Jake Gyllenhaal: one of the Most Valuable Stars

#1 - ROBERT DOWNEY JR. - THE KING

Can there be any doubt that Robert Downey Jr. should be sitting pretty at the top of this list for two years in a row? He’s the star of two of the top five highest-grossing movies of all time — The Avengers, which brought in $1.5 billion worldwide, and Iron Man 3, which took in $1.2 billion — and unlike other comic-book heroes who could be recast at the drop of a hat (and often are), Downey Jr. is so synonymous with Tony Stark that when he decided not to make any more Iron Man movies for the time being, Marvel basically put the megafranchise on pause in the hopes that he’ll change his mind.

(Whereas Warner Bros. promptly installed Ben Affleck as Batman just as soon as Christian Bale hung up his cowl.) Don’t worry, though: Downey Jr. did decide to sign on for two more Avengers sequels, so he’s hardly done with his most iconic character.

#2 - LEONARDO DICAPRIO - THE STAR WHO STARTED SMILING AGAIN

The fun he had in Django Unchained and Great Gatsby was contagious. For years, Leonardo DiCaprio was out to prove himself as more than just a teen heartthrob. He was a serious man. An actor. The plan worked, as DiCaprio became a favorite of A-list auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and Steven Spielberg, and their collaborations scored dozens of Oscar nominations (and a Best Picture win for The Departed) and a lot of money (Inception earned $825.5 million total worldwide, while The Great Gatsby pulled in $348.8 million around the globe). There was just one thing missing: a smile.

The formerly impish star hit a brick wall with the dour, roundly ignored J. Edgar, and it seemed to spur him to once again show off his more lighthearted side. As Django Unchained’s Calvin Candie, he was both giddily wicked and brutally cruel, and he mounted a full-on, I’m-a-movie-star-dammit charm offensive in Gatsby.

Both films scored at the box office, and early glimpses of his next movie, Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, were highly GIF-able, suggesting DiCaprio at his most hedonistic and appealing. His studio value is second only to Brad Pitt’s, because while DiCaprio is still popcorn-blockbuster-averse, he’s the best way to get audiences into Hollywood’s most expensive adult fare. That’s why in our rankings he lands in second place: He doesn’t have anything lined up past Wall Street, but can do whatever he wants next.

#19 - MATT DAMON - THE STAR WHO SLIPPED

Studios still love him, but Damon struggled at the box office last year. Last year, Matt Damon was ranked sixth on our list, but this year, he tumbled to nineteen. What happened? Some of it simply couldn’t have been helped — in part, he was supplanted by stars in the prime of their franchises, like Jennifer Lawrence — but Damon also hit a rough patch last winter with his fracking movie Promised Land, the lowest-grossing wide-release movie of his career. At an anemic $7 million, this reteam with his Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant, which Damon co-scripted, went nowhere at the box office.

Sadly, Damon’s hoped-for summer smash Elysium didn’t quite restore him: The expensive sci-fi vehicle was unable to crack $100 million at the box office and opened to a lower number than director Neill Blomkamp’s last movie, District 9... despite the fact that District 9 had no stars and Elysium had Damon.

It’s no wonder that rumors recently flew that Damon might be willing to come back to the Bourne franchise; he could use a pick-me-up. Still, Damon is a solid, hard-working star with a high studio rating, and he also has a high likability score, made all the more impressive owing to his potentially polarizing activist work for liberal causes. (Just compare him to Sean Penn, who’s got one of the lowest likability ratings on this list.) As a celebrity, Damon is an unshowy presence who’s hardly blowing up Twitter, but that’s part of what people appreciate about him: Unlike his occasionally polarizing cohort Ben Affleck, Damon really does seem unconcerned with his celebrity status. Let’s just hope that when it comes to the box office, he can right his ship and move up a few places.

#55 - JAKE GYLLENHAAL - THE MODEST MOVIE STAR

Jake Gyllenhaal at the Hollywood Film Awards, on 21st October 2013

Over the short decade-plus that he’s been a recognizable name, Jake Gyllenhaal’s career has gone through several incarnations: from the young star of coming-of-agers like October Sky and Donnie Darko, to the critics’ darling of The Good Girl and Brokeback Mountain, to the would-be action hero of Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time.

