Jake Gyllenhaal honors Natalie Portman at the 22nd Annual Palm Springs Film Festival

Jake Gyllenhaal with Natalie Portman at the 22nd Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival January 8, 2011, in Los Angeles

Carey Mulligan with Jake Gyllenhaal

Natalie Portman was honored with the statue on stage by her ex (and Brothers co-star) Jake Gyllenhaal.
Natalie Portman (who is pregnant) wore Cartier Baby Trinity earrings and a dress designed by Vionnet Spring: Vionnet Spring 2011 dress

"While calling her elegant, graceful and "Audrey Hepburn of our generation", Jake Gyllenhaal dropped a couple of expletives in his tribute to Natalie Portman.
Portman is recipient of the Desert Palm Achievement award for actress at the Palm Springs International Film Festival's annual gala. Gyllenhaal claimed he first met her waiting in line at a "Star Wars" convention for her to sign his Queen Amidala doll. He said he hopes she wins the Academy Award for her performance in "Black Swan" so the doll's value will appreciate.
Portman made her entrance in a black miniskirt to the strains of "Swan Lake."
Natalie Portman with "Black Swan" director Darren Aronofsky

She described the honors she has received for "Black Swan" as "a cherry on the top" of making the film". Source: blogs.inlandsocal.com

Homer Hickam writes "The Dinosaur Hunter" novel for the Viagra generation

Jake Gyllenhaal and Laura Dern as Homer Hickam and Miss Riley in "October Sky" (1999)

"An interesting guy, Homer Hickam. The former NASA engineer scored big in 1998 with “Rocket Boys”, a memoir of his high school rocket club back in West Virginia in the 1950s. It hit No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list and was adapted as a movie renamed “October Sky” starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Laura Dern.Director Joe Johnston shooting "Jurassic Park III" (2001)

As if that weren't enough, Hickam also spent a decade or so vacationing in Montana, where he joined in dinosaur digs with “October Sky” director Joe Johnston and noted paleontologist Jack Horner.

That experience inspired Hickam to write another novel, “The Dinosaur Hunter,” about Montana's current and prehistoric inhabitants. It's very nearly as enthralling as its author's real-life story.
The narrator of “The Dinosaur Hunter” is Mike Wire, a burnt-out Los Angeles homicide detective who headed east to become a cowboy on a cattle ranch.
Jake Gyllenhaal arriving at LAX airport, on 7th January 2010

Before long, Mike is having to deal with shady Hollywood types, Russian mobsters, federal bureaucrats and homegrown Montana survivalists armed with surplus Soviet army ordnance.Jake Gyllenhaal as Jamie Randall in Love and Other Drugs (2010)

In short, “The Dinosaur Hunter” is a classic boys' adventure yarn for boys of the Viagra generation". Source: www.starnewsonline.com

Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra and The Big Sleep, spatial gems

Ann Savage as Vera in "Detour" (1945)

“Of course the stumbling block for Europeans in America is, as they’re constantly reminded, the American failure to understand irony — as though it matters. First, this is probably not true; and out west, anyway, they don’t need it — they have space and they have gaze and horizon; they don’t need the artificial distance of irony. Real space and real emptiness make such conceits redundant. Irony and desert operate as polar extremes.” -Christopher Petit's film theory, in "Negative Space" documentary short (1999).

Humphrey Bogart with "High Sierra" director Raoul Walsh (1941)

"Whereas Walsh bends atmosphere, changes camera, singles out changes in viewpoint to give a deeper reaction to specific places, The Big Sleep ignores all the conventions of a ganster film to feast on meaningless business and witty asides. Walsh keeps re-establishing the same cabin retreat; Hawks, in another spatial gem, gives the spectator just enough to make the scene work. One of the fine moments in 1940's film is no longer than a blink: Bogart, as he crosses the street from one bookstore to another, looks up at a sign".Bogart as Roy Earle and Ida Lupino as Marie in "High Sierra" (1941)

"There is as much charm here as Walsh manages with fifteen different positioning setups between Lupino and Arthur Kennedy in a motel cabin. All the unbelievable events in The Big Sleep are tied together by miserable time jumps, but, within each skit, there is a logic of space, a great idea of personality, gesture, where each person is". -"Negative Space" by Manny Farber (1998)

"In this appreciation of Bogart 50 years after his death, American film critic Richard Schickel observes that of his cohort of male stars, which includes Astaire, Cagney, Tracy, Gable, Cooper, Grant, and Wayne, Bogart now glows the brightest. Projecting tough romanticism in sympathetic roles and evoking unsympathetic characters' demons without negating their humanity --think of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place (Schickel's pick as Bogart's best performance)--he forged a masculine persona that continues to be the envy of men and irresistible to women. In his review of Bogart's life and career, British film critic George Perry points up Bogart's real personality--preferring privacy and nonactor friends, unwise in marriage until wedding Lauren Bacall, hard-drinking and smoking, impatient with fools and bullies, genuinely gentlemanly in his manners. While evaluating certain films differently (Perry is kinder to more of Bogart's lesser efforts), the two critics together make this a quite satisfying commemoration of a thus-far unforgettable figure".
-Ray Olson Source: www.booklistonline.com

