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7 45 Issue 70 / 2014 FILM guestlist.net St. Vincent is a film about a cantankerous old man who despises everyone and the young kid who makes him see there is good in this darn cruel rock of ours. That also happens to be the premise of about 20 other films: Up, Denis The Menace, Bad Santa, and to some extent Gran Torino. Unfortunately, St. Vincent doesn't add anything new to the canon. In fact, it merely feels like an ersatz amalgamation of qualities explored in those films. Matthau perfected the resistant baby-sitter neighbour in Denis The Menace, Up had the misanthrope's heart-rending backstory, Gran Torino tackled the unpalatable racist views. Bad Santa had... well it had the most important element - the unpredictable, demented element. The late great Roger Ebert praised Bad Santa for successfully violating 'unwritten parameters governing mainstream American movies'. St. Vincent, on the other hand, feels like a film that pondered violating those parameters but ultimately felt uncomfortable at doing so. Vincent is not bad at all; he looks after the people in his life, he's a brave war vet, he's got a fluffy fat cat. So what if he took the kid to a bar that feels like a slightly darker Cheer? There were no repercussions, no bad mistakes made. Therefore, we are never convinced that Vincent was a truly reprobate character at the beginning of the film, and so don't believe that he actually went through that much of a transformation, despite the film's efforts to convince us otherwise. Compared to Thornton's Willie T. Soke he's always been bona fide saint. It's only the chemistry between Murray and Jaeden Lieberher as Oliver that elevates this film above a mere soppy indie flick. Dan Gilroy's picture gets the Guestlist treatment, and is found wanting. Cast against the backdrop of a seemingly perpetual L.A midnight, where the neon is as omnipresent as the moral degradation, Nightcrawler takes as its subject matter the seedy world of freelance urban reportage, as groups of camera jockeys compete against each other to capture the most gruesome, and therefore newsworthy, images from stories around the town. Car crashes, armed robberies, fire, murder, the titular nightcrawlers have no scruples when it comes to getting up close and personal with the most abject of human tragedy. It's through this miasma of the unsavoury that Lou Bloom, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, finds his economic salvation. Lou Bloom is a fascinating idea for a character, and Gyllenhaal excels in conveying the latent nervous energy behind his impassive façade. In conversation Bloom has a distinct sense of uncanny valley about him; making seemingly all the right moves, presenting himself with a blasé confidence straight out of a management training video: "I'm a hard worker. I set high goals. My motto is, if you wanna win the lottery, you have to make the money to buy a ticket." The problem with Nightcrawler is that Gilroy lacks the self-awareness to identify this voyeuristic impulse in his own cinema. Gilroy has sabotaged himself here, his attack on the "if it bleeds it leads" cutthroat mentality would appear rather trite were it not for the increasingly grisly actions of Bloom. The anonymous filmmaking only heightens the sense he has nothing to say, his mise en scene failing to visualise the interior life of his one dimensional protagonist. As a portrait of unethical journalism, Gilroy's film does not rise above that which it seeks to critique. ST. VINCENT IS NO BAD SANTA - 'ST. VINCENT' REVIEW NIGHTCRAWLER: MOST OVERHYPED FILM OF THE YEAR?