Oh So Geeky

Photo Credit: Demolition / Fox Searchlight Pictures Workaholic Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) struggles to express his grief after his wife dies from a tremendous car accident. Unlike his in-laws, or his own parents, even co-workers, Mitchell just can't connect with his loss. Suppressing his pain seems to be the immediate answer. He throws himself into work and then is caught up in a friendship with a customer service agent Karen (Naomi Watts) he started writing letters to when the vending machine at the hospital didn't work. In 2014 director Jean-Marc Vallée's exquisitely adapted  author Cheryl Strayed's  Wild  to explore the weight of her mother's death as she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. Just two years later with a similar premise,  Demolition  is simply a weaker version of its predecessor. Vallée's second take on bereavement focuses on a protagonist realizing the cage he felt trapped by in his marriage - almost like he wouldn't realize ho...

photograph by Dove Shore Every six months or so it seems a title of Best Leading Man Ever is passed around. Cleverly, the media tries to distract us into thinking there is only one actor who has ever earned the blue ribbon of being leading man material. But really stardom is a cycle: One month it's George Clooney, the next it's Brad Pitt, or Ben Affleck or Matthew McConaughey, and onwards. Though the media tries to convince us, there's hardly ever just one man in the limelight, behind the curtain, or capable of having it all. One actor comes to mind who has recently popped up on everyone's radar, and has utilized his nearly lifelong recognition in film with attentive creativity and ambition. That guy, which comes to mind, is Jake Gyllenhaal. For such a mildly young talent (34 years old), it's difficult to remember that he has been tagged with fame since he was eleven years old. And yet his career has garnered just about the right amount of everything it ...

Photo Credit: Nightcrawler / Open Road Films Blood sells in the world of the evening news, and at the foothills of Los Angeles, the sharks come out at night. Known as stringers or nightcrawlers, are videogoers; men and women who chase tragedy and package their footage of roadside crashes and neighborhood crimes to television stations. One shark hungry for the entrepreneurial life is Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), a desperate but ambitious young man who finds his calling in the supply and demand of voyeurism and violence. From thief to cameraman, Bloom studiously climbs his way up the ladder of a local station selling footage he captures of car accidents and jackings and robberies. Eventually a triple-homicide is a make-or-break venture that threatens to his video gathering production out of the water. But Bloom isn't like other cutthroat videogoers converting tragedy into dollar-sign motivated adrenaline rushes. He's a shell of a person cashing in on bloodshed like...