BiliPiton

Plot no, character interest no, drama almos no. So wats left; great song and dance. Sweet costumes. Maybr under fills feature length, but mezmerizing got done, like the author of thes. That central song embeds itself somewhere deep in brain tissue for some; wishes condense to just. Desire for another repetition.of that brilliant Andrew Lloyd Webber melody and haunting T. S Eliot words..Barbra Streisand later embedded it furthers, but this earlier version still compels.

Memory, all alone in the moonlight I can dream of the old days Life was beautiful then I remember the time I knew what happiness was Let the memory live again.

Poor Don Diego de Gama. Both parents Spanish, but he's never been to Spain, as he is frequently snobbily reminded by the Spanish-born residents in his 1790s Argentina back country town. He's a bureacrat serving a king 6000 miles away, unable to decide anything by himself, a fish in water (in a ruling metaphor) who can't live in a wet place. He wants to leave but can't, because everything is on hold. Will a military expedition bail him out? Bitterly totally ironic, structured around off camera sounds that are never what hearers think they are. I'm now hunting down the 1956 novel by Antonio_di_Benedetto.

Nightcrawler, aka 'in TV news if it bleeds it leads' all takes place in a beautifully photographed nighttime Southern California, from Venice Beach to the Valley to the hills, much of it in a car navigating familiar street names with a map app. Jake Gylenhaal is an anonymous monster from "somewhere in the north end of the Valley," chasing crimes and crashes in the city and surrounding. It is all LA, all the way.

And much of it is wonderful. Gylenhaal plays a video news freelance monster who is except for his Valley ref, completely without provenance or background or any emotional structure or reactions at all, a personality that works well in his spooky skill at non-zero sum bargaining. Every scene contains him haggling, he bargains with every single other character, from the news director (Rene Russo, great) to whom he peddles his videos, to the dim assistant he ruthlessly exploits, to a competing video peddler, to cops. Always with the same grim half-smile pokerface, as he moves from nowhere toward his new ambition: an LA news king and seems likely to achieve it.

It's so well paced and drives so fast and so unpredictably that three quarters of the way through you seem to be watching a great movie. But then, unfortunately, the film refuses or fails to get through the Gylenhaal's character armor, and we leave him exactly as we found him - and it needs more.

The problem may be that we're in the wrong genre. Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom would be an absolutely perfect Marvel comic movie character, a villain perhaps like the Joker; or maybe, with a little adjustment of the Rene Russo character, a kind of demon Clark Kent. As it is, the creepiness that begins chilling becomes irritating, a bell that won't stop ringing; you don't just dislike Bloom, you wind up disliking the movie, despite its great execution.