"You may not know his name. You may not even know his face. But look out Jake Gyllenhaal – indie prince Joseph Gordon-Levitt is fast becoming one of the hottest properties in Hollywood.
Like so many of his peers, the 27-year-old almost ended up as road-kill. As a teenager, the actor hated being a celebrity. He hated being pimped out as a poster boy during his six-year stretch on suburban-alien sitcom 3rd Rock From The Sun. At his best, the adult Gordon-Levitt is a stealthy, cerebral performer – always shining without shouting. Recently, he’s been slotting nimbly into studio films like Memento-style heist thriller The Lookout; and Killshot, in which he plays a psychopathic assassin stalking Diane Lane. Next on our screens, though, is Kimberly (Boys Don’t Cry) Peirce’s eagerly anticipated boys-back-from-Iraq drama Stop-Loss, in which Gordon-Levitt co-stars with Ryan Phillippe. To date, he has kept a tight steer on script choices – no youth romps, no flowery rom-coms. Instead he seeks out troubled, edgy roles that showcase his dark side. -Is it Joseph or Joe? -It depends who’s talking. And, more importantly, it depends on how they say it. If a pretty French girl wants to call me Josef then I’m down with that. -The new film stuff all happened after a film I did called Manic, which I made in 2001. I played a mentally ill kid. If there was one hurdle then it might have been Manic. -Rian Johnson saw it and cast me in Brick. Gregg Araki also saw it and cast me in Mysterious Skin, which was the first time that anyone had asked me to be sexy. -What was it like taking Brick and Mysterious Skin to Sundance in the same year? -It’s a cliché to say it, but that was a dream come true. To go to Sundance had been a promise I’d made to myself since I was a kid working on TV. So ten years later when I was able to go there with two movies that I was really proud of, it meant the world to me. -Do you lose yourself in your characters? -The simple answer is no. Some actors stay in character on set. I think that’s impressive but I’ve never done it. But when I went home at night on Stop-Loss I was still very much in the mood of that character. It’s a strange thing to say about yourself, but I change a lot with different roles. I’m a volatile person. -Do you think you’re attractive? -[Laughs] That’s not a fair question. How can you answer that without sounding like a tool? -Is music crucial to you? -Yeah. We’re all made of music. It’s the most basic thing in the universe. -Do-Do you Google yourself? -Yes. It was a triumphant day for me about a year ago when my website hitrecord.org came up first on the Google page under my name. I make short films and put them on there. Now I think it’s number four. -What were your favourite films growing up? -Well, Dumbo still hits me harder than just about any other. Dumbo or Bambi couldn’t happen nowadays. In this business where accountants and lawyers are now in charge of how stories get told, the movies are sucking. -Are you in the frame to do the live-action Akira with Leonardo DiCaprio? -That’s just a rumour. They haven’t finished the script yet. I’m waiting to read it. -Are you worried that doing big movies like G.I. Joe will make your life difficult? -In what way? In terms of fame. I don’t feel famous. That word gives me the creeps. Personally, I don’t think fame has that much to do with it – it’s about making good movies. When I was younger, if people recognised me, I would lie or hide. I’d rather have just gone to work and then burnt the film. I was a selfish little kid, really. But now I want to do stuff that matters. So when people come up to me and say that a movie I was in made them laugh or cry, it means everything to me". "Stop-Loss" is in cinemas from April 25.
Kip Pardue: "Nora plays Princess Ithaca, who is a person who is misunderstood, to say the least, and she lives in a castle on the hill in this kind of idyllic space. My character, William, enters her life by chance actually. And as he enters into her life he realizes that he’s going to play a much bigger role and finds out that Princess Ithaca really does have powers beyond the mere mortals that most of us are. It ends up being this tale of saving mythological creatures from certain disaster, and Princess Ithaca needs William’s help to make the transition to the next princess.-I notice that you’ve both worked on both TV and film, and I was wondering how you feel production on the film set has differed from the TV set and with your relationship to the other actors. Nora Zehetner in the indie flick "Fifty Pills"
N. Zehetner: Actually I do a lot of independent films and they’re on tight schedules too. But I think generally speaking it’s a tighter schedule. We shot this entire thing in four weeks. Luckily Kip and I knew each other before, so we had a nice time in Toronto. K. Pardue: I’m sure Nora will embarrass me about the dancing situation.
