NIGHTCRAWLER

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Vampire Culture
Jake Gyllenhaal Goes Dark

So Social satire doesn’t get much darker than it does in “Nightcrawler.”

Jake Gyllenhaal lost 30 pounds in order to play Louis Bloom, a devious social misfit who goes from scrap metal thief to self-made video journalist, selling accident and crime footage to a Los Angeles television station. Filmed primarily at night in Los Angeles, “Nightcrawler” feels like a twisted, more engaging, West Coast version of “Bringing Out the Dead.”

Gyllenhaal’s unreliable anti-hero looks like a recently recovered meth addict. He tempers his gaunt wide-eyed persona with polite speech soaked in “the self-esteem movement so popular in schools” and corporate management double-speak.

Lou is an auto-didactic monster who has risen from the sludge of America’s economic failure and its relentless culture of greed. Lou’s motto is: “if you want to win the lottery, you have to make the money to buy a ticket.” While it’s not stated, Louis Bloom is a radical right-wing tool.

The slogan tells a lot about Lou’s warped value system, which plays out in all sorts of shocking displays of dangerous and selfish behaviors that are all the more appalling for the success that Lou achieves through them. Lou reflects America’s rampant corporate-political model for creating mayhem and profiting from its aftermath.

Screenwriter-turned-director Dan Gilroy (“The Bourne Legacy”) gets deep inside the mind of America’s poisonous organized (read racist) culture of violence-worship. “If it bleeds, it leads” is the famous fear-based ethos of the stereotypical television news station that pays Lou increasingly more for his ethically dubious footage. Lou is not above moving a body at a car crash site to get a better camera angle. He also has a knack for developing strategies on the fly to optimize the value of violent situations.

Hiring Richard (Riz Ahmed), a possibly illegal immigrant, as his assistant is the first step in Lou’s plan to corner the market on salacious news footage. Paying Richard $30 a night isn’t as good as paying him nothing as an intern, but Lou knows a sucker when he sees one.

Nina (Rene Russo) is a middle-aged news director at the local news TV station whose ratings rely on the kind of exploitation “news” coverage you see on CNN. Nina’s personally racist editorial vision cherishes “urban crime creeping into the suburbs” as the theme her viewers want to see supported. She informs Lou about her ideal content being a “screaming woman running down the street with her throat slit.”

An ostensibly romantic restaurant negotiation scene, in which Lou blackmails Nina into acting as his sex partner, captures the political climate that enables Lou to work his intimate brand of skullduggery. Witnessing how Lou gets the upper hand on Nina in a seemingly unwinnable situation is as diabolically funny as it is disturbing.  

Lou is a mercenary. He's got the sickness that most YouTubers have. Building his brand and making money are his priorities. He views people as objects he can manipulate to meet his goals. When Lou says, “today's work culture no longer caters to the job loyalty that could be promised to earlier generations,” it discloses an indisputable American viewpoint of cruel social conditioning.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s canny portrayal delivers a revelatory character study of an opportunistic sociopath working all the angles in a system built on violence-fueled propaganda. Lou Bloom is an ideal agent for the faulty structure because he can manipulate people, places, and images to support the one-percenter’s party line for the masses to absorb. You’ll feel a chill.

Rated R. 117 mins.

SPEED RACER

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Fast Movie
The Wachowskis Make Summer Family Fun 

The Wachowskis achieve a divine vision of psychedelic visual ecstasy — you won’t believe the sheer amount of color on the screen at any given time — while digging deep into a campy comic/dramatic tone that speaks to audiences of all ages.

Emile Hirsch leads a flawless cast as the title character that carries the death of his car-racing brother Rex Racer (Scott Porter) as a constant inspiration to win races for his family’s racing business.

Anti-corporate themes abound as the sport’s predatory company Royalton Industries tries to bring Speed and his family to the dark side of greed. Far-out racing sequences, ninja attacks, and a budding romance between Speed and his girlfriend Trixie (perfectly played by Christina Ricci) attend the trippy visual fun. Like a revved-up turbo mix of Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy” with 1982’s “Tron,” “Speed Racer” is a blast from start to finish.

Since ending their Matrix trilogy with a whimper rather than its anticipated bang, the Wachowski Brothers have successfully turned their attention to uniting cartoon logic with live-action appeal. The pay-off is fast and non-stop. Fans of Tatsuo Yoshida’s ‘60s era Japanese anime cartoon series (originally entitled “Mach GoGoGo”) get plenty of positive reinforcement with key story elements, like the functional “A” through “G” buttons on the steering wheel of Speed’s car (the “Mach 5”) and his little brother Spritle’s pet monkey Chim-Chim.

