Do-Gooders Stars

"This week's hot Hollywood couple, Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, danced briefly but divinely last night at a beyond-posh Toronto Film Festival party co-sponsored by TIME magazine. Across the way in the huge Design Exchange room, once home to the Toronto Stock Exchange, George Clooney stood in a corner, pinned by the admiration of other, less famous swells. If the three eminences had come there to schmooze with a TIME movie critic, they missed their big chance. Even so, they seemed as happy as celebrities ought to be, given their privileged status in our bi-national movie culture.

Clooney, whom I'd call the exemplary Hollywood star, has been especially generous in lending his aura to well-chosen issues and charities. The top actors also appear in films that are, in their subject matter and their underdog status in the commercial movie universe, their own worthy causes. That's what brought Reese and Jake and George up to Toronto: to raise awareness of thorny issues, to speak up for movies that make bold statements and, in the process, to get rivers of publicity for their politically and emotionally charged endeavors.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke's famous phrase could serve as the text for both Clooney's Michael Clayton and the Witherspoon-Gyllenhaal Rendition. Both are fictionalized expos�s: the first of corporate malfeasance, the second of Bush Administration policy in its war on Muslim extremists. At the center of each is a man trapped in a dilemma between doing what is damn well expected of him and risking his livelihood, and maybe his life, by doing the right thing.

Clooney did that by not taking a salary on Michael Clayton. The entire film was made for about $20 million, or a top star's salary on a typical movie; but it has the sheen of a picture four times its budget. It also carries the deep distrust of U.S. corporations except for the movie conglomerates that has become the badge of Hollywood liberalism. (At the Venice Film Festival, where Michael Clayton played, Clooney got annoyed when he was asked to square the sentiments of this movie with his appearing in commercials sponsored by giant companies. He replied, "I'm not going to apologize to you for trying to make a living once in a while," then turning off the mic and kept muttering. A few moments later he was his genial self again.)

[...] Clooney keeps impressing me by his alternation of frivolous and serious roles, and his apparently effortless ability to make both convincing. He can go from heartthrob to Oscar candidate simply by relaxing his smiling face into a rictus of exhaustion. The frown lines dominate here; Clayton is worn out, and the movie spends a little too much time documenting his dissipation. It's more compelling when it follows the money, and the other clues Edens has sleuthed out about how far a company will go to protect its good name (and its stock price) by suppressing information about the toxic effects of its policies.

Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter (all three Bourne movies) making his directorial debut here, balances character study with thriller elements, while adroitly shifting the plot's sequence of tenses over a four-day period. Whatever lethargy his movie falls into in its early passages, it rouses itself for a finale about which I should say little, except that it's likely to send the audience home happy and satisfied. I guess it's just the contrarian in me that wonders if real corporations are so awful, and the stalwart souls and whistle blowers who work for them so numerous, as they are in the Hollywood films that mean to expose the one and praise the other. Source: Time.com/time/arts

Singing "Jackson"

Female-Crushes Video

SOME OF MY CINEMATICAL FEMALE-CRUSHES

Maggie in "Stranger than Fiction"

STRANGER THAN FICTION - WHOLE WORLD WIDE


Download "Whole world wide" song by Wreckless Eric.

"Ferrell cuts an improbably romantic figure when Crick, desperately trying to stay on track, faces a gorgeous hurdle right in front of him: Maggie Gyllenhaal as Ana Pascal, a bake-shop owner who has refused to pay all of her taxes except for ones she can connect to social services. Gyllenhaal is delicious as a woman who gave up law for baking when she discovered the joys of cooking for her law-school study group. If there's such a thing as a quick sensual languor, Gyllenhaal has it: She imbues Pascal with a sensory awareness that extends every gesture, every syllable, into something delectable. She helps you experience Pascal through Crick's eyes and heart and stomach. As a friend said, you want to eat her cookies".
Source: Baltimoresun.com

TIFF 2007 Parade

Jake Gyllenhaal.Michael Caine.Sean Penn.Matt Damon.Charlize Theron.Ryan Gosling.Evan Rachel Wood.Abbie Cornish.Cate Blanchett and Abbie Cornish.James McAvoy and Keira Knightley.Jena Malone.Mark Ruffalo.

The Invisibe guy

Sep 09, 2007 04:30 AM
Geoff Pevere
MOVIE CRITIC

"When it came to committing to play a CIA analyst who finds himself a reluctant but complicit witness to torture in the forthcoming thriller Rendition, Jake Gyllenhaal was sold on something that might hold a special allure for a movie star.

`"I liked the fact the guy was invisible."

Sprawled over a chair in a well air-conditioned hotel suite, Gyllenhaal, 26, is basking in relief from the stifling room in which he has just done a dozen or so consecutive TV interviews.

There was no air conditioning in that room and the fan was on the fritz, but for appearance's sake, the Academy Award-nominated actor was compelled to keep wearing his natty suit jacket and open white shirt collar ensemble.

Though that hardy qualifies as torture – and certainly not compared to that endured by the Egyptian-American chemist whose sudden, CIA-sanctioned abduction to Egypt is what propels Rendition across three continents, several characters and a gamut of competing political perspectives – it was uncomfortable nonetheless.

First thing in the new room, Gyllenhaal strips down to trousers and a V-necked T-shirt. Second thing, he muses on where he took his inspiration from.

"Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold," he says with a laugh, only to instantly adopt a more serious demeanour. "I'm not kidding. I learned a lot from that performance about how to play a guy who's invisible. And who's silent."
"But I hope people don't walk out of the movie cheering for the guy," Gyllenhaal observes.

"Because he's just one guy. And what I really liked about this script is that there's no right and wrong, at least as far as my character is concerned. There's only does it work or not? And since he thinks the methods aren't working, he sees no point in them. And who knows if what he ultimately does really does anything anyway?"

The son of TV director Stephen Gyllenhaal and Losing Isaiah screenwriter Naomi Foner (his sister is actress Maggie Gyllenhaal), the actor grew up in a liberal-leaning, Democrat-supporting household in Los Angeles. "I get about 15 emails a day from my mother," he laughs. "And each one has links to all these political blogs she thinks I should check out."

But while he's not reluctant to admit he's political, Gyllenhaal does insist that politics and performance should be strictly chaperoned when they get too close – lest one take undue advantage of the other.

"What I really liked about this script," he says, "And what I really admired about Gavin (Hood, Rendition's South African-born director) is that politics is secondary to the human story. And as an actor I'm always interested in the human side of politics. The thing about this movie is that everybody believes they're acting out of the best intentions. They all think they're doing some kind of good. And they're all acting on what they've been told.

"But who's to say what you're being told is the truth?" adds Gyllenhaal. "I think people question whether they're being told the truth in situations like this. And who can blame them? Even worse, a lot of people have even lost the want for the truth."

For Gyllenhaal, that's the issue: not that people are being lied to about what their governments may be doing on their behalf, but that they may not care.

"I heard somebody say recently that people actually prefer ignorance," he says. "I know I do a lot of the time. The truth can be painful."

If Gyllenhaal took a lesson away from making Rendition, it was what the filmmaker told him about art and politics. Gyllenhaal describes him as "robust, energized and very wise and very political" – and very wise. "He always said to me how important it was for him as a filmmaker not to judge. People tend to see artists talking about politics as a kind of judgement. And then you've lost them". Source: Thestar.comJake attending the US Open (Men's Final Championship Game). Pictures by Iheartjake.com

Thriller with conscience

"As as result, Gavin Hood's Rendition plays out as a crackling good political thriller with a simmering conscience.

In the fictionalized case of El-Ibrahimi– whose pregnant American-born wife Isabella (Reese Witherspoon) will instigate an investigation that will lead straight to Washington – the movie nails both the complexity of motivations behind the incident and a very good justification for paranoia.

Structured as a propulsive clock-ticker that spans several countries, a couple of dozen characters and a multitude of conflicting but equally articulated points of view, Rendition is about what happens when the machinery of government permits its own self-interest to trump those of the people it ostensibly exists to serve.

At what point, it asks, does the practice of protecting democracy contradict the very values that make it worth protecting? When do the means violate the end?

While the pregnant Isabella's campaign leads her to the office of a sympathetic Democratic senator's aide (Peter Sarsgaard), the detainment of El-Ibrahimi draws the callow CIA analyst Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) right into the belly of the beast.

Having been conscripted to replace the agent murdered by a terrorist bomb in a public square, Freeman must act as a silent advisor to the Egyptian interrogator (the marvelously imposing actor Igor Naor), as the latter – whose daughter is secretly seeing a would-be Muslim extremist – indulges any means necessary to extract the prisoner's confession.

His conscience increasingly strained by what he's seeing, Freeman blurts the word "torture" to the top-level CIA officer (a terrifically chilly Meryl Streep) when queried about the progress he's making.

Tersely informed that "the United States government does not practice torture," Freeman is ordered back into the dungeon to get results. It's either that or sacrifice his career – one that began, as one imagines so many well-intentioned careers did, on Sept. 12, 2001". Source: Thestar.com/Special/FilmFest