NIGHTCRAWLER

wow what a movie; a resounding 10 from both of us and a 26 for Jake Gyllenhaal's acting.

He is Lou a petty thief with deep sunken unfeeling dead eyes and a ready smile to go along with his super overpoliteness. Coming home from a robbery, he happens upon an accident and meets Bill Paxton who is a stringer providing sensational footage for TV news; i.e., accidents, stabbings, burned houses, car wrecks, dead bodies, screaming women and lots of blood.

So Lou decides he's going to do the same thing so he buys a cheap video camera and a police scanner and starts. The woman who is head of the news department and who enters into this parasitic relationship  when she starts buying what he brings in  is Nina, played by Rene Russo.

Since Lou has no morality or conscience, he goes farther and farther afield to get the best shots. And the movie expertly and with much tension and suspense,  shows Lou's ever more manipulative ways to get better and better footage.

His "relationship" with Nina is very interesting because as she becomes more and more dependent on Lou's video and the TV station - her boss- gets more and more of a viewer's share and her value to the station increases, Lou also uses that for his own ends of bizarre and twisted  ideas of 'teamwork'. because his goal is to own his own widely known and popular video business.

His "relationship" with Ric, his assistant, is also very interesting because Ric keeps wanting a regular job and a normal relationship with an employer and Lou is sociopathically unable to connect with people on that level.

I love movies with a great story, with ever building tension, with superb acting, with complex characters and a jab and comment at society and its voracious appetite for disasters.