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Film: Nightcrawler

Almost a really good film. Jake Gyllenhaal has found his calling: playing an emaciated sociopath. He was brilliant. His hands, eyes, and smile were overly large and freakish. He could fit into a circus. The red Challenger floating around Los Angeles at night like a shark. The violence of pointing the camera at people. So much potential. But...

...the music was awful. Distracting. Overly ironic. Cheap. The scenes that failed the movie were the long ones -- the two when the characters closest to Gyllenhaal realize he is a sociopath. Renee Russo would've walked out of the restaurant. His shooting partner, gotten out of the car and left. They weren't that desperate. They didn't really need him. Gyllenhaal was creepy, not seductive. He wasn't the devil, he was a serial killer. The writer couldn't get out of the scenes. The movie had to continue, so the characters stayed. But they were not driving the story. Later, the car chase at the end was a huge mistake if you ask me. It was beyond obvious. It is what a third rate producer would call for in a story meeting. They were making an 8 million dollar tiny-ass movie. The movie could've ended in the restaurant. Why blow their wad? Relative to their budget, this was like their train sequence in the Lone Ranger, the exploding bridge in River Kwai. But in those movies, we've built towards this cinematic extravaganzas. Here, it was nothing but a de rigueur chase. Everything that happens afterwards is unnecessary and repetitive. Meaningless. And this is why it is almost a good film.