The happy drink

On the cover of "Esquire"

"The new December Esquire came out yesterday (or the day before), with six actors being celebrated on the cover for having given the mag's choices for "Performances of the Year." Denzel Washington in American Gangster, Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There, Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, Robert Downey in Zodiac, Emile Hirsch in Into The Wild and Jake Gyllenhaal in...Rendition?

It's not that Gyllenhaal plays his Egypt-based CIA guy badly or ineffectively, but that Egypt-based CIA guy is written as such a revoltingly passive wuss. As Esquire's Mike D'Angelo points out, Gyllenhaal "spends much of Rendition standing in the corner of a dark room, watching as some poor soul gets beaten, doused and fried...it's a near-silent performance."

For me, Gyllenhaal's inactivity is infuriating. He's not just a guy doing nothing, but an emblem of do-nothing types the world over. Two thirds of the way through a screening of Rendition at the Toronto Film Festival I leaned over to a friend sitting next to me and said, motioning at Gyllenhaal, "Is he going to do anything or what?"

Gyllenhaal's guy finally makes a move at the very end, yes, but it comes way, way too late".
Source: Hollywood-elsewhere.com

More car situations

Infatuated with Reese

Ad hoc encounter

"We arrived about 10 minutes late, so we lost our table and had to wait to be seated. While we were waiting, a small, attractive blond woman walked in wearing jeans and a black wool coat. She faced the wall, and I could tell that she didn't want to be seen. Behind her walked in a taller guy with dark hair and a characteristically unshaven face. It was Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, standing four feet away from me, dining at Ad Hoc. The hostess seated them immediately in the back corner, about 20 feet away from our table, and that was about all I saw of them for the remainder of the evening. I have to admit, I was kind of starstruck. I guess that's California".
Source: Aaronadalja.blogspot.com

Car situations

They are cute when they go errand, but they are closer (more accomplice) inside their car. That vibe you get on-the-road, driving and feeling sexy either you're alone or in good company, entering or leaving your car.

"Rendition" review (some spoilers)

"Rendition," starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon, is a good example of this syndrome. Scenes of powerful realism alternate with melodrama. This is not altogether a bad thing: Melodrama can be enlivening; it can even heighten the political content. But more often, and this is usually the case in "Rendition," the clash of trenchant political drama and thriller histrionics produces a jarringly bifurcated experience.

[...] Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) is an Egyptian-American chemical engineer returning home to Chicago from a business trip in Cape Town when, on frail evidence, he is linked to a terrorist bombing in an unnamed North African country that killed 19 people including a top CIA case officer. Whitman authorizes Anwar's secret abduction to North Africa and subsequent torture.

Taking over for the slain case officer, Douglas Freeman (Gyllenhaal) starts out stoic and grows incrementally more disgusted with the waterboarding and electrodes administered by the cop in charge (Igal Naor), whose daughter's boyfriend, unbeknownst to him or her, is a local radical Islamist (Moa Khouas).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Anwar's highly distraught and very pregnant wife, Isabella (Witherspoon), heads to Washington, D.C., to track her missing husband's whereabouts. An old college friend (Peter Saarsgard) who works for a liberal senator (Alan Arkin) does his best to root out the situation in the shadowy corridors of power – actually, they are brightly lit, which is scarier – but is stonewalled at every turn. It finally falls to Freeman to do the right thing.

Given how little emotional range is written into his role, Gyllenhaal does a convincing job of rendering the arc of Freeman's disillusion. Chastised by Whitman for having his doubts about Anwar's guilt, he responds flatly and devastatingly, "It's my first torture."

To the filmmakers' credit, the motivations of the key players are not all black and white. Freeman is not a saint and Whitman, for all her imperiousness, is not a cartoon meanie. Everyone involved in Anwar's rendition has a strong justification for what they do, which makes for a more believably terrifying scenario.

But about two-thirds of the way through, "Rendition" takes a bad turn and sells out most of what made it worth watching in the first place. Witherspoon is given little to do except look weepy, Freeman's change of heart is Q.E.D., and the radical Islamist subplot overwhelms the action, which becomes so confusingly structured that I thought the projectionist had misplaced a reel. Complex issues are magically resolved with a single call to The Washington Post.

And so it is that a hard-nosed political thriller devolves into a wish-fulfilment fantasy". Source: www.csmonitor.com