Nightcrawler (2014)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT TAKES TO SUCCEED IN ENTREPRENEURIAL AMERICA?)

[Hot off the press. Busts don't come much fresher than this.]

Nightcrawler (2014) is an American crime thriller film written and directed by Dan Gilroy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, and Bill Paxton.

In the end, extreme loner and opportunistic criminal, Jake Gyllenhaal, carves out a successful new career for himself, gathering footage for glamorous yet raddled local television news executive, Rene Russo, by engineering the death of his assistant, Riz Ahmed, and sabotaging his main business competitor, Bill Paxton.

Unperturbed by being correctly identified as a thief by a scrap metal dealer who declines to hire him, quick witted, motor-mouth Gyllenhaal is intrigued when he witnesses a freelance videographer, Paxton, recording the grizzly aftermath of a freeway accident for television news.

Unable to persuade Paxton to give him a job, Gyllenhaal, using the proceeds from a stolen racing cycle, sets himself up with a cheap camcorder and police scanner, which allow him, through a naive willingness to get uncomfortably close to the injured and dying, on his first night, despite a very hostile reception from both emergency services and other news stringers, to capture graphic scenes that news editor, Russo is more than happy to buy.

Soaking up every detail he hears from those he encounters, self-educated Gyllenhaal applies himself to the task of learning what sells in the news business and how best to get it, in the process, taking on the shambolic and desperately unemployed Ahmed, as a barely paid assistant, chiefly on account of his phone's GPS capability.

Unfortunately, under the pressure of Gyllenhaal's maniacal driving, Ahmed proves to be a less than effective navigator, causing them to arrive late to the scene of one particularly promising house shooting incident.

Unwilling to accept that he has missed his chance, Gyllenhaal ignores police lines to obtains shots, without permission, from within the victim's home that, despite her colleagues' reservations, impress Russo considerably.

Buoyed by Russo's encouragement, Gyllenhaal manages to secure an increasing number of sales to her station, permitting him to upgrade both his equipment and his ride.

Complete with top-of-the-range scanners and navigation aids, the high performance car eventually enables Gyllenhaal and Ahmed to reach the site of a fatal country road smash, well before emergency services, giving Gyllenhaal, out of Ahmed's view, the chance to improve the staging of the scene for the benefit of the camera.

Emboldened by what he sees as his increasing importance to Russo's station's output, Gyllenhaal asks her out for dinner, to which she only agrees after Gyllenhaal makes veiled threats to take his footage elsewhere, and which proves to be an embarrassingly awkward miscalculation on Russo's part, as, with little regard for her feelings, Gyllenhaal employs hard-nosed business arguments to blackmail his way into her bed.

Indeed, so confident is he of his own potential, that when Paxton approaches him with an offer to team up, Gyllenhaal refuses in very insulting terms to even consider working in partnership, something Gyllenhaal seems incapable of doing, with him.

It's not long before Gyllenhaal has to pay the price of the animosity he generates, when Paxton gloats over beating him to the scene of a light aircraft crash, denying the incandescent Russo a story she felt her continuing sexual favours towards Gyllenhaal should have guaranteed her.

In private, the humiliation and disappointment Gyllenhaal feels over his failure, cause a complete loss of his usual unnaturally calm composure, prompting him to tamper with Paxton's news truck, resulting in a horrendous accident that sends Paxton to intensive care.

Their chief rival out of action, Gyllenhaal and Ahmed immediately follow up reports of a home invasion in an affluent neighbourhood.

With Ahmed keeping a lookout, Gyllenhaal witnesses the final moments of what turns out to be a brutal drug related family slaying, the explosive footage from which he uses to bargain his way further into Russo's station's organisation.

Unable to resist the opportunity to advance his soaring ambitions, Gyllenhaal deliberately withholds footage from both Russo and authorities that allows him to identify and track those responsible, waiting for the perfect moment to inform the police, so maximizing the impact of the ensuing arrest story they capture for Russo.

But in confiding his intentions beforehand, Gyllenhaal unwittingly put Ahmed in a position to demand better employment terms and an equal share of any eventual bounty, which, though Gyllenhaal reluctantly accepted, prompts him to deliberately betray Ahmed, who is shot dead by one of the killers at the end of the terrifying police chase they film.

Though convinced that Gyllenhaal is responsible for instigating the whole incident, investigators lack evidence of wrong doing, and are forced to release him, after questioning, allowing Gyllenhaal to expand his operation, which was precisely what Paxton had been hoping to achieve for himself with his original offer of partnership.

In portraying this weird Travis Bickle-Raymond Babbitt hybrid, Gyllenhaal joins a long list of distinguished Hollywood leads to have embraced either psychiatric disability or the dark-side of sociopathology, in order to widen their acting credentials, though not usually in the same role.

Certainly Dan Gilroy's combination of Forrest Gump'ish naivety, and Rupert Pupkin'esque ambition makes for arresting viewing, were chocolate box philosophy and chat show insincerity are replaced by motivational sound bites and beguiling corporate business-speak.

So it is perhaps unfortunate that Gyllenhaal's character is so undeniably a monster as to eclipse the monsters of television news he serves.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film)

Four Lions (2010)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW IF ISLAMIC IDIOTS MAKE EFFECTIVE JIHADI TERRORISTS.)

[I'm pretty sure I wrote this "way back" bust after watching the movie on the small screen. I can't imagine what cinema goers made of it!

Sometimes the hype surrounding a movie is so misleading that the only decent thing to do is plot bust it, so that others need not suffer, just to find out what all the fuss is about.

By the way, this is the first time I've ever posted anything on the internet that might conceivably raise a red flag with the security services. So, if you're reading this, girls and boys, "ha, ha!" You come out of it even worse than the jihadis!]

Four Lions (2010) is a British satirical black comedy film co-written and directed by Chris Morris, starring Riz Ahmed, Kayvan Novak, Nigel Lindsay, Arsher Ali and Adeel Akhtar.

In the end, disaffected young Muslim father, Riz Ahmed, is reduced to detonating his suicide bomb in a shop near the route of the London Marathon. (No, it really is supposed to be a comedy!)

Forced to return home to England early from Pakistan after unknowingly killing Osama Bin Laden in an accidental rocket attack on a terrorist training camp at which he had hoped to receive guidance from a senior Jihadi, Ahmed and his simpleton friend, Kayvan Novak, find their angrily demented co-conspirator, a white English convert to Islam, Nigel Lindsay, has recruited a new member to their supposedly underground cell, Arsher Ali, an equally publicity hungry protester against perceived Islamic oppression by Western culture and society.

Hiding the failure of his and Novak's mission, Ahmed pretends that the group has received the go-ahead to conduct a terrorist attack. So the group set about turning their stockpile of peroxide hair bleach, naively bought wholesale by fifth member, Adeel Akhtar, into explosive, despite being unable to agree upon a suitable target for their action.

Fearing that their cover has been compromised when Ali unwittingly invites a neighbour into their bomb making safe house to enjoy some bhangra rap, the group are forced to hurriedly relocate the materials they have so far prepared to Lindsay's allotment shed. Tragically Akhtar is blown to bits during the move when he stumbles and falls on the volatile material he is carrying.

Devastated by the loss of Akhtar and exasperated by the ineptness of the others, Ahmed abandons the group to Lindsay's false flag proposal to blow up a mosque, intended to radicalise the moderate Muslim majority.

Realising that the discovery of the remains of Akhtar's blown off head may lead authorities to the group, and inspired by a work colleague's request for an outfit from his family's fancy dress business to wear for charity while running in the London Marathon, Ahmed relents and persuades the others that the event and costumes present the perfect target and cover for achieving their ambition of martyrdom.

Unfortunately, when the costumed and bomb laden group eventually arrive in London, Ali loses his nerve and attempts to surrender himself to a policeman they encounter, prompting the determined Lindsay to remotely detonate Ali's explosives.

In the ensuing chaos, not only are a couple of innocent bystanders gunned down by the police, but both Lindsay and Novak's explosives are detonated, one accidentally and the other deliberately, before Ahmed resigns himself to targeting a high-street pharmacy, a suggestion originating from Akhtar that Ahmed had previously dismissed as unworthy of consideration.


To answer the original question posed, of course idiots can be just as terrifying as those that know what they're doing. But, a movie like Chris Morris' debut feature is bound to raise a whole raft of other questions. What motivates people to religious extremism? Is it possible for good people to do bad things? Does unwittingly doing something good during the course of your actions justify your evil intentions? Is it possible to make a comedy about suicide bombing? The movie only really provides an answer to the last of these. Because there are plenty of laughs to be had from the bungling incompetence and ignorance of these would-be terrorists, right up until the moment they start blowing themselves and the innocents around them to smithereens. At which point the movie reveals its true colours as those of a tragedy dressed up in a comedy disguise.

Perhaps another question that Four Lions unintentionally manages to answer is "is it possible to make fun of Muslim terrorists without incurring their wrath?" Well, yes it is. You can portray them as ignorant and as stupid as you like, as long as at the same time you paint the authorities and society ranged against them as corrupt and intolerant, persecuting the innocent and pious alike, while divorcing those perpetrating the violence from the religion that drives and informs them. Oh, the cleverness of Morris!

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Lions