N. Zehetner: No, I wasn’t going to. I was going to let you go for it. Well actually we went to a dance lesson, or dance rehearsal, because there is this big choreographed dancing, which was delightful for me, I was thrilled, because I took dance when I was younger, ballet. And so just to be in a dance studio was really fun. Kip was not as pleased to spend the day in a rehearsal studio learning ballroom dancing. And I had my hoopskirt inside out, is what I realized happened, so it didn’t really flow properly. So I was constantly tripping in rehearsal until somebody told me I had it inside out, and I felt pretty silly.-How does it feel to play a part in a Disney fairytale?
N. Zehetner: It was wonderful for me. I had so much fun. When they sent me the script and it was called it Princess, I was like, please let it be about a real princess. And I read it and it was and I was so excited and I immediately kind of got thrown into this series of fittings where they were building all these dresses on me. And it was just kind of an amazing thing to go into my trailer in the morning in sweats and come out in these gowns with tiaras and masses of hair and it was kind of a fairytale, a little girl’s dream. It was lovely. -Could you talk a little bit about the other upcoming projects that you guys have lined up.
K. Pardue: Nora.
N. Zehetner: Oh, me first. Ok. I have a film called "Spooner" that they’re just finishing right now. It’s kind of a sweet, quirky kind of romantic comedy with Matthew Lillard. And I did a small part in "The Brothers Bloom", that has an amazing cast. It’s a great movie. I just saw it the other day. I think it comes out in the fall. I don’t know. Nora and Noah Segan (who played Dode in "Brick") will coincide again in "The Brothers Bloom", -this guy Noah is an underrated intense actor and totally a hottie, keep an eye on him!-
N. Zehetner: I have a couple of other things lined up to do but I think those are the only ones that are completed. Oh, and "Remarkable Power", I guess. I don’t know what’s going on with that, which Kip is in. "Princess" is obviously a strong fantasy-based movie and I know Nora has been in "Heroes" as well". Source: www.buzzfocus.com
"When I worked in a factory, I'd go to the movies on a Saturday night and sit alone in the back row watching. If the film was good, I mean really great, that movie could carry me through the entire next week on my dreary job in the plant. That's what I think movies should be all about, giving people that kind of fantasy! Carrying them to other places. That's what they did for me." -Marilyn Monroe.
"Douglas is perfect playing the uptight businessman Nicholas, cleverly riffing on his Oscar-winning performance as the cold-blooded Gordon Gekko in WALL STREET. Fincher's Kafkaesque carnival show is an exercise in taut filmmaking that mischievously pulls a seemingly endless supply of rugs out from under both Nicholas and, even more impressive, the viewer". Source: www.lovefilm.com "To say "The game" is a nightmare would be an understatement. Like Nick, the moviegoer is left guessing. Lines between reality and fantasy are not just blurred, they are indistinguishable. The director, David Fincher, is a master at placing characters in vexing situations and bleak locations. Both of those elements are present here. Part of the film is shot on location in Mexico. That sequence alone is such a fundamental moment in the breaking of Nicholas that one could analogize it to a descent into hell". Source: ramblingdoah.blogspot.com
-Black: I have these guilty pleasures, these failed films that don't work at all, but I'll watch them if they're on. Like "The Game".
-Wright: I like that film, but it should have ended with Michael Douglas shooting Sean Penn -- but then there's the airbag and T-shirts and Deborah Unger. It's like, after two hours of paranoia, as soon as he gets a novelty T-shirt he's fine with it.-Black: "The Game" would have worked for me if the elements related to each other instead of being just random shit -- let's see, that chair will blow up, the clown will come in, the car will go by with people wearing carrot suits, and the moon will shift two degrees in the sky -- I mean, there's no rhyme or reason to anything that happens, unless I'm missing something.
-Wright: Yeah, yeah, yeah! Bruce Willis is aging into quite a nice grizzled man. When he showed up in Planet Terror I thought I could happily watch him being a badass for the next twenty years. Having said that, the fact that you have bald Bruce for Die Hard 4 is just wrong. They should have CGIed his hair back!
