Jake presenting the Golden Globes

Jake presenting the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards, on 11th January 2009. Pictures courtesy of Iheartjakemedia.com

Jake Gyllenhaal - 2009 Golden Globe Awards

Jake Gyllenhaal introducing the film 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' at the 2009 Golden Globes.

Heath Ledger Wins Posthumous Golden Globe

"The late Heath Ledger was honored on Sunday night, as the actor won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for his role in "The Dark Knight."
Director Christopher Nolan accepted the award on Ledger's behalf.

"All of us who worked with Heath accept this award with an awful mixture of sadness but incredible pride," Nolan said. "After Heath passed on, you saw a hole ripped in the future of cinema. But with the extraordinary response to his work that we've seen all over the world, I, for one, start to look a bit less at that gap in the future and a little bit more at the incredible place in the history of cinema he built for himself with his talent and his dedication and his artistry."Prior to Nolan's acceptance speech, a brief scene of Ledger as The Joker was shown.

The award marks the first Golden Globe award in Ledger's career.

In a statement to People, Heath's father expressed his delight for his son's win.

"We are overjoyed for him," Kim Ledger said. "It's wonderful."

Heath's father cited personal reasons for not being able to make the trip from his home in Perth, Australia, to the Golden Globes ceremony in Hollywood.

Meanwhile, Ledger's "Dark Knight" co-star, Aaron Eckhart, echoed Nolan's sentiments prior to the show during a red carpet interview with Ryan Seacrest .

"I get the chills when I talk about him. I'm very proud of him, I've proud to have known him and been in the movie with him", Eckhart said. Source: omg.yahoo.com/news


Read the Complete List of the Golden Globe Winners 2009.

66th Golden Globes Red Carpet

Drew Barrymore.Amanda Seyfried.Anne Hathaway.
Anna Paquin.Evan Rachel Wood.Megan Fox.Penélope Cruz.Robert Downey Jr. and his wife Susan.Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.Seth Rogen and girlfriend Lauren Miller.Mickey Rourke.Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Harvey Milk's words

In this scene inside the City Hall, Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch) appears wearing an elegant suit, but Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) says to him:
"When you come here, I want you to wear the tightest jeans possible. Never blend in. And no elevators. Ever. Always take the stairs, you can make such a grand entrance going up the stairs"."In the Declaration of Independence it is written: "All men are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights". For Mr. Briggs and Mrs. Bryant and all the bigots out there, no matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence. No matter how hard you try, you cannot chip those words from off the base of the Statue of
Liberty. That is what America is. Love it or leave it". -HARVEY MILK's SPEECH. "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door... And that's all. I ask for the movement to continue. Because it's not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power... it's about the "us's" out there. Not only gays, but the Blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s. Without hope, the us's give up. I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living."

Critics Choice Awards 2009

Anne Hathaway.Sean Penn.Josh Brolin and Emile Hirsch ("Milk" won Best Ensemble Casting and Best Actor Sean Penn).Emile Hirsch.Mickey Rourke.Josh Brolin, Diane Lane and Penelope Cruz.
Christopher Nolan accepting Heath Ledger's award for "Dark Knight".

"The Dark Knight" also won a pair of trophies: best action movie and best supporting actor for Heath Ledger. The crowd rose to its feet as the film's director, Christopher Nolan, accepted the award for Ledger.

"I can't presume to speak for him. His voice was as unique as it was original," said Nolan, adding that working with the actor "was one of the greatest experiences any of us ever had or will have."

"His contributions to cinema should be greatly appreciated", Nolan said, "so thanks for this appreciation".
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Nietzschean and Christ figures

