lot of people complain that music is manipulative, that it tricks people into thinking a scene is more important than it is. Well, that's nonsense. That's what music does. That's what music in film does. It's a trick. It's all a trick. Nolan and Zimmerman manage to pull off the greatest trick of all, which is making you believe in this massive, cosmic opera that they have constructed. The film's score is as much responsible for making me cry during this movie as anyone else in the project.

And, on a slight aside, Interstellar has the best movie robots since. . . Aw, hell. David from Prometheus? We all liked him, right? Anyways, somebody give me a TARS spin-off. What an amazing/dumb idea.

Interstellar, like all of Nolan's films, are not the perfect watches that he wants them to be (or, with some people, needs them to be). I won't slog into the Dark Knight Risesdebate again, but we all have opinions on that film, right? Whether we like it or not, we all know that the details of the story are not Nolan's main concern, right? In his ambition, Nolan tends to overstep. Missing the details in favor of the grander picture. And unlike a great piece of Islamic art, his mistakes are not intentional. He is a man and his reach excedes his grasp.The same is true of Interstellar.

When the film arrives at what I will call the “Cosmic Erector," the movie hits a patch of black ice and starts careening out of control. It is at this point that we are asked to take a big bite of this mystery sandwich. Now, I might be mixing up my metaphors (or are the similes?) here, but I'm riding high off of space fumes and really need to get this all across. Like Nolan, I need you to stick with me.

Anyways, it's nonsense. Utter nonsense. In a movie that has painstakingly and proudly adhered to scientific reality (there is a reason that Nolan called upon physicist Kip Thorne to work on this movie) it is an abrupt and confusing stop. Faith is a major theme in the movie, but I don't know that this extends to the viewers. It has given you a good few hours of concrete, scientific adventure, then it basically asks you to believe in wizardry. And fuck you, no I am not. I just paid sixteen bucks, not including parking to get into this movie. But, the movie has been good so far and I just paid sixteen bucks, not including parking to watch it.

And, luckily that great filmic ditch never arrives. The narrative rights itself and everything turns out just fine. And that's kind of amazing. It then appears to be less of a film losing control as it is a film that has earned a few moments of indulgence. From the places it has been and the places that it then goes, it maybe had earned that indulgence.

And that mystery sandwich that I mentioned earlier? It is a Reuben. Maybe the best Reuben you've had in years. And you feel like a fool for ever doubting this delicious, delicious sandwich. And what's that? A pickle? Yes it is. You earned it.

Interstellar feels like a movie born to receive superlatives. It is about the greatest achievements of mankind. It is both a requiem and a jubilee all rolled into one. It's big, it is audacious, it is very loud. There is nothing muted or demur about the movie, even when it is dealing with smaller character moments. Even its flaws are incredibly loud and obvious. As a whole, though, like the best of Nolan's films, it works. Interstellar is a grand and imperfect film that perfectly encapsulates what is so incredible about people, the universe, and film.

 

SIDE NOTES:

Whether you want it to be true or not, Christopher Nolan is going to go down as one of the Great Directors. Make yourself right with your god, because no one else is going to save you. And, for the record, The Dark Knight Rises was the second best Bond movie to come out that year.

 It's also appropriate that the last movie I saw at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood was 2001: A Space Odyssey (it also might pass for a major plot point in a Christopher Nolan movie, but anyways. . .)

Man. Now I want to see 2010: The Year We Make Contact. And Contact. And Sunshine again. And Event Horizon when it's not on TV. Man. Space really is the place, isn't it?

I still have this document, complete with pictures, about the hows and whys of how amazing space travel is. I will never finish it. But Interstellar will do in its own way. It is a love letter to space travel and space exploration which, to me, is a love letter to this planet. Going Out There represents the greatest achievement that we could possibly have. Or not. I don't know. I never finished it because the ideas never coalesced in my head. We should strive to do impossible things, I guess is the major thrust of it. I don't know if that is what Interstellar is arguing for, but I'd like to think that it is. I'd like to think that somebody does something impossibly because of what this movie represents.

It would be nice to live in a world where our greatest heroes are pioneers, not soldiers. And I say this as a guy who loves Fury with all of his pinko heart.

James Kislingbury writes, podcasts, and begs for money.