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This article was published 12/02/2015 (4237 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nightcrawler

THE movie title Nightcrawler is suggestive of a horror offering — promising something slimy and icky and, of course, nocturnal. In fact, the film’s horror tends to creep in from its edges.

Jake Gyllenhaal goes gaunt, underweight and morally vacant as Lou Bloom, a scrounger, thief and all-round L.A. lowlife.

A loner who has evidently learned everything, including social behaviour, from the Internet, Lou has a lively patter, presenting himself to would-be employers as a go-getting self-starter. But that promise is as hollow as his eyes.

One night, he stumbles upon a videographer (Bill Paxton) on the periphery of a fiery car accident, recording footage to be sold to a local TV news outlet. Suddenly, Lou gets to act on the self-starter thing, purchasing a video camera and a police scanner so that he too can enter the realm of TV journalism through its disreputable back door.

In his mission, he finds the perfect co-conspirator in news producer Nina Romina (Rene Russo), a woman who, we guess, was probably once a serious TV journalist before the atavistic demands of the industry transformed her into a canny survivor, feeding fear to the masses. She advises Lou to ignore the violent crime in poor black or Latino neighbourhoods in favour of violence done to more affluent suburbanites, preferably by visible minorities. Her ideal footage, she says, is “a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.”

A parasite is born.

Like the film’s subject matter, the movie is simultaneously repulsive and compelling as we follow Lou’s progress, first capturing those gory, terrible images, and then actively manipulating events so that TV news “tragedies” favour his growing fortunes.

Given that his character is so very repellent, it falls on Gyllenhaal to keep us watching, and that he does, with his wide-eyed intensity and his crazily inappropriate reactions to disturbing stimuli. Nightcrawler, then, is an amoral ghoul’s success story, which should strike a cautionary note. After all, if TV news is in the business of selling fear, as peddled by the likes of Lou, we have good reason to be afraid. ***1/2

 

Predestination

IT shouldn’t be too surprising to find Ethan Hawke in this direct-to-DVD sci-fi potboiler. When he’s not making Oscar front-runners such as Boyhood, Hawke often dips his toes in genre fare such as The Purge and Sinister. In 2010, he starred in the interesting futuristic vampire film Daybreakers and he reteams with that film’s Aussie auteurs the Spierig brothers for a spin into time-travel territory.

As they proved with Daybreakers, the Spierigs get good value for their low-budget efforts, using a clever visual style and a cheeky attitude to genre convention.

Their cleverness and cheek get the better of them this time, with an elaborate time-travel premise contrived to accommodate a pretty bizarre gender twist.

Hawke is, for all intents and purposes a TimeCop of the Van Damme school, capable of hopping back and forth in time in an ongoing mission to track a mad terrorist inaccurately designated as the “Fizzle Bomber.” After one such mission results in a catastrophic injury to himself, he is assigned by his boss to go back in time to enlist a young would-be agent deemed perfect for the mission.

Let’s leave it at that, plot-wise, except to point out the existence of a young woman (Sarah Snook) attempting to gain entry to the time-travel organization.

While requiring a generous suspension of disbelief from the audience, the Spierigs stake much of the film’s entertainment value on a couple of plot twists that you’ll see coming a mile away.

Even with that going against it, Predestination is an entertaining in spite of itself, given newcomer Snook’s gravitas and Hawke’s earnest approach to material that might have inspired a vibe of smirking self-parody in a lesser actor. **1/2

 

The ABCs of Death 2

LIKE the original ABCs of Death, this sequel is a compilation for which 26 filmmakers from around the world were invited to make a brief, morbidly themed short film after being given their own letter of the alphabet.

That’s a lot of shorts, so let’s concentrate on the fairly strong Canadian contributions, starting with Astron-6’s Steven Kostanski’s segment, W Is for Wish, an enjoyably twisted variation of an ’80s toy commercial in which kids are invited to enter a different universe of play. Unfortunately for the young stars of the commercial, the He-Man/Masters of the Universe-type realm to which they gain entry is as toxic and deadly as the plastic playthings that inspired it.

Vincenzo Natali (Cube) gives us a consumer paradise in U is for Utopia, wherein a homely maladroit finds himself targeted for elimination in a shopping centre catering exclusively to the young and beautiful.

Especially disappointing is T is for Torture Porn, the entry from Vancouver’s Jen and Sylvia Soska that sees a seemingly passive porn star transform into a demonic avenger, a tantalizing enough premise that doesn’t have an especially interesting payoff. One expects more from the makers of American Mary, one of the stronger rape-revenge genre movies.

As in the first ABCs, there’s as much chaff as grain, but a couple of interesting films have notable fun with movie convention, particularly the first film, E.L. Katz’s A is for Amateur, in which a hit man’s plan to get to his target via air vents goes disastrously awry. In a similar spirit, Hajime Ohata’s O is for Ochlocracy is a Japanese film in which zombie-slayers are brought to trial by a jury of disgruntled ex-zombies. ***

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca