Dan Gilroy
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While Taxi Driver is a clear influence (there's even an allusion to De Niro's mirror scenes), Lou doesn't develop into a ruthlessly opportunistic go-getter; he starts out that way.
As shot by Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood,” “Michael Clayton”), the directorial debut of screenwriter Dan Gilroy (“The Bourne Legacy”) makes the low-to-the-ground desert city look like a parallel to the hellish landscapes of 1970s New York City in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”
Gyllenhaal’s creepazoid theatrics are superficially amusing (he plays every interaction like Travis’ “Henry Krinkle” conversation with the Secret Service agent in Taxi Driver, right down to the icky fake smile) but leave the viewer at a safe reserve.
You are likely to hear some comparisons to “Taxi Driver” bantered about in reference to “Nightcrawler,” but Louis Bloom is a wholly original nightmare who doesn’t transform over the course of the film, but instead settles comfortably into a niche we have carved out for him.
Bloom is more akin to the sociopaths in Taxi Driver and Peeping Tom.
Louis Bloom isn’t an iconic and righteous anti-hero like Ryan Gosling’s Driver or Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” though – he’s the Hannibal Lecter of the TV-news satire, the kind of guy who’s fascinating from afar, but you’d never want to tango with him.
While the variously horrific crime scenes make for some almost unbearable tension, Gilroy's script hews closer to satire than a traditional thriller, particularly in its portrait of the TV news station where Lou is employed by bloodthirsty exec Nina (Rene Russo, channeling Network 's Faye Dunaway).
While Nina is a caricature, not unlike Faye Dunaway�s character who exploited Peter Finch�s �Mad as hell� character in 1976�s Network, she�s not quite as over the top as Faye, and is, therefore, a little more believable.
Nightcrawler is cynical, but so was Network, Sweet Smell of Success, or Ace In The Hole (this film’s very clearly spiritual mentor).
The other 1970s' film Nightcrawler has been compared to is Network.
Paddy Chayefsky’s Network remains the patented gold standard for commenting on our out-of-control TV mentality.
This isn’t the first time that subject has been satirized before in cinema (perhaps most notably in Sidney Lumet’s 1977 Oscar-winning film “Network”), but “Nightcrawler” tells its debauched tale of immorality in the newsroom through the eyes of a Rupert Pupkin-esque antihero more frightening than any masked killer.
He’s created a colourful world in this dark corner of California, but the full vibrancy of the city never quite registers the way it has in after-hours thrillers like Collateral and Heat (a Michael Mann connection is engendered immediately, thanks to Lou borrowing James Caan’s leather jacket from Thief ).
There’s a harsh, neon brassiness about the film that’s very Eighties: not just in the climactic car chase action (in a way, as opportunistic as Louis himself), but in the overall look, with DP Robert Elswit giving Los Angeles and its night lights a synthetic metallic sheen, with echoes of Michael Mann, from Thief to Collateral.
It was shot both digitally and on film, as was Michael Mann’s “Collateral,” another nervous nocturnal thriller, set in the same city.
For a first-time feature, Nightcrawler benefits from an accomplished technical package, highlighted by sharp widescreen cinematography from Robert Elswit (who’s worked regularly with Paul Thomas Anderson) that captures the L.A. backdrops in an array of bright color, and a score by James Newton Howard that recalls the hypnotic melodies he composed for Michael Mann’s Collateral – another City of Angels noir set during the wee hours of the night, and for which this film feels like a distant, crazy cousin: one whose weapon of choice is the camera itself.
You can feel it in Michael Mann's Heat , or in Collateral a decade later.
“Nightcrawler,” which Gilroy also wrote, shares a lineage with some great American films, including “Network,” Michael Mann’s “Collateral” and the signature works of Martin Scorsese, including “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy.”
Ace in the Hole (1951)
Directed by Billy Wilder
influenced Nightcrawler (2014)
Themes Dialogue Characters
Nightcrawler is cynical, but so was Network, Sweet Smell of Success, or Ace In The Hole (this film’s very clearly spiritual mentor).
Produced by the director/writer's brother, Tony Gilroy, and edited by his other brother, John Gilroy, "Nightcrawler," as the title promises, takes us into the underbelly of big city "news" removed of all ethical and moral barricades, something like an update of Billy Wilder's classic newsman drama "Ace in the Hole."
If Sidney Lumet’s “Network” and Billy Wilder’ s “Ace in the Hole’’ had a mutant baby, it would probably look like Dan Gilroy’s “Nightcrawler,” a pitch-black satire of local TV news in Los Angeles with an eye-popping performance by Jake Gyllenhaal as the paparazzo from Hell.
Nightcrawler is the directorial debut of screenwriter Dan Gilroy (The Bourne Legacy), and it’s framed as a movie about the media, with some of the purplish, strident dialogue of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951) or Sidney Lumet’s Network.
As a satire on tabloid journalism, it is in the cynical tradition of Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole.
He is like a Billy Wilder hero (Kirk Douglas’s unscrupulous reporter, say, from “Ace in the Hole”), transplanted to the land of David Lynch.
He’s created a colourful world in this dark corner of California, but the full vibrancy of the city never quite registers the way it has in after-hours thrillers like Collateral and Heat (a Michael Mann connection is engendered immediately, thanks to Lou borrowing James Caan’s leather jacket from Thief ).
There’s a harsh, neon brassiness about the film that’s very Eighties: not just in the climactic car chase action (in a way, as opportunistic as Louis himself), but in the overall look, with DP Robert Elswit giving Los Angeles and its night lights a synthetic metallic sheen, with echoes of Michael Mann, from Thief to Collateral.
Christine (2016)
Directed by Antonio Campos
influenced by Nightcrawler (2014)
Themes Characters Music
“If it bleeds, it leads,” he says, echoing a sour cry that has resounded from “Ace in the Hole” (1951) to “Nightcrawler” (2014).
Thus Christine’s beat isn’t clearly established when the station manager, Mike (Tracy Letts), informs the anchors that the higher-ups want them to go all Nightcrawler: “If it bleeds, it leads,” Mike emphasizes.
When it had its premiere at Sundance, Christine was immediately compared to Nightcrawler and, especially, Broadcast News: Hall’s Christine Chubbuck, like Holly Hunter’s Jane Craig, is the smartest person in the room and a bundle of insecurities.
It’s not the only manner in which the movie subtly channels the mother-daughter psychodrama and extreme performance anxiety of Darren Aronofsky ’s “Black Swan” — one of several pictures with which “Christine” seems to have drawn inspiration, Sidney Lumet ’s blistering 1976 classic “Network” and Dan Gilroy’s recent “Nightcrawler” not least among them.
“Nightcrawler,” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (whose theme song Campos even inserts into the story).
Viewers will be reminded of the Bret Easton Ellis adaptation of “American Psycho” as Bloom methodically increases his bloody level of wrong-doing in pursuit of capturing the perfect crime.
Lou, the character Jake Gyllenhaal plays in the darkly funny, terrifically smart little film Nightcrawler , at first seems like a simple riff on someone like Gordon Gekko from Wall Street or Patrick Bateman from American Psycho — a sociopath who has absorbed the lessons of his culture so thoroughly that they have become the blood running through his veins.
He might be the post-recession cousin of Christian Bale in American Psycho.
Bloom is more akin to the sociopaths in Taxi Driver and Peeping Tom.
But while “Nightcrawler” plays first and foremost as a lurid, borderline-satirical thriller about a disturbed individual who pushes the disturbed logic of 21st-century media to its ultimate conclusion, Gilroy clearly has some larger questions in view, along with a cinematic legacy that includes “Taxi Driver,” “Network” and Michael Powell’s 1960 shocker “Peeping Tom,” a movie whose influence only continues to grow.
Final Destination (2000)
Directed by James Wong
influenced Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)
Visuals Plot Themes
It is a bright, vividly colored slice of gore, a pop art riff on “ Final Destination ” with bright red flames, blood, and paint.
Velvet Buzzsaw es un hilarante e impredecible relato que combina elementos de la película nominada al premio Oscar The Square con la franquicia de terror Final Destination .
With the horror elements, what you see is pretty much what you get; most of the Final Destination-esque death scenes aren’t particularly imaginative or shot with much flair – surprising given DP Robert Elswit’s involvement – and mostly feel like they belong in, well, a Final Destination film.
The tension between art and commerce is as old as the Renaissance, so the anthropomorphized, bloodthirsty paintings and installations have only slightly more subtext than the Final Destination series.
At the same time, the film never leans into the goofiness of its situations as much as it could and ends up feeling a bit like a pretentious Final Destination for it.
‘Final Destination’ meets the art world, with a batty performance from Gyllenhaal at the helm in ‘Velvet Buzzsaw,’ which heads to Netflix this Friday.
Everything from the visual effects to the costumes and caricatures (Catherine O’Hara’s Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice would fit right into this world) fly in the face of what one might call “taste,” because in Velvet Buzzsaw taste and its subsequent valuation is the beginning of a very slippery slope.
Meanwhile, Gyllenhaal is hilarious as the camp critic, reminiscent of Glenn Shadix’s Otho in Beetlejuice but dialled up to eleven.
The film's moral ambiguity and focus on the psychological impact of violence echo Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners while Its critique of media sensationalism brings to mind Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler.
The King of Comedy (1982)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced Nightcrawler (2014)
Characters Themes
If one were to somehow merge the Scorsese-directed Robert De Niro characters Travis Bickle (of Taxi Driver) and Rupert Pupkin (of The King of Comedy), the result, I imagine, would be someone very much like Lou Bloom, the antiheroic lead played by Jake Gyllenhaal in writer/director Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler.
