Maggie and Christian Bale on "The Dark Knight"

Maggie Gyllenhaal recalls her favorite scene in "The Dark Knight".

Batman himself explains why "The Dark Knight" is even better than the original.

Tobey Maguire for Spiderman 4

"The British Telegraph is running a fairly standard puff piece on Tobey Maguire in the run up to the release of Spider-Man 3, with Maguire spouting the same 'maybe I will, maybe I won't' boilerplate when it comes to the next installment in the series. "They'll definitely develop a fourth movie and write a screenplay, and I would consider it if there's a good script, a good story that I felt was worth telling and Sam Raimi was involved and the right cast came together for it," he says. More interestingly, the paper seems to know something that I don't, which is that a $20 million offer is already on the table for Maguire, should he decide to put on the costume one more time. Maguire was paid $16 million for Spider-Man 3, was signed only for three films, and currently has no other film projects lined up, superhero or otherwise, according to the paper.
Maguire blanches at the notion that he is confining himself to big-budget work: "When I read a script, it has nothing to do with the size of the budget or whether it has global appeal," he's quoted as saying. "I just want to tell stories and play different roles, and I always want to work with great filmmakers." The article also goes into the old story about Jake Gyllenhaal almost getting to put on the suit for Spider-Man 2 before a last-minute intervention by Ron Meyer, president of Universal, put the kibosh on that. In typical British press style, the reporter also feels compelled to point out that Maguire didn't "look particularly relaxed" during the interview, and looks more like a "classroom nerd" than a superhero".
Source: www.cinematical.com

Rendition, Disorder, Affliction

"Rendition" casts Jake Gyllenhaal as a CIA analyst confronted with the process of extraordinary rendition. Supervising a secret torture of a terror suspect, Douglas Freeman (Gyllenhaal) questions whether this practice even works to get information. Since all of this goes on in secret, Gyllenhaal didn’t have any real CIA agents with whom to research.

Gyllenhaal on Rendition: "I never talked to anybody who I don’t think would admit or say they were involved in any sort of extraordinary rendition situation," said Gyllenhaal. "I only talked to CIA officers for fact checking. I think I found that when you talk to someone who has a job like that it's very technical and the questions you want as an actor are a little bit more emotional, but I think that’s a real key into a character anyway. A lot of it was actually watching movies of people who played CIA agents and officers, and then a couple of movies of a couple of people who have played alcoholics".Since the movie is designed to provoke debate on issues, Gyllenhaal hopes that practicality can enter the discussion. "I think that as a culture, I think that the hope in watching this character, that there can be people who can make these decisions, I think it takes you out of the present of what is actually going on. I think there is a lot more muck than we think that there is. I think hope is the wrong message right now. I think really working at it is the right message. I don't know how successfully that was portrayed. I don't know if we did. That's an audience's decision to make that decision but I just wanted to say that." Source: www.canmag.com

"The humdrum corruption of political machinery, the passivity of screen- addled citizens, ignorant pedagogues, job-gobbling immigrants, malevolent divines, greedy corporate grandees, the timidity of bourgeois journalists, the sinister conniving of neoconservative and liberal intellectuals, and homosexuals living in holy matrimony have all been adduced as causes of the national decline. Proximity cannot be denied, yet none of these putative causes appears to be sufficient to the magnitude of the disorder. What can be said with some certainty, however, is that we are now exiles in a strange land; America is no longer America.

In one domain of our national life after another, the old American ideals and liberties have been replaced by their opposites. Torture, once a reliable attribute of Nazis, Communists, and Eastern despots, has become official government policy.

The disease manifested itself almost everywhere at once, but the superficial effects were most spectacular in our national mirror: the Media, which absorbed and digested the once proud opposition of the Press and made of it a mere legitimizer of horrors.

[...] Aggressive, ill-informed, irrational, and largely unsupported opinion predominates in our age of infectious autosatire (on millions of blogs, yes, but also on television and radio talk shows, in op-ed columns, news analysis, and “expert” commentary) and threatens, in a corollary of Gresham’s law, to drive out all other modes of articulate human expression. And by far the greatest number of opinions expressed by any given SSS host concern the doings of celebrities and other by-products of the publicity stream. The relative merits of Denzel Washington’s or Russell Crowe’s latest performances are discussed and analyzed with the same insipid vocabulary applied to the fund-raising prowess and speaking abilities of Barack Obama and John McCain.
What we need is an experimental subject, an “I” sufficiently armed with narrative powers both literary and historical, gifts of irony and indirection, and the soothing balms of description and implication, to go forth and find stories that might counteract the unhappy effects of our disorder. What distinguishes such dispatches is what might be called the radical first person: the individual consciousness of the writer becomes paramount. The reader is thereby privy to the writer’s experience and receives direct confirmation of its truth value. What results is not mere consumable opinion, the mystical commodity of mediated capitalism, but the raw material of a considered judgment, whether aesthetic, political, or ethical. In that judgment lies the cure for our affliction".
Source: www.harpers.org

Jarhead in Blu-Ray

"A trio of action/thrillers can be seen in Blu this November. 8 Mile and Jarhead will be released on Blu-Ray on November 18 and The Kingdom will hit Blu-Ray shelves the following week on November 25. The discs will also all be available in an "Action/Thriller" bundle on November 25 as well.
Jarhead (the self-imposed moniker of the Marines) follows "Swoff" (Gyllenhaal), a third-generation enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back through Middle East deserts with no cover from intolerable heat or from Iraqi soldiers, always potentially just over the next horizon. Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing desert fields in a country they don't understand against an enemy they can't see for a cause they don't fully fathom.

Foxx portrays Sergeant Sykes, a Marine lifer who heads up Swofford's scout/sniper platoon, while Sarsgaard is Swoff's friend and mentor, Troy, a die-hard member of STA-their elite Marine Unit.

An irreverent and true account of a war that was antiseptically packaged a decade ago, Jarhead is laced with dark wit, honest inquisition and episodes that are at once surreal and poignant, tragic and absurd.Special Features
- Feature Commentary with Director Sam Mendes
- Feature Commentary with Screenwriter William Broyles, Jr. and Author Anthony Swofford

Source: www.movieweb.com

Cera and Dennings - UK eonline

He's been in some huge movies, and Michael Cera is fast becoming a force in indie film. I caught up with the Juno and Superbad star over the weekend at the Toronto Film Fest, along with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist costar Kat Dennings, and they dished on why waiting is good, NYC is a star and how they met their new best friends. Source: uk.eonline.com

Jake's awkward side

While Michael Cera is ascending to the awkwardness stardom, we must remember Jake's awkward side too!

Dropping his awkward character a bit

"Michael Cera, though... I look at this performance as his dry run for Scott Pilgrim. Truth be told, I had serious reservations about Cera taking that role. The character is one that I love very dearly and I have very specific thoughts about who he is and what he's like. Michael Cera, whose persona has always been that of a more than slightly awkward nerd, a guy who is smarter than everybody around him but sort of uncomfortable with that, a guy whose stumbling way with words charmingly disarms the potent bombs he can drop, plays somebody else here. He drops that Arrested Development/Superbad character and, while his delivery is similar, plays a guy with a lot more self-confidence and conviction. He's not a tough guy or a stud, and he's maybe a little on the emo side of things, but he's not intimidated by everything and everyone around him. He's more self-possessed. And he's playing a guy in a band - seeing Cera in skinny jeans and holding a guitar makes for a good segue into Scott". Source: chud.com