What's gone wrong with TV news: Nightcrawler

There are a bunch of things wrong with Dan Gilroy's but plenty right with it as well and on balance it's a very engaging, scary, and, sadly, accurate account of a deeply disturbed guy who finds his calling as a freelance videographer who sells crime and disaster footage to local LA TV media. We meet Lewis Bloom, played well by Jake Gyllenhaal in a real cast-against-type move, when he's a petty thief lifting scrap metal and manhole covers by night to sell illegally to a junk dealer. When he's caught in the act by a security cop at a freight yard, he punches out the guard and steals his watch - very, very hard to imagine Gyllenhaal doing this, but it sets him up as a crazy young man. The junk business isn't working too well, when by chance he comes across a fatal car accident and watches the crew filming the rescue attempt, and from that point on he builds up his own business - mostly by going way beyond the boundaries of ethics and personal safety to get the best footage (moving a dead body for a better angle, entering the house where there's a home invasion and filming the dead bodies, ultimately failing to disclose vital info he has about a murder in order to set up the arrest of the suspects in a police raid that he films exclusively). What's wrong about the film is how it pushes us way beyond credibility: first of all, who is this guy? He arises just ab ovo, with no back story whatsoever. Now if he's supposed to be an aspiring entrepreneur, no matter how crazy, what's he been doing all this time? It appears that this might be his first night stealing scrap metal - where has he been? Who is he? Second, for the key scenes to work in any conceivable way we have to imagine that somehow he always arrives at the crime or accident scene well before the police and rescue - which is impossible, as he hears about these events from the police scanner. (It can happen, once in a great while - happened to me as a reporter once in fact - but not routinely.) On the plus side, however, in part because he is cast against type and in part because he's a thinking guy and not just a thrill seeker out for kicks, Gyllenhaal's character is very creepy and suspicious - we suspect the worst from him at the outset and we're right. The night footage of LA is consistently beautiful and moody. Most of all, sad to say, the film is dead on about what's happened to TV news over the past 15 years. I'm a bit sick of movies bashing journalists, usually print journalists for that matter, but few if any have taken on this topic and it's very true at real: local TV news no longer covers the news in any serious manner - just death and carnage (if there's no local footage, they'll use national), which to me is one of the great maladies of our culture today - local TV coverage has literally encouraged people to think that world, in fact their community, is a dangerous place full of crime and mayhem and disaster, not a place where almost everyone lives and thinks and loves and aspires and just tries to get on with life. Despite its flaws, a film worth seeing, and even pondering.