"On TV it looks so real!"

Rating: 8/10 (4 January 2016)

Man, isn't Lou Bloom an absolute creep? I've just seen Jake Gyllenhaal back to back in this picture and "Southpaw" and you wouldn't think it was the same actor. Here he's a gaunt shadow of a human car wreck while in the boxing movie he's ripped to the max on his way to regaining the light heavyweight championship. I haven't seen him in that many movies, but this guy has a pretty good future ahead if he keeps his head on straight.
So the picture is enough to make most normal people abhor the methods these ad hoc news gatherers use to get their stories. You have to wonder if there are characters like Lou Bloom out there manipulating events to make a buck the way we see in "Nightcrawler". As soon as I saw Lou move a car crash victim in order to get a better shot with his camera, I knew it was only a matter of time before he would actually be creating stories instead of filming them.
What actually made the movie even more creepy for me was Gyllenhaal's resemblance to a guy I grew up with. I never noticed it before so it might have been attributable to all the weight he lost for the role. But he did look spooky most of the time, didn't he?
Something I thought about when I first heard of this film - was there any push back from the Marvel Comic folks over use of the term Nightcrawler? They have an X-Men character by that name so I thought there might have been some legalities involved with it, but I never heard anything come of it. Lou must have passed on the story.