Sporadic dabs of noirishness: Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac, Malin Akerman, Carla Gugino

Carla Gugino and Malin Akerman attending Comic Con 2009
Ryan Phillippe and Malin Akerman attending the 35th Annual TIFF premiere for 'The Bang Bang Club' on 16th September 2010
Malin Akerman in Details magazine photoshoot October 2010

Cardigan by Topman.
Underwear by VPL."Akerman has dabbled in nudity in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and left fanboys breathless in Zack Snyder's megabudget Watchmen. Malin Akerman as Laurie Jupiter / Silk Spectre II in "Watchmen" (2009)
Now she is going small, Sundance, and angsty to the point of serious with her next two films—this month's The Romantics, costarring Katie Holmes and Josh Duhamel, Malin Akerman and Anna Paquin hang out on the vineyard set of "The Romantics" on 11th November 2009

and early 2011's Happythankyoumoreplease, written and directed by How I Met Your Mother's Josh Radnor. Akerman's indie hot streak has taken her to Shreveport, Louisiana, where she's filming the crime thriller Catch .44 with Bruce Willis and Forest Whitaker.
Malin Akerman and Ben Stiller in "The Heartbreak Kid" (2007)Malin Akerman in Dirrty Glam Magazine (2010)

Running with the rough-and-tumble crowd seems to have amplified Akerman's swagger. "I carry a Glock—I'm gangster now!" she says, referring to her part in Catch .44 as a drug dealer on the run from a psychotic hit man.Malin Akerman in 'Hollywood noir' photoshoot for C magazine

When asked what makes a Glock a Glock, however, she stops short. "Why'd you have to call me out on that?" she asks, suddenly sounding every bit the ingenue. "They just told me it was a Glock, all right? I was like, "Cool. I got a Glock." Source: www.details.com

"Sally Jupiter, a former Depression-era burlesque dancer who morphs into the Silk Spectre, a crime fighter with a yen for garters, high-heeled boots, and long black gloves. "Carla has that old-Hollywood quality about her—that indescribable glamour," Snyder says. "I feel like she got ripped out of the forties and put into our time."
Carla Gugino as Sally Jupiter in "Watchmen" (2009)

Sally Jupiter, Snyder says, is supposed to carry around "the faded opulence of a bygone era," which is apt, since even Gugino's memories can sound like images from some Citizen Kane snow globe. She remembers how her father, an orthodontist and inventor in Florida, would fly her to Europe for the holidays. Her parents were divorced; for a while she and her free-spirited mother lived on the fog-ribboned cliffs of Big Sur in California. Gugino remembers "moon parties" on the beach to celebrate each lunar phase in the astrological calendar". Source: www.details.com

"Carla Gugino has played more than a few dangerous women —women haunted by their past, who’ve made bad choices, who taunt men to their doom. She tears into her roles as if with talons, showing an alarming capacity for risk taking in neo-noir tales (The Singing Detective, Watchmen, Sin City) that careen on the edge of true darkness, halted only by a slight wink, a strand of irony to protect us from the gaping maw of no-holds-barred film noir.
Carla Gugino and Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum (2006)

And as noir relies on the stark contrast between lightness (home, hearth, family) and the underbelly, Gugino’s career is a study in contrasts—gleeful, kid-friendly movies (Spy Kids, Night at the Museum) in which she enjoys “just dancing on the surface of something” and stories that go to the darkest of dark places. “What I love about noir,” she says, “is under all that style and flash, it’s also ultimately bare bones about that fight between and the dark and the light within ourselves.Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in "Double Indemnity" (1944)

Watching the noir classic Double Indemnity again recently, Gugino found herself feeling surprisingly sympathetic toward Barbara Stanwyck’s blond spiderwoman, noting that she must rely on her sexuality because she “has no other tools at her disposal.” In the end, noir offers up these women who have “this kind of inner strength but also a certain level of damage.” Source: www.latimesmagazine.com

"Jake Gyllenhaal's boyish Graysmith is a portrait in stuntedness, if not regression: he proudly admits to having been an "Eagle Scout, actually, first class", and corrals his children to work on the case with him; when wife Melanie hands him divorce papers, he gives her a vaguely worried look but doesn't protest.As games go, Zodiac - no less than Fincher's Se7en, The Game and Fight Club - is rigorously masculine, a double buddy movie that stretches over several years and underscores Graysmith's desperate need for fraternal approval, even as it folds and unfolds around the pivotal figure of Allen (the excellent John Carroll Lynch).
Jake Gyllenhaal as Robert Graysmith in "Zodiac" (2007)
Aside from moments of heightened mise en scène (achieved through tracking and crane shots, low angles and sporadic dabs of noirishness) and temporal condensing (a time-lapse sequence, a quick montage), the tone is pleasingly flat and mundane, evoking the demoralising grind of police work in a pre-feminist, pre-technological era. As such, Zodiac is considerably more adult than both Se7en, which salivates over the macabre cat-and-mouse game it plays with the audience, and the macho brinkmanship of Fight Club". Source: www.bfi.org.uk