He’s like a cross between two of Robert De Niro’s most memorable and sociopathic characters from Martin Scorsese movies: Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver’s “I can’t sleep nights” rolling time bomb; and Rupert Pupkin, The King of Comedy’s delusional narcissist, who stops at nothing to get on TV.
Oozing traces of Taxi Driver‘s Travis Bickle, with a smudge of The King of Comedy‘s Rupert Pupkin on the side, Gyllenhaal shed 30 pounds to play the ever-hungry Louis Bloom, morphing his handsome, expressive face into a gaunt, dingy-toothed jack-o-lantern, his wolfish grin flashing at the slightest glimmer of leverage.
At the same time, he’s a socially clueless character, like Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, given to quoting inane, optimistic affirmations and business guides like an alien who has arrived on Earth and is experimenting with operating manuals.
Jake Gyllenhaal is blistering as Louis Bloom, a wiry, bug-eyed go-getter, and plausible descendant of The King of Comedy 's Rupert Pupkin, except with a proclivity for messing with the maimed and deceased.
“Nightcrawler,” which Gilroy also wrote, shares a lineage with some great American films, including “Network,” Michael Mann’s “Collateral” and the signature works of Martin Scorsese, including “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy.”
The use of media, to invoke the nature of looking, in crime films in nothing new, especially when considering the element in Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966); DePalma’s tribute to the ’66 film, Blow Out (1981); and Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), which notes that possessing (i.e., recording) all the information is knowing too much.
It speaks volumes that he’s hired the great cinematographer Robert Elswit here — Elswit, who has lensed most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, including There Will Be Blood and Inherent Vice , as well as Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler , brings a lovely warmth to this one, making it feel more tangible, less shiny and clean than Apatow’s usual films.
It was shot by Robert Elswit, the Oscar-winning cinematographer of "Boogie Nights," "There Will Be Blood" and "Nightcrawler."
This down to the great work of cinematographer Robert Elswit, who was behind There Will Be Blood and Nightcrawler .
But both scenes are really just trumped-up versions of William Hurt’s post-produced crocodile tears in “Broadcast News,” and anything but shocking at a time when we’ve come to expect professional framing and lighting from even an ISIS beheading video.
But truthfully, it isn’t saying anything about the relationship between the media and society — and the toxic and symbiotic voyeurism that fuels it — that hadn’t been said already, decades earlier, in eerily prescient films from “Ace in the Hole” (1951) to “Network” (1976) to “Broadcast News” (1987).
What Gilroy and Gyllenhaal are up to here is a kind of amped-up Broadcast News meets Network meets Bringing Out the Dead for the TMZ and reality show era.
What was once prophetic in movies like Network and Broadcast News is now commonplace.
What Gyllenhaal evokes in some of these scenes is Peter Sellers’s “ Chance the Gardener ” in Being There, which was also about a savant with a warped relationship to television.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced Nightcrawler (2014)
Visuals Characters Themes
As shot by Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood,” “Michael Clayton”), the directorial debut of screenwriter Dan Gilroy (“The Bourne Legacy”) makes the low-to-the-ground desert city look like a parallel to the hellish landscapes of 1970s New York City in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”
It’s the greatest misanthropic central character since Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood.
Robert Elswit, the great cinematographer who won an Oscar for "There Will Be Blood" and is Paul Thomas Anderson's regular DP, shot "Nightcrawler" in a shadows/bright lights style that adds an essential element to the story.
Photographed by Robert Elswit, whose images of California in the films of Paul Thomas Anderson ("Boogie Nights," "There Will Be Blood") are among the indelible sights of contemporary moviemaking, "Nightcrawler" comes from the writer-director Dan Gilroy, who is married to Russo in real life and whose brother, Tony Gilroy ("Michael Clayton"), is one of the film's producers.
Veteran cinematographer Robert Elswit, Paul Thomas Anderson’s frequent collaborator who won an Oscar for “There Will Be Blood,” shoots Los Angeles in the wee hours with darkly gleaming menace, which is crucial to creating the film’s mounting sense of suspense.
The full-length writing/directing debut of screenwriter Dan Gilroy (Two for the Money, The Bourne Legacy), Nightcrawler can be summarized as the There Will Be Blood of slick L.A. based neo-noir dramatic thrillers.
He’s created a colourful world in this dark corner of California, but the full vibrancy of the city never quite registers the way it has in after-hours thrillers like Collateral and Heat (a Michael Mann connection is engendered immediately, thanks to Lou borrowing James Caan’s leather jacket from Thief ).
You can feel it in Michael Mann's Heat , or in Collateral a decade later.
Does his surname refer to Leopold Bloom, the urban wanderer in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”?
For his directing debut, Gilroy is out for the contact high of that Mean Streets vibe (there’s Scorsese again), and Gyllenhaal and Russo deliver it to him in spades.