Month: January 2015

Nightcrawler is everyone’s favorite X-Men, right? I mean, after Wolverine, Deadpool, Magneto, Cable, Bishop, The Phoenix, Gambit, Professor X, 1990s Cartoon Rogue, Longshot, Iceman, The Juggernaut, Apocalypse, and that pterodactyl dude, right?

Just kidding. Nightcrawler is pretty cool up there. Transporting around, being all blue and sneaky and shit. Give him a dagger and he is better than any thief in any roleplaying game. So it is about time Fox branched out on its solo movies, away from their Wolverine jerk fest,

Wait, what? It isn’t an X-Men movie? But that would mean we only got sweet Nightcrawler action in X2, and I am super tired of that movie (too much Wolverine Origin story).

Apparently Nightcrawler (outside of worm teminology), can also describe someone who usually is more social and comes out at night. Ah okay. So maybe a movie about a well liked party animal.

“Wrong again, fuckface!” – Nightcrawler director

Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a dirty rotten scoundrel. Or at least he seems that way, when he beats up a security guard (steals his watch) and steals some material to sell under the table for spare parts. Dude is just trying to get by and make a living. Something is clearly off about him. Kind of scrawny. Talks in a funny way. Always looking at people with those deep eyes, rarely blinking.

No one wants to hire a thief either, so he tends to work on his own, at whatever he does, doing some internet researching and jumping head first into his tasks.

So, when he sees a car crash, he is surprised to find a news crew really quickly on the scene. Apparently these guys just listen to police scanners, try to get great footage of crime, either in progress or with people hurt, and sell it to news stations for some quick cash. After all, these news stations want to have the most exclusive footage and first to get the better ratings!

Sounds cool. Louis should get into that business. Just needs a camera, a police scanner, and an ability to haggle just how hard could it be? Anyone can do it, right? Even that dude from American Psycho could pull it off. Also starring Bill Paxton, Rene Russo, and Riz Ahmed.

I will admit I only said that because of the resemblance in the picture, despite the fact that I still haven’t seen it (shh).

Trust me, this is one of those shitty reviews where I describe the plot in a terrible, vague way. That is just because I need filler and don’t want to really spoil anything that happens.

Nightcrawler is that good. I went in knowing close to nothing and boy was I surprised in so many ways imaginable. I heard that Jake was supposed to be the second prince in Into the Woods with Chris Pine, but had to cancel because he was doing this movie. That made me upset. I want to see Jake singing in agony, damn it!

But I am incredibly happy, in retrospect, that he went the Nightcrawler route instead. Gyllenhaal dropped over 30 pounds for this role, making himself a creepy skinny dude with big bulging eyes. Nothing like his ripped Prince of Persia self. BUT HE WAS SO GOOD IN THIS ROLE.

Shit. I thought this would be a lame drama. But it was captivating, tense, somewhat scary, good, and it didn’t go the ways I thought it would. Louis Bloom is a despicable character and creation, but I want to see him do a lot of things. I don’t want a sequel, that’d be weird. But maybe just side stories or something. I think I am just describing shitty fanfiction. Bloom is probably the best bad guy of 2014. And honestly, I feel like this film came completely out of nowhere.

Nightcrawler is just continuing the trend of great Gyllenhaal movies coming out. I feel like the only reason he has a bad rap at all is due to Bubble Boy, which is silly, because Bubble Boy rocks.

I am not going to review A Brony Tale in a vacuum. I try to, I do. But there is another Brony based documentary that I reviewed this year. Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony, it cames out in 2012, two years ago, at a much higher point of the My Little Pony popularity. I mean, it came out before My Little Pony: Equestria Girls!

This one apparently has a much stricter focus. It is specificually about Ashleigh Bell. “Who is Ashleigh Bell? Kill yourself!”

Ashleigh Bell is a voice actress and singer, made most famous for voicing two of the five ponies, Rainbow Dash and Apple Jack. She is now a huge deal to a community and she doesn’t know how to cope.

I guess with the title of A Brony Tale, it makes sense to be about one person. One Brony. Not sure which Brony though, because Ashleigh doesn’t refer to herself as one ever and only talks about them as groups of people.

If Ashleigh wanted to be about 20% cooler, she would call herself a Brony as well.

Oh man, if you wanted to learn a lot about Ashleigh Bell in a documentary, you still didn’t come to the right place. “What?” you may ask. “You don’t learn a lot about Ashleigh Bell in a documentary about Ashleigh Bell? But it is 80 minutes long!”

I know right. You get the basic information. What she did before MLP, her band, her first Brony experience, but you don’t delve anywhere. Mostly I think because the documentary seems to focus mostly on other people and not her. We get some random person who started a famous MLP page. We got several Bronies defending their hobby and the idea of masculinity. We get a MLP history lesson. Basically, we get a lot of things we got in the previous documentary, but in worse less focused ways.

This documentary is an incredible waste of time. Like, it is jarring to see a person go from regular voice to a cartoon character and it can freak me out too. But that doesn’t make this a great documentary. I watched the whole thing and I still don’t know why she had to spend so much documentary time wondering if she even wanted to go to the BroNYC Con or whatever. Of course you want to go and be worshipped and make cash. Why make an easy decision seem like a hard one. Fake drama for your documentary? I don”t know.

Just. Ugh. The last Brony documentary was just a pointless circle jerk. This is like an even more pointless slight arousal that gets wasted.