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Nightcrawler
A young, hungry and driven sociopath finds the perfect line of work for his sensibilities and stops at nothing to realize his destiny.
Jake Gyllenhaal is an actor whose career can easily be dissected and his motivations and goals can easily be traced back to the movies and the point of time in his career he made certain choices. Its hard to dissect career of someone like Matt Damon or George Clooney because their choices have been very varied and much more artistic from the get go with some commercial fair thrown in there. But Jake Gyllenhaal is an actor whose early choices were highly guided by his parents. It almost felt like his parents read the scripts to okay them for him.His facial features are something that women may find attractive but men certainly don't want to follow him into a battle. He doesn't have that macho look. Partly because of his blunt nose and elongated face.
So what can Jake's career tell us about hollywood pecking order? For better or for worse every top director plays it safe in casting either financially or critically. Hiring Daniel Day Lewis doesn't necessarily guarantee box-office but most certainly does it guarantee Oscar attention. Hiring DiCaprio doesn't necessarily means he is right fit for the part but it does guarantee box office and may be Oscar attention.So unless you are in that top 3 numbers on a call sheet for a role, your chances of getting best scripts is null . So Jake Gyllenhaal started his career doing interesting work but none of it is a masterpiece. Most them are just non embarrassing but most certainly interesting choices. His earlier choices highly indicate that he wanted to work with auteurs but the financial performance of those movies is not impressive, so he did not become the first choice for other directors after those movies performed poorly. He tried becoming commercially viable by making movies like Prince of Persia and Love and other drugs, but those movies are flavor of the movie and they didn't have staying power even after the week they came out. So these choices of making himself commercially viable kind of backfired. Add to that his less masculine look. He suddenly dropped off the lists of many directors casting choices. One of the hard evidenced fact here is that he fired his agent around this time because they couldn't get the roles he wanted. So since then he has been making low profile independent projects with small distributors and he started a production company that develops their own movies. So you get movies like Enemy, prisoners, southpaw, nightcrawler,demolition or stronger. All these are very low profile movies which are dumped in September or in summer.Oscar campaign is a very expensive affair and if a movie isn't making bank at box office , studios aren't gonna spend anymore money to campaign for the movies and also the movies have to be edgy without being preachy and something new.So in a way Jake is trying to create his own movies by defying the pecking order in hollywood. Leonard Berstein movie sort of highlights the point. The movie is produced at his production company with director of true detective at helm, which is to be expected because that how Jake operates now a days. Instead of waiting for high profile roles which he is not gonna get with Gosling , Fassbender , Hardy and other mega super stars in line before him, he is just collaborating with reliable dependable directors based on their previous works. Anyone would wanna work with Nolan, Tarantino or scorsese or Spielberg or finches but they would wanna work with those actors which is rare and also the money guys would wanna work with these actors. So all in all he is swimming upstream against the pecking order but I don't know how much good would it do for an actor to go up against paramount/Scorsese and Spielberg production.
This movie is one such movie. Where Jake decided to work with director who wanted to work with him rather than chase directors he wanted to work with. It one of those American psycho wannabe movies. Its got a fairly straight narrative with few expected twists and one unexpected twist.It does invoke that night life vibe from heat or collateral.Its funny what it says about our society when a character like this movie's lead or Joker from the dark knight is praised for being complex and memorable.Why are we attracted to these roles ?
But in the end I give most praise for this movie to Dan Gilroy than Jake Gyllenhaal because its the whole concept of the movie and its execution thats impressive and not the screenplay per se. Jake relied heavily on memorizing few lines and looking hungry and frail. As opposed to becoming another character with voice modulations or something. I did think Bradley Cooper deserved the Oscar nomination way more than Jake Gyllenhaal, People need to understand that just because someone is playing a sociopath or psychopath doesn't mean their performance is great. Risk has to be take in terms of acting choices and not just displaying bad behavior in a glorious light.
A young, hungry and driven sociopath finds the perfect line of work for his sensibilities and stops at nothing to realize his destiny.
Jake Gyllenhaal is an actor whose career can easily be dissected and his motivations and goals can easily be traced back to the movies and the point of time in his career he made certain choices. Its hard to dissect career of someone like Matt Damon or George Clooney because their choices have been very varied and much more artistic from the get go with some commercial fair thrown in there. But Jake Gyllenhaal is an actor whose early choices were highly guided by his parents. It almost felt like his parents read the scripts to okay them for him.His facial features are something that women may find attractive but men certainly don't want to follow him into a battle. He doesn't have that macho look. Partly because of his blunt nose and elongated face.
So what can Jake's career tell us about hollywood pecking order? For better or for worse every top director plays it safe in casting either financially or critically. Hiring Daniel Day Lewis doesn't necessarily guarantee box-office but most certainly does it guarantee Oscar attention. Hiring DiCaprio doesn't necessarily means he is right fit for the part but it does guarantee box office and may be Oscar attention.So unless you are in that top 3 numbers on a call sheet for a role, your chances of getting best scripts is null . So Jake Gyllenhaal started his career doing interesting work but none of it is a masterpiece. Most them are just non embarrassing but most certainly interesting choices. His earlier choices highly indicate that he wanted to work with auteurs but the financial performance of those movies is not impressive, so he did not become the first choice for other directors after those movies performed poorly. He tried becoming commercially viable by making movies like Prince of Persia and Love and other drugs, but those movies are flavor of the movie and they didn't have staying power even after the week they came out. So these choices of making himself commercially viable kind of backfired. Add to that his less masculine look. He suddenly dropped off the lists of many directors casting choices. One of the hard evidenced fact here is that he fired his agent around this time because they couldn't get the roles he wanted. So since then he has been making low profile independent projects with small distributors and he started a production company that develops their own movies. So you get movies like Enemy, prisoners, southpaw, nightcrawler,demolition or stronger. All these are very low profile movies which are dumped in September or in summer.Oscar campaign is a very expensive affair and if a movie isn't making bank at box office , studios aren't gonna spend anymore money to campaign for the movies and also the movies have to be edgy without being preachy and something new.So in a way Jake is trying to create his own movies by defying the pecking order in hollywood. Leonard Berstein movie sort of highlights the point. The movie is produced at his production company with director of true detective at helm, which is to be expected because that how Jake operates now a days. Instead of waiting for high profile roles which he is not gonna get with Gosling , Fassbender , Hardy and other mega super stars in line before him, he is just collaborating with reliable dependable directors based on their previous works. Anyone would wanna work with Nolan, Tarantino or scorsese or Spielberg or finches but they would wanna work with those actors which is rare and also the money guys would wanna work with these actors. So all in all he is swimming upstream against the pecking order but I don't know how much good would it do for an actor to go up against paramount/Scorsese and Spielberg production.
This movie is one such movie. Where Jake decided to work with director who wanted to work with him rather than chase directors he wanted to work with. It one of those American psycho wannabe movies. Its got a fairly straight narrative with few expected twists and one unexpected twist.It does invoke that night life vibe from heat or collateral.Its funny what it says about our society when a character like this movie's lead or Joker from the dark knight is praised for being complex and memorable.Why are we attracted to these roles ?
But in the end I give most praise for this movie to Dan Gilroy than Jake Gyllenhaal because its the whole concept of the movie and its execution thats impressive and not the screenplay per se. Jake relied heavily on memorizing few lines and looking hungry and frail. As opposed to becoming another character with voice modulations or something. I did think Bradley Cooper deserved the Oscar nomination way more than Jake Gyllenhaal, People need to understand that just because someone is playing a sociopath or psychopath doesn't mean their performance is great. Risk has to be take in terms of acting choices and not just displaying bad behavior in a glorious light.