The filmmakers are careful to emphasize Spritle (well played by cherubic Paulie Litt) for his amusing little kid qualities of loving candy and constantly trying to prove himself as worthy of adult respect. Spritle and Chim-Chim get plenty of welcomed screen-time, and their constant slapstick shenanigans anchor the movie’s wild racing sequences from a child’s knee-high perspective of seeking fun at every opportunity.

The diabolical Royalton (played by Roger Allam) introduces himself to the Racer family as an effeminate pancake-loving family man who wants nothing more than to provide them with the riches they deserve. But when Royalton gets Speed alone in his office to sign a contract piled high across his desk, we learn the depth of his corporate villainy. Every raced is fixed in Royalton’s worldview. If there is a running theme smuggled into this summer’s family movies (“Iron Man” included), it’s that profit for profit’s sake is to be avoided like the plague.

“Speed Racer” balances between dangerous car race rallies and the nefarious intrigue that surrounds them. A low-fi animated introduction sequence gets us inside the mind of young Speed daydreaming in class about racing with his brother. He doodles car crashes in the pages of his notebook. We are transported to the joys of childhood when all that mattered was how far your imagination could take you away from the mundane realities of homework, chores, and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches — Speed’s mom (Susan Sarandon) makes them by the tray-full. If Speed is a rebel with a one-track mind, it’s an ethic of independence that he consciously inhabits with his family’s united approval.

The movie’s greatest achievement lies in its embrace of a modern family entertainment in a broad yet boiled-down spectrum of soup to nuts humor, action, and unbridled festivity. You can find touches of inspiration drawn from everything from the Three Stooges to Jerry Lewis comedies to the camp humor of Pee-wee Herman. The audience is encouraged to laugh at characters, with characters, and at themselves for being so easily led.

As Susan Sontag wrote, “You can’t do camp on purpose.” Here, the Wachowskis achieve a universal postmodern style and sensibility that comes from a connection between individual ambition and familial trust combined with lots of color and speed. It’s the fastest movie ever made.

Rated PG. 126 mins.

THE UNKNOWN KNOWN

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Smart New Media Presents

ColeSmithey.com

 

Errol Morris meets his match in Donald Rumsfeld. The notoriously contentious documentarian, whose interviews with 1960s secretary of defense Robert McNamara form the finest political documentary ever made (“The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara” - 2003), runs aground against McNamara's eventual successor, the Bush administration’s Donald Rumsfeld’s thousand-mile-wide and thousand-mile-high wall of bullshit.

The film, however, is likely the closest the public will come to witnessing the war criminal questioned for his crimes.

Rumsfeld’s clinically devised responses are less than satisfying, to say the least. Rumsfeld, a vacuous careerist politician, has mastered the art of obfuscation so thoroughly that he doesn’t even recognize the stench of his own rotten mind. The man is such a soulless, wrongheaded, inveterate manipulator of words that he comes across as an idiot savant in love with the sound of his own voice. It would be hard to imagine any other human being speaking so much, yet saying so little.

The politician’s consistently false and evasive answers to Morris’s direct questions about events such as the migration of illegal torture techniques from Abu Ghraib to other U.S. prisons, as well as Guantánamo, leave the audience infuriated beyond belief. The fact that Rumsfeld was, and is, wrong about how and why America went into a series of wars in which it is still engaged, is part and parcel to the discussion Morris pursues with his usual tenacity.

Still, Morris gets nowhere. Rumsfeld’s maddening rationalization for the death and destruction he helped foster around the world is that “stuff happens.” His classic, glib reply reflects the American government’s deeply cynical yet cunning attitude that continues to choose stupidity over wisdom for every single piece of domestic and foreign policy it administers.

Drawing parallels to "Eichmann in Jerusalem," Morris has called “The Unknown Known,” a “horror movie about history from the inside out.” I take his point. The U.S. government is filled with career politicians like Donald Rumsfeld who value only their personal ability to disengage from any responsibility for the global horrors they actively create on a minute-to-minute basis.

“The Unknown Known” is a valuable window inside the warped mind of an irrational sociopath who, like those around him during his time in Office — Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, etc. — acted with unfathomable incompetence that they were able to disguise with the complicity of corporate news media.

On display is Errol Morris’s knack for utilizing stock footage, news clips, and beautifully layered imagery, along with evocative music, to bring resonance where there would otherwise be none — considering the vacuum bubble that is Donald Rumsfeld’s pathetic mind. Have a stiff drink before you see “The Unknown Known” — you’ll need it — but don’t miss this essential look at the abysmal state of a country known as “The United States of America.”

Rated PG-13. 96 mins.