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." -Nietzsche

"Batman, The Dark Knight, is a morality play told by Nietzsche, wherein the only non-conflicted premier character who manages “moral” clarity is one who would be considered demented and insane in any non-Nietzschean world. When truth is arrived at in Gotham’s little Nietzschean shop of horrors it is truth that is arrived at by a will to power and the only reason that it bears any familiarity to what any non ubermensch being would understand is a sheer “accident” created by Batman’s will to power.Nolan’s film finds all of his characters except one conflicted with divided loyalties. Rachel Dawes is conflicted about love with her loyalties divided between Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne. Harvey Dent, an ambitious District Attorney, is conflicted about career as seen by the fact that he was known as “two face” by the police force. His divided loyalties fluctuate between his own personal advance and the means by which that advance is attained. Commissioner Gordon is conflicted by loyalties to family and loyalties to work. Bruce Wayne is conflicted by identity. Only The Joker is unfamiliar with the uncertainty that being deeply internally conflicted brings. Nolan’s characters, excepting one, all seem to be in some existential internal crisis. The entrance of the Joker becomes the meaningful, and sometimes final, experience that resolves this cornucopia of internal existential crises.

[...] Batman, as the Dark Knight covenant head, by means of substitution, takes on the sins of the White Knight and so brings order to Gotham. The White Knight remains the hero but for all who can see behind the veil we know that any order or justice is based on the noble lie. The Joker has won even if only a handful of people in Gotham know it.

In this sense, Batman is a deeply cynical movie. In a culture where God is dead an optimistic cynicism used to prop up the myths that make society governable is perhaps the best we can hope for". Source: backwaterreport.com

"Somewhere in the middle of the picture Donnie Darko takes his girlfriend to the movies. They’re watching The Evil Dead, but when Donnie leaves we see that The Evil Dead is double-billed with The Last Temptation of Christ. It seems like a cheap gag of juxtaposing the sacred with the profane, but there is more method to the image. Donnie Darko reveals itself to be a loose retelling of The Last Temptation of Christ with Donnie as, of course, the Christ figure.

In the subsequent stretch of life that Frank has given him, Donnie meets his girlfriend and apparently loses his virginity to her at a Halloween party he’s thrown with his sister. There’s a genuinely, youthfully erotic moment afterwards when they walk downstairs holding hands and he gives her an open mouth kiss goodbye.) For teenage boys, the loss of virginity is often seen as proof that you’re normal. In The Last Temptation of Christ, that’s more or less the message that Jesus gets when he loses HIS virginity in his hallucinated marriage to Mary of Magdelene. The world ends, however, and Donnie decides to go back in time and relive it again. He dies, as we are lead to believe he was meant to, by being crushed with the jet engine, and the apocalypse seems to have been averted. Like Jesus, he was born a freak and he was meant to die a freak.
Frank makes an obvious Satan figure, especially the Satan as portrayed in The Last Temptation of Christ. He’s played by James Duval, an unbelievably beautiful boyish actor who is a favorite of the openly gay director Gregg Araki".
Source: cc.usu.edu

"Penn's movie ultimately redeems a tragic quest. As McCandless blazed his Huck Finn trail up and down America, devouring Jack London, Thoreau and Tolstoy, he was carving his own voracious narrative into the land. With the movie, that narrative is made flesh. Chris becomes a Christ figure, an environmental martyr. While his death was an accident (explained in a twist that should not be spoiled), he was author of his own destiny. And on film his story achieves the literary grandeur of the writing that inspired him.

Chris is a deeply moral person and carries books from Tolstoy, Jack London and Nietzsche with him.

He desperately does not want to be found by his parents, so he assumes a new identity, "Alexander Supertramp."
Source: www.newsrecord.org

Ben Foster: How did you get ready for the movie ["Alpha Dog"]?
Emile Hirsch: There's a Nietzsche book called "Human, Aft-Too-Human", which is basically a book of aphorisms. I was randomly reading it as I was preparing for the role. There was this quote that really got the whole gist of Truelove, my character. It was about humiliation and forgiveness. To me, it was the key to everything, because when someone is humiliated, an awful rage can result. It's weird playing a tough guy. What is a tough guy? Is he a tough guy because he thinks he is? How much of it is pure? And how much of it is that he's concealing something inside? In Truelove's case, I think he really is one. But I think he's also cowardly; what he ends up doing is not what a tough guy would have done. It's funny, because in earlier interviews people were asking us if we did research on the real guys our characters are based on. And in this case, I think that smart, selected research was best--too much of it can constrain you. I didn't want the facts to get in the way. So the character was purely my own invention".
Source: findarticles.com