-Black: Well, I don't even know that Die Hard 4 isn't wrong.
-Wright: In every other territory, it's not called Live Free or Die Hard, it's Die Hard 4, because the phrase doesn't mean anything anywhere else.
"It is interesting to compare Plath’s innovations in fiction with those of her husband, Ted Hughes, for there was undoubtedly a jagged edge of rivalry between them as writers. His prose ventures were a reworking of fantasy and ancient history within the fantasy fiction genre Tolkien opened up with spectacular success when Lord of the Rings found an audience of both children and adults.
But Plath sailed into the relatively uncharted waters of the modern world seen through the eyes of young people—teenagers—and helped begin a literary trend that has exploded since [...]" Source: www.wsws.org "Grant fantasy a reality of its own and it crosses the barrier into the real world. There can, he argued, be no distinction between fantasy and a life. This was not the argument that, however mediated, fantasy will always include the kernel of the world from which it departs. For Hughes, there was no mediation: I was ‘surreptitiously rewriting the real history of Plath’s relationship to Hughes’, replacing it with my ‘own fantasy’, imposing an ‘invented identity’ on Sylvia Plath". Source: www.lrb.co.uk
"While talking to Metro.co.uk, actress Maggie Gyllenhaal did field one question for her approach on taking over the Rachel Dawes character in "The Dark Knight".
-Is your Batman character a damsel in distress?
-There are moments of that. Chris Nolan, the director, would joke about how I had to resign myself to being a little bit of a damsel in distress but he pushed me in other ways to make her a powerful character. I play a lawyer and have real relationships with the people I'm interacting with in the movie. She's very smart and a real rounded person. Of course, if you're the girl in Batman, you're going to be a damsel in distress to some extent but she's a really great character. So many people I play are a mess; Rachel's really clear about what's important to her and unwilling to compromise her morals, which made a nice change. She will be starring alongside Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman. The sequel was written by brothers Johnathan and Christopher Nolan with Chris once again behind-the-camera in the director's chair". Source: www.mania.com
Just how serious is Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon's relationship?
"I just think he loves her", Gyllenhaal's producer pal Ryan Kavanaugh told PEOPLE at the 23rd Annual "Salute to Youth" dinner in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Kavanaugh produced the actor's upcoming film, "Brothers", which he calls a "passion project."
"[Jake] has obviously had his fair share of dating", Kavanaugh says of Gyllenhaal's romantic life. "I think eventually you come to a place where you know what you want and seeing what we saw on the set, he was certainly completely devoted to her and really loves her."
Over the course of the film, the producer really got to know Gyllenhaal, 27. "He's awesome" says Kavanaugh. "He's a true artist and a really good guy. We used to workout every morning before going on the set so he became a good friend, too." Source: www.people.com Jake and Reese were spotted together on 8th April in Brentwood and also "The pair talked and traded sections of the Los Angeles Times at the table. Later that night, the couple was spotted again – this time at West Hollywood's Chateau Marmont where they celebrated Robert Downey Jr.'s 43rd birthday with Cameron Diaz, Gerard Butler, Ben Stiller and more". Source: www.people.com
"OK, so this isn't Ryan Gosling's hottest look . . . but we still do love seeing him, so we'll take what we can get. He and Kirsten Dunst were looking equally dirty haired on the set of "All Good Things" in NYC yesterday. The duo are rumored to be getting hot and heavy off the set (or at least dining together from time to time), and we all know how much Ryan loves to date his co-stars. Anything seems like the wrong call after adorable Rachel McAdams, but these two could grow on me as a couple. Just as long as he loses the wig when the cameras stop rolling".
