Nightcrawler

Jake Gyllenhaal is the greatest actor of his generation.

Agreed? Good.

What a despicable weirdo he plays in Nightcrawler. The film makes you question how much of what you are presented on the news is actually real and what has been manipulated for the sake of ratings.

This is not the first film about the exploitation of tragedy by the media. Billy Wilder already tried his hand at this in the brilliant but underrated Ace in the Hole (watch it!). Back then it was a newspaper reporter that milked his story for all that it's worth, Nowadays, as an extra, there is also speed to consider. Everyone has a camera phone and being faster than the rest is pivotal.

But of course, once you have mastered the speed part, your new problem is how to make what you deliver more appealing to the people you are trying to sell your footage to?

Louis "Lou" Bloom, who has an eye for a good scene, stops being content with however a, say, car accident, looks as is. To put the victim(s) in the best light possible (very literally), he simply pulls a bleeding body closer to where it should be for maximum impact. Also, to make bullet holes in a fridge more shocking, he adds the all-important human element, by placing the family photos on the fridge just so before filming the holes.

And it gets only more ethically questionable from there. He starts to not only manipulate the scene of the crime, but orchestrates one himself, waiting with camera out for tragedy to unfold. In the aftermath, when questioned by police about his involvement and his footage, he tells them, us and himself that he only did his job. And he gets away with it.

What an asshole.

8/10

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst

You can't make this stuff up.

The life story of Robert Durst is so weird, it can only be true. This is the account of the man himself, made after the film All Good Things by the same film maker, Andrew Jarecki, which was based on the same events then discussed in The Jinx interviews. Giving those interviews and letting a camera follow him around may well be the worst decision Robert Durst ever made.

The details of the series have been chewed over often enough recently and all the connections to the Serial podcast have already been drawn, so I will not go there. Here are simply my own thoughts on the whole mess.

The Jinx is quite brilliant and very engrossing. Andrew Jarecki also made the exceptional documentary Capturing the Friedmans (if you haven't seen is, please consider this a recommendation to do so). Documentaries have been getting larger audiences in recent years, which is a good things. Life, after all, does tell the best stories.

The final punch of the show, of course, has a weird after taste. The timing of Durst's recent arrest coinciding with the airing of the last episode is curious, and accusations of holding back evidence for the sake of the sucker punch of that scene have flown, but I tend to give the film makers the benefit of a doubt. The inclusion of the team's discussions of the evidence they had in hand (the inciminating letter) even before Robert Durst muttered his confession to himself while wearing a live microphone and their sharing the evidence can be taken as an indicator, that they were acting in good faith.

In conclusion: watch more documentaries. Some of them are well worth your time and long gone are the times when reality banned on film are presented in a way that will bore you to tears.

9/10