![]() Full creative freedom has brought out the best in him. You don’t know whether to laugh, cry or shudder.īehind all this is screenwriter Dan Gilroy (Real Steel, The Bourne Legacy), making his directing debut. Every gruesome clip flogged and televised is a step towards success. Now imagine someone like that turning up to crime scenes with a video camera. It’s as if he wants to shove all the variety of human behaviour and its baffling concept of morality into the rigid checkboxes of career development plans and performance reviews. This sententious oddball armours himself in hollow management speak, exuding all the unearned business acumen of a contestant on The Apprentice. But what’s surprising is the way the movie also tackles modern corporate mentality. And, sure enough, we have tough-skinned TV station editor Rene Russo defining ‘news’ to ingenue Lou as “rich white folks getting killed by poor minorities”. Given the set-up, you expect Lou’s journey into the murky world of freelance crime-scene videography to be a media-skewering satire. He is delusional enough to refer to “my company” when all he has is a camcorder, a police scanner, a fast car and an “assistant” named Rick who is merely a desperate street hustler (portrayed by Four Lions’ Riz Ahmed with the nerve of a goose in a butcher’s). All Lou Bloom wants is to be a successful businessman. He has a more modest destiny in mind, making him the product of these ever more nakedly materialistic times. ![]() But Lou doesn’t feel driven to right perceived wrongs or achieve fame (directly, at least). And in Nightcrawler’s Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) we find, more than 30 years later, the spiritual younger brother to these iconic Scorsese/De Niro creations: another dark-roaming misfit with malformed ambitions. Both are deranged loners who go to obscene lengths to achieve their warped ideas of The American Dream. In The King Of Comedy, Rupert Pupkin craves celebrity. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle thirsts for justice.
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