"Nightcrawler": Gyllenhaal Delivers Twisted Acting Gold

Now In Theaters

Sometimes a film just works because it takes a story we all know and love and applies some sort of twisted logic to it in order to not only recontextualize the genre, but make a point about how that genre actually operates in the real world.  Take, for example, Nightcrawler.  Structurally, this is a fairly standard rags-to-riches story, with protagonist Lou Bloom working his way up through the ranks of his chosen profession until his skills place him at the top of his game.  What makes Nightcrawler so special though is the character of Lou and the profession that he finds himself the rising star of.

Lou starts out as a night owl thief scrounging for scrap metal, when he comes across an auto accident and pulls over to watch the police extricate a woman from the wreckage.  Suddenly, a news van arrives on the scene, swarming with cameramen (nightcrawlers, as the film calls them) getting up close and personal on the police and victim who are too otherwise occupied to push them away.  Lou sees this and thinks it would be a good idea to get into the business himself, so he buys his own camera and police scanner and starts filming, eventually hiring an “intern” to navigate for him and becoming a prominent member of the journalistic community.

Jake Gyllenhaal breathes a special sort of life into Lou, having lost so much weight for the role that his eyes nearly pop out of his skull, which is made all the more creepy by his tendency to blink as little as possible.  Lou speaks almost entirely in PR language and bargaining terms, sounding like someone who has memorized every phrase from the minimum wage management handbook, yet doesn’t have the position or resources to use the jargon effectively.  His rambling nature is accentuated by a malicious undercurrent, where it becomes clear that no step is too far for him to take in order to achieve his goals, no matter how underhanded, no matter how violent.  This performance is what elevates the film to greatness, and it will no doubt be one of the Oscar contenders for Best Actor.

But Lou wouldn’t work so well as a character if it weren’t for the smartly directed screenplay that recognizes the formula it is derived from and plays on the audience’s expectations.  Eventually, as Lou’s talent and drive push him toward being one of the most powerful nightcrawlers in Los Angeles, what at first looks to be an honest, if morally reprehensible, living starts taking on more sinister tones at Lou’s direction.  Whether it is through coercion, deception, or just plain illegality, Lou will go to whatever lengths necessary to get what he wants, and though the plot may be a bit predictable at times, the way the film makes those moments the subject of deep suspense shifts focus from what is going to happen to when and how it is going to happen.  Integrate that with a message about the evils of crime-driven local journalism, and this makes for a truly intense film, punctuated by the fact that our fascinating anti-hero drives it all through sheer force of will, leading us to question if he is truly evil or just a symptom of a larger system.

Nightcrawler is a powerful thriller that will not leave you disappointed.  Gyllenhaal truly delivers as Lou, and the script he has to work with really lets his acting talents shine.  To miss out on this would be to miss out on one of the most intense films of 2014.  So don’t miss it.

Has Jake Gyllenhaal ever delivered a performance of this dramatic scale before?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)": Almost As Bad As Expected

Now Available on DVD and Blu-Ray

Let’s make one thing clear right from the get-go: this is a bad movie.  We were all expecting it to be bad.  This is Michael Bay’s production company, Platinum Dunes, behind the wheel here, which specializes in making cash cows out of nostalgia properties for the cheapest amount possible and the most minimal amount of effort put in.  Normally, this comes in the form of horror reboots, but here Bay’s crack team is going after yet another late-80s toy franchise, and the Ninja Turtles are near and dear to as many Gen-Xers hearts as the Transformers once were.  So is this new TMNT just as bad as the infamously horrible Transformers quadrilogy?  Well, not really, but it’s still horrible.

But before we can talk about the only thing about this film that 

kinda, sorta works, we have to delve into the horrible, horrible plot.  April O’neil (Megan Fox) is a reporter who speaks entirely in exposition, seeking to prove herself as more than just eye-candy to be objectified, which is somewhat ironic considering that Fox’s entire career path has relied on just that sort of superficial, chauvinist attraction.  She stumbles across the turtles during a strike against a vaguely evil paramilitary group called the Foot Clan, and very conveniently remembers that her scientist father worked on mutating turtles.  She then connects this to a businessman, Eric Sacks, who wants to use the turtles’ blood to act as a cure of a pathogen that he wants to release into the atmosphere, so that he can sell the cure and become very rich.  Now April and the turtles must stop Sacks and his henchman, Shredder, from releasing the pathogen over New York.  If ever there were a lazier screenplay that relied on convenience, coincidence, destiny, and plot holes, this is it.  The film jumps from scene to scene with only the slightest connective tissue between them, and while it never gets to the point of being incoherent, it does reek of plagiarism, as many key plot points are ripped directly from another horrible-yet-somehow-successful script, The Amazing Spider-Man.  Convenient box in the main character’s closet that explains all the backstory?  Check.  Evil baddie wants to pollute the air with a toxic gas?  Check.  Climactic fight atop a tower where the gas will be dispersed?  I could go on, but you get the point.

The performances are really the only thing that could have carried this poor of a script, but unfortunately the so-called “acting” is simply horrible.  Megan Fox is as wooden and vapid as ever, with an emotional range of mildly amused to sorta shocked.  The turtles don’t fare much better, as each of their iconic personalities have been reduced beyond the cartoonish simplicity implicit in their television origins, and filtered through the most hypermasculine dude-bro sensibilities one could conceive of.  This results in them barely having any personalities at all, so even if all the voice-actors’ deliveries weren’t inappropriately inflected and oddly similar, there isn’t much beyond the superficial differences to tell their “characters” apart.  The only exception is possibly Michelangelo, who spends most of his screentime very creepily trying to flirt with April, going so far as to call dibs on her like a piece of property.  Gross.

And that brings me to the only thing I did appreciate about this film.  You may notice that my description of the plot paints April as the main protagonist, and that’s mostly correct, as her actions are the ones that ultimately resolve the primary conflict.  That isn’t to say that the turtles are completely sidelined though, as they are the main focus of the action scenes, which are much better than I could have hoped from a Michael Bay production.  While nothing mind-blowingly spectacular, they do have a sense of organic flow to them that never feels disorienting, and there is a neat sense of roller-coaster excitement to an extended slide down a mountainside avoiding semis and electrified grappling hooks.

But that point only demonstrates that I understand how this film could have done so well at the box office, even ignoring the fact that this was a film marketed at kids.  However, setting that mindless action aside, this film has a multitude of problems at every level of production.  Even those exciting action scenes are marred by the turtles’ cheap-looking CG animation and incredibly ugly character models.  This obviously isn’t a film that appeals to the sensibilities of long-time TMNT fans, but I don’t see this as something good for the current generation of fans either.  I haven’t seen much of the new cartoon, but I know it relies on cartoon antics and sly pop-culture nods while relying on rich character dynamics to tell compelling stories.  Kids expecting to see that in this live-action adaptation will be sorely disappointed.

And yet somehow this is getting a sequel.  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"The Theory Of Everything": Disability As Oscar Bait (Yet Again)

Now In Theaters

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I went to go see The Theory Of Everything.  This film is about as blatant as Oscar bait gets, being billed as the uplifting story of an upper-middle class English guy overcoming a physical impairment in order to achieve greatness.  To those who don’t know, this is the Stephen Hawking biopic, so you can fill in the appropriate blanks in order to get a picture of precisely the sort of story you are in for.  Except this is worse than your standard inspiration porn, because the film has some underlying themes about disability that, while I’m sure are unintentional, transform it from what should have been a mildly inoffensive glimpse into the life of one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century into a commentary that makes Mr. Hawking’s disability his defining characteristic.

I think the problem comes from where the screenplay was adapted from.  This film was based on a biography by Hawking’s now-ex-wife Jane, and though I don’t want to blame the source material itself (having never read it), I do think it is informative of the film’s troublesome perspective.  Stephen has the most screen time for the first third of the film, establishing him as a funny and awkward man with a passion for cosmology; however, Jane takes on the role of protagonist as the film enters its second act.  After Stephen is diagnosed with motor neuron disease, Jane steps into the forefront as Stephen’s caregiver, and the film’s primary conflict becomes her struggle to keep her family together.  This feels more than a little disingenuous for being a film where the main selling-point was to catch a glimpse of the life of Stephen Hawking, as his character’s arc is little more than an obligatory progression from career landmark to milestone of physical degradation, rinse and repeat.

And therein lies the main problem with the film.  Because the primary narrative focus is on Jane’s emotional torment for most of the film, with allusions to an affair with an assisting caregiver, Stephen becomes little more than an obstacle keeping Jane from finding happiness.  When Stephen’s achievements are necessarily touched upon, the emphasis is not that he formulated a theory on the nature of time and space, but that he formulated a theory on the nature of time and space despite his disability.  This is only further punctuated by the fact that the film’s climactic moment is when Stephen tells Jane that it is alright to finally leave him, basically freeing her from her burden.  The film’s primary conflict is resolved when Stephen acknowledges that his disability has been holding her back.  If it isn’t readily apparent to you why that is problematic, you may need to check yourself on some of your able-bodied privilege.

And yet, I’m not quite sure how the film could have avoided this pitfall, as I’m not familiar enough (nor did the film make me familiar enough) with Mr. Hawking’s life to say in what ways his personal struggles could have been greater emphasized without couching everything in terms of “overcoming” disability.  After all, nobody is going to see the film to see Mr. Hawking crunch equations for hours on end; rather, everyone knows him as the physicist in the wheelchair with the robot voice, and it’s that shallow, surface understanding of the man that the film panders to.  There has been a lot of buzz over Eddie Redmayne’s portrayal of Hawking, and though the actor certainly has the physicist’s mannerisms pretty solidly pegged, that quite aptly demonstrates that the primary praise for the film derives from an able-bodied actor’s portrayal of disability, not its portrayal of a multi-dimensional man with disability.

At the end of the day, The Theory Of Everything seems to have its heart in the right place, but stumbles over its Oscar ambitions by placing emphasis on the wrong aspects of a great man’s life.  I recognize that it would be impossible to make a film about Stephen Hawking without placing some emphasis on his disability, yet this film goes after that low-hanging fruit a bit too overzealously for my taste, making what should have been a single aspect of Mr. Hawking’s life into an attraction where we can mourn his wife’s lost opportunities.  I’d recommend passing this one up.

I’ve somehow managed to find an awards-season dud right out the gate.  Have you come across any yet?  Leave your thought in the comments below.