Things that go 'bump!' in the night
Nightcrawler is Dan Gilroy's apparent attempt to 1) do a dark satire on the media's vampiric thirst for lurid videos and 2) do the Nighttown sequence of James Joyce's Ulysses only set in Los Angeles (aside from similar imagery and the idea of a man roving a major city, Jake Gyllenhaal's character is named Louis Bloom). Just for the effort I give the director props; though local TV's propensity for tabloid journalism is hardly news, Gilroy does achieve moments of crawly discomfort that are of value--a reminder of what we're being spoonfed twenty-four hours a day.