Humphrey Bogart with wife Lauren Bacall and son Stephen in his Jaguar XK 120
Humphrey Bogart (with Lauren Bacall inside the Jaguar) leans to kiss his son Stephen

"I never saw her again" -The Big Sleep (Bogart and Bacall) by Howard Hawks

"Bogart was one of the best actors I worked with. He was a far cry from the actors of today, who are a little bit on the dilettante side... when I started working with him, I said, "Why don't you ever smile?" "Oh", he said, "I've got a bum lip." He had a lip that was badly cut up, and I think the nerves were cut. And I said, "Well, the other night when we got drunk you certainly were smiling and laughing a lot." He said, "Do you think I can?" And I said, "You'd better if you're gonna work with me . . ."
I had trouble the first day with him. I remember grabbing him by the lapels and pushed his head up against the wall, and said, "Look, Bogey. I'll tell you how to get tough, but don't get tough with me." He said, "I won't".Everything was fine from that time on. He had had a couple of drinks at lunch, and that's what caused it. I stopped that.As for Lauren Bacall, she had to keep practising [sic] for months to keep that low voice" -H Hawks. Source: www.reelclassics.com

Lauren Bacall in a publicity still for The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks in 1946.

"She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full. She had a drink. She took a swallow from it and gave me a cool level stare over the rim of the glass". -Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939)

"On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again". -"The Big Sleep" (Raymond Chandler)

Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge, Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe and Peggy Knudsen as Mona Mars in "The Big Sleep"

"Truth and invention, real lives and fiction become indistinct and equal elements, merging with other people's work in the found-footage style, to create a single fabric of random spontaneous expressiveness, not unlike the life that slides by in front of a shop video camera. Each piece of film presents a clue to an inextricable tangle to which everything in the world is connected in its spider web of time, space and chance". — Excerpt from Serafino Murri, 'Chris Petit, Anatomies of the Image', in Afterall - A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 5, February 2002.

Martha Vickers as Carmen Sternwood in "The Big Sleep" (1946)

"I've been called that by people of all sizes and shapes, including your little sister. She called me worse than that for not getting into bed with her. I got five hundred dollars from your father, which I didn't ask for, but he can afford to give it to me. I can get another thousand for finding Mr. Rusty Regan, if I could find him. Now you offer me fifteen grand. That makes me a big shot. With fifteen grand I could own a home and a new car and four suits of clothes. I might even take a vacation without worrying about losing a case. That's fine. What are you offering it to me for? Can I go on being a son of a bitch, or do I have to become a gentleman, like that lush that passed out in his car the other night?", "She was as silent as a stone woman". -Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939)

Earth Angel: Ava Gardner, Gloria Grahame, Lauren Bacall, etc.

Earth Angel: Ava Gardner, Gloria Grahame, Lauren Bacall, and other co-stars of Humphrey Bogart. Song "I Forgot To Remember To Forget" by Elvis Presley.

Photo montage of Humphrey Bogart and Rita Hayworth

"Many have assumed the character of Maria Vargas was based on Gardner's life, although writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz said he was inspired by Rita Hayworth; her life as a dancer and her marriage to the international playboy Aly Kahn. Gardner, too, journeyed from a modest background to international stardom.
Gardner loved Europe, and felt alienated from Hollywood. Soon, she would buy a house in Spain (a place that reminded her of her North Carolina home) and live far from the movie business the rest of her life. She thought Bogart horribly provincial because he "hated Italy and lived on ham and eggs and steak whenever he could." He didn't think much of her acting ability; she wrote, "he certainly knew a lot more acting tricks than I did, and didn't hesitate to use them. I have to admit he probably forced me into a better performance than I could have managed without him." Sometimes, he gave her the wrong line just to freshen her performance, which he also did when acting in films with his wife, Lauren Bacall.
Mankiewicz said, "Bogie wanted you to be afraid of him a little. He made perfectly sure that you knew he was going to be an unpredictable man. I caught on to that and I played my own little game of keeping him off balance by never giving him his opportunity. You forstall it by kidding him out of it." But, he also said of him, "Bogie was the iconoclast in a society that dealt in icons, which is Hollywood. The cynicism that the part required was his by nature. When you've been through the Hollywood mill, you've been through the mill of mills." Source: www.moviediva.com

"Robert Osborne, the host of Turner Classic Movies always relates interesting background facts concerning the cast of the movies he presents. He shared the fact that Humphrey Bogart was very cool to Ava Gardner throughout the shooting of The Barefoot Contessa although she was certainly his type. Osborne reported that Bogart was a close friend of Frank Sinatra and that Ava Gardner was in the process of divorcing Sinatra at the time. Bogart was steadfast in his friendship with Frank which accounted for his coolness to her". Source: www.associatedcontent.com