"After telling George Sr. that George Michael doesn't want to be seen with him, George Sr. refutes his allegation by citing George Michael's girlfriend Ann as true cause for embarrassment. Instead of taking offense or coming back with some wry comment, Michael is taken out of his train of thought and concedes that even he doesn't know what the story behind that is". -Justin "What’s so brilliant about "Arrested Development" is that they make you care about the characters but are still willing to fuck with you because you care. George Michael and Maeby kiss in the pilot episode, but it’s pretty meaningless. By the time they finally kiss in “Righteous Brothers”, the last episode of the second season, it’s been a long time coming. You so want George Michael and Maeby to be able to express their feelings for one another, and then they do, and it’s just as beautifully awkward as anything else in the series; I know of no other show that’s ever been on television that’s been so evasive about something like the possibility that the main romantic arc of the show may be incestuous". -Kyle Source: progressiveboink.com
Maeby: Hey, do you remember that French movie we tried to sneak into once. You know, Dangerous Cousins?George Michael Bluth: Oh, no, that's not her kind of thing. I mean, if it maintains any of the complex eroticism of the French original...I like the way they think.
Tim Goodman of "The San Francisco Chronicle" called "Les cousins dangereux": “a ‘relative’ masterpiece of complex eroticism". "I like the way they think" -George Michael first made this comment about the French in "My Mother The Car" episode, as he remembered the kissing cousins in "Les cousins dangereux", whose remake Maeby was currently overseeing for Tantamount Studio, where she had conned her way. "Michael and his friend, Clark, have set up a faux Production Company called "Pure Gold Dynamite". "In the style of "Curb Your Enthusiasm", "Clark and Michael" follows a now-basic formula for the sophisticated adult sitcom —awkward showbiz hi-jinks mixed with unpredictable improvisation. Add to that a faux reality show premise in which a camera crew tracks our awkward, delusional duo and with three deceptively simple ingredients you’ve got a hilarious, hilarious show". Source: www.tilzy.tv
-Do you think George Michael will ultimately end up with Anne? -I think Anne's out of the picture. -So it's either Maeby or loneliness.
-The thing that blows my mind about it is that it's a 50 or so year old guy ["Youth in Revolt"s author C.D. Payne] writing about teenagers beating off together. It's totally filthy, yet totally smart at the same time, which, again, relates back to what “Arrested Development” does. -Michael Cera: Exactly. All it takes to capture people is to go really low-brow but hide it with smart talk". Source: Brianmpalmer.com
As a famous example of low-brow disguised in pop culture: Serge Gainsbourg wrote a sexually sly song ‘Les Sucettes’ (1966) for the pop star France Gall, which she thought was about sucking lollipops:
"I'm not very fond of poetry in general, but I appreciate reading Serge Gainsbourg's lyrics because of the games he plays with words, the tone of the words" -Françoise Hardy.
"Twisp’s overblown literary voice is one that pours intense diction out of its pores, fueled by intellectual pretension, Woody Allen-like punch lines and sexual double entendres."From his best friends, estranged father with a 19-year-old girlfriend and the both brainy and beautiful Sheeni Saunders herself, Youth In Revolt’s plethora of colorful characters - from even the most minor - are impossible to forget". Source: movies.gearlive.com
"Recently, I've been watching "Clark and Michael". If you're a fan of dark surreal nerd comedy like "Arrested Development" or "Superbad", this might be something you'll really enjoy". Source: www.comics2film.com
"I enjoy LA much more than I used to". "I love how it’s almost like a dreamworld". "However, gradually we begin to realize that Pilgrim's reality is not quite our reality. A girl he becomes obsessed with uses "subspace highways" to travel through people's dreams (including Pilgrim's) to deliver packages for Amazon.ca (this all takes place in Toronto). Bands are capable of playing songs that knock the entire audience unconscious. [...] Scott Pilgrim is neither typical boys' fiction or typical girls' fiction, but incorporates elements of both". Source: www.wetasphalt.com
"How I Met Michael Cera: Mr Edgar Wright, his brother Oscar, cowriter Michael Bacall and I met up in Toronto in June 2007. We were talking about the script, I was showing them the original locations, etcetera. We went to the CN Tower and then we met with Michael Cera. We ate sushi and saw "Live Free Or Die Hard". (When you hang out with Edgar Wright, you will be watching movies.) I was passing around some pages from Vol 4 while we waited for the movie to come on. The "Superbad" trailer played, and people around us were like "oh my god it's that guy".