But it’s really only in the last few years that Gyllenhaal really seems to have found his place as the lead of modestly budgeted, well-reviewed films like Source Code, End Of Watch and Prisoners. None blew up the box office, but the films were all made at a price and likely turned healthy profits, and it seems that Gyllenhaal can still draw enough of an audience, especially abroad: End Of Watch aside, his films generally perform better internationally, with Prince Of Persia quietly making a quarter of a billion dollars away from American jeering. Gossip editors are more interested in him than studios seem to be (thank you, Taylor Swift!), but within his lower-budget wheelhouse, he has significant value.

His mind-bending doppelganger film Enemy (directed by Prisoners’ Denis Villeneuve) recently had a mixed reception at Toronto, but he also has Nightcrawler coming (a crime thriller that he’s producing and which forced him to bow out of Into the Woods) and Everest, with Josh Brolin. Source: www.vulture.com

Jake Gyllenhaal looks emaciated on the set of "Nightcrawler" (dramatic weight loss)

Jake Gyllenhaal appears visibly emaciated on the set of "Nightcrawler" in Los Angeles, October 21, 2013

"I think [I've lost] probably a little over 20 pounds, something like that," the actor, 32, told PEOPLE Monday on the red carpet at the Hollywood Film Awards, where he looked noticeably thinner as he was honored for his role in Prisoners. While he may look different, his approach hasn't changed as he prepares for Nightcrawler, Gyllenhaal said. "It's not different than getting into character for anything. It's more about believing where you are and being present where you are," he said. "Who's to say what the process is? I have a strange one … but I love what I do." Source: www.people.com

Matt Damon: Environmental Media Awards, Eco-SciFi & Ultimate Glamour Guy

Frances McDormand and Matt Damon in "Promised Land" (2012) directed by Gus Van Sant

Matt Damon and Luciana Damon attend the Environmental Media Awards, on October 19th, 2013

Matt Damon, Hayden Panettiere, Bill McKibben and Anna Getty may have been honored at last night’s Environmental Media Awards, but fracking was the real winner. Several anti-fracking films and TV shows, including Damon’s “Promised Land” and “Last Man Standing,” took home prizes at the 23rd annual ceremony held outdoors at Burbank’s Warner Bros. Studios lot.

“Insufferable do-gooder” Damon — as he was described by frenemy Jimmy Kimmel in an opening video — received the Ongoing Commitment Award for his efforts to provide underdeveloped countries access to clean water and sanitation. Source: variety.com

Some critics more recently remain convinced of the utopian possibilities of cyberspace and have gone so far as to dismiss an over-preoccupation with ‘real’ space as eco-fundamentalism. I continually demonstrate in my reading of various Hollywood closures that there is evidence of a renewed sublime mode which affirms and produces a ‘positive’ form of ecological expression. Both modernist and postmodernist expressions of the sublime, including Bertens’s analysis of Lyotard’s use of the term, evoke contradictory feelings which are potentially transgressive.

Haraway prophetically suggests, ‘we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism - we are all cyborgs’ (Haraway, 1991). 'Blade Runner' attempts most specifically to work through such chimeras, to (re) construct a populist utopian narrative closure which has significant ecological implications.

LA epitomises subterranean, even terminal ecological difficulties. Possibly the most mediated city in the world, LA simultaneously has become the most ecologically precarious. Consequently, its continual, often noirish representation tends to effectively foreground, if not embody, many contemporary global ecological issues. The LA of AD 2019 in 'Blade Runner' remains perhaps the most dazzling recent cinematic vision of the result of exploitation of the environment for technological progress. ‘The city rots with the waste products of its over-technologist, over commercialised culture . . . The only thing that is recycled is waste, which forms the raw material for architecture, fashion, even transportation . . . the city projects no sense of community’ (Rushing et al, 1995).

