I think I may have intended something for top right but what, can’t remember.

Okay, real quick: I wanted to mention a movie I saw last month, Blue Ruin.

Blue Ruin is a very low budget independent revenge story that is solidly filmed, acted, edited, etc. Super tight, highly recommended. There’s a guy who became a drifter years after his parents are killed, and then finds out that the killer is being released from prison, so he decides to take revenge, only to risk the life of his remaining family members once he leaves plenty of evidence of his actions. One thing about indie films is how they make use of the limited sets they may have access too. You start to notice after a while. Sometimes a bottle episode within a movie makes sense, sometimes a good portion of a movie is just the actors in the same room reacting to news from off camera. Here, characters inhabit spaces and just wait, and the suspense builds up and pays off scene after scene. I have a few raised eyebrows of disbelief – the incompetence of the film is contained within the lead character, who becomes kind of a clumsy Rambo character in the face of the advancing enemy. Still great, with an ending that left me wondering what happens next. Well done, highly recommended.

I tried I tried I TRIED to watch Nightcrawler, and yes I already knew it had nothing to do with the Marvel character. “I gave up halfway through” is not a reliable commentary, but that’s what happened. It looked good but the main character is like something out of American Psycho without the narration. Jake Gyllanhaal is this low level thief who spouts empty corporate interview tips as he goes from selling stolen scrap metal to breaking into the paparazzi style true crime footage. I lost interest because there was nothing about his character I felt concern about. Halfway through, he starts to blackmail the TV producer, which is when I realized as her verbalized his willingness to take advantage of her advanced age in a medium where youth is celebrated, that I was watching something about someone with no redeeming qualities. I knew we weren’t going to root for him, but if we’re going the American Psycho path, why tune in at all? I knew I’d have to be in a mood to watch something with a challenging narrative, but to watch him go from unrepentant crook to whatever this is leading to, I wasn’t interested if the main character was going to be awful to a woman who probably has enough to deal with on a day to day basis. Sorry. It looked great though.