Anyway, that's all. Since then, I think he's been making movies like every single day. And the casting took a year to go from a gleam in Edgar's eye to an on-paper reality". Source: destroyerzooey.livejournal.com
"Maidstone" (1970) was Norman Mailer's third movie. As far as he was concerned, this was the film that would finally erase the boundaries between fiction and truth, "the surface of reality and the less visible surface of psychological reality". "An actor's finest acting happens off-camera" -Michael Cera to Brian M. Palmer.
"Bobby Stork, a beer guzzling widower, runs into his old friend MARK VAN HOUTEN, an out of work doctor who has resorted to making crystal meth to pay the bills. Bobby discusses Mark’s problem with their mutual friends LAITH RUKKAB, an uptight guy who’s packed on a few pounds but somehow lucked into landing a pretty girl friend and HUTTO, a soon-to-be father and the most together out of the four. The friends decide to give Mark the throwing stars they played with as kids to bring him back to reality. The throwing stars that were meant to bring Mark back to reality end up leading each member of the group to realizations about their own lives". Source: www.apple.com/trailers
"If you want to see a good and enjoyable comedy before “Harold and Kumar,” “Baby Mama,” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” check out “Who’s Your Monkey” if it’s playing near you". Source: www.filmarcade.net "With his crosshairs squarely aimed at generation MySpace, writer/director Robbie Bryan has finally called it a wrap on his suspense-chiller IMURDERS (from which he sent us the first pics above and below). The movie, which we first told you about here, centers on eight on-line chat room participants within a MySpace-like site who are being knocked off one by one". Source: www.imdb.com
"The onscreen scares will be more Agatha Christie than Argento, Bryan notes, though he claims that there are elements to please hardcore horror fans as well. “Our amazing makeup man, Josh Turi, did a stellar job,” he says. “The effects make for some really gruesome, hair-raising moments. There aren’t many, but that handful should make the gorehounds very happy.” Of course, the film’s noteworthy cast, which includes CANDYMAN’s Tony Todd (top photo below, with Brooke Lewis), Gabrielle (CRAZY EIGHTS) Anwar, Billy Dee (THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK) Williams, Charles Durning and William (HALLOWEEN) Forsythe, should be enough to entice genre fans. Working with such a diverse ensemble, Bryan says, “It was interesting meshing the different personalities and acting styles, but thrilling to be working with name actors for all but one of the 21 days of filming.
A mysterious love triangle leads to a tragic shooting. Months later, eight members of a Myspace-esque chat room are being gruesomely murdered in the privacy of their own homes. Having now completed the IMURDERS shoot, Bryan reflects on the time spent". —Kiran Aditham Source: www.fangoria.com
Check out the Mega Red Carpet Contest (a t-shirt giveway contest and the director and some of the cast attending Fangoria's Horror Con at the Meadowlands Sheraton June 30th-July 1st) in: http://www.goodtobeseenfilms.com/
"You may not know his name. You may not even know his face. But look out Jake Gyllenhaal – indie prince Joseph Gordon-Levitt is fast becoming one of the hottest properties in Hollywood.
At his best, the adult Gordon-Levitt is a stealthy, cerebral performer – always shining without shouting. Recently, he’s been slotting nimbly into studio films like Memento-style heist thriller The Lookout; and Killshot, in which he plays a psychopathic assassin stalking Diane Lane. 
Next on our screens, though, is Kimberly (Boys Don’t Cry) Peirce’s eagerly anticipated boys-back-from-Iraq drama Stop-Loss, in which Gordon-Levitt co-stars with Ryan Phillippe. To date, he has kept a tight steer on script choices – no youth romps, no flowery rom-coms. Instead he seeks out troubled, edgy roles that showcase his dark side. 
-Is it Joseph or Joe?
-The new film stuff all happened after a film I did called Manic, which I made in 2001. I played a mentally ill kid. If there was one hurdle then it might have been Manic. 
-Rian Johnson saw it and cast me in Brick. Gregg Araki also saw it and cast me in Mysterious Skin, which was the first time that anyone had asked me to be sexy.
-Do you lose yourself in your characters?
-Do-Do you Google yourself?
-What were your favourite films growing up?
-Are you worried that doing big movies like G.I. Joe will make your life difficult?