Unlike most of the non-individualised masses who scurry around hiding their bodies under big coats and uniform umbrellas, Deckard has nothing to protect himself from these unnatural elements (acid rain) yet somehow appears impervious to their polluting effects. Like the classic private detective, he has also developed a form of extrasensory perception and consequently can articulate upon the dysfunctionality of this ecocidal environment.

Eco-Closure: David Lyon argues that omitting the ‘return to nature’ denouement in the director’s cut version of "Blade Runner" ‘simply leaves one with increased apocalyptic unease’ and pessimistically wonders ‘are decay and death the terminal postmodern condition?’ (Lyon, 1994). -"Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema" (2012) by Pat Brereton

The basic premise in "Elysium" (2013): the year is 2154, the population of Earth is ravaged by economic and ecological catastrophes. The wealthiest have taken refuge on a giant space station orbiting Earth run by robot butlers and guards, offering them clean air and almost magical healthcare technology.

The casting of Matt Damon in the lead role implies two strategies by Neil Blomkamp. It is immediately obvious that on one level the casting of Damon was a marketing strategy: in a time in which only sequels or established story lines are green-lit by big studios, attaching a big name actor to a new story is a sure-fire way for studios to ensure that they recoup their profits.

On the other hand, the choice of Matt Damon represented a clear attempt to solidify the film’s political credentials. Damon has starred in several political roles, including his roles in Good Will Hunting (with a screenplay by Damon, and in which he infamously describes why he would never work for the imperialist U.S. government), the anti-War on Terror film 'Syriana,' and recently the anti-apartheid 'Invictus.'

The Hollywood actor has distinguished himself from his peers by openly criticizing President Obama: “I’ve talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grassroots level. One of them said to me, ‘Never again. I will never be fooled again by a politician.’ You know, a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, much better.” Damon is also famous for his speech in 2011 defending teachers against Democrat-sponsored education “reform” at a Save Our Schools rally in Washington D.C. That speech is particularly memorable due to the viral video in which he angrily mocks the libertarian Reason.tv for their coverage of the teachers’ struggle. Source: www.solidarity-us.org

7 Reasons Matt Damon Is the Ultimate Glamour Guy:

1) Respect for the media: It's very rare these days for celebs who show up at events to stop and talk to all the media. Most do maybe a couple of outlets and then duck inside. Damon —one of the biggest celebrities in the world— stopped to talk to EVERY SINGLE OUTLET on the press line and was charming and gracious. The last person I saw do that was Harrison Ford, which brings me to this lesson of the day: Up-and-coming actresses and actors, take a note from the real power players in Hollywood.

2) Never forgetting where he came from: Matt was not about to miss Saturday night for anything, even if his Red Sox were playing in game six of the ALCS ("I have my phone though; it's in my pocket!," he told me). I was equally invested in the game because Max Scherzer was pitching for the Detroit Tigers, and we grew up together in St. Louis. When Matt heard that story—"No way! That's pretty awesome," he exclaimed—we checked the score (Damon's Red Sox eventually won).

3) Speaking from the heart: When Matt went up to the podium to accept his EMA Ongoing Commitment Award for his work with Water.org, he was the only celeb who didn't rely on note cards or a teleprompter. It made his speech that much more powerful.

4) Eight years of marriage and still so in love: He's so enamored with his wife, Luciana. Just look at the way Matt smiles at her. There's truly nothing more romantic.

5) He's hilarious: With a house full of girls, Damon recognizes the importance of a man cave. "I do have a little man area that I can go to that they don't know about," he told a People reporter. "It's basically a closet that I can go to if the estrogen gets too crazy!"

6) A passion cause: As passionate as Matt is about making great films, he's more so about bringing clean water to those in third-world countries who have no access to a basic human necessity. "We had our board meeting yesterday," he told me, "and we have officially reached 1.6 million people with clean water now. That's really awesome."

7) He's a good sport: Just ask Jimmy Kimmel, who roasted Matt in a pretaped video introduction at the start of Saturday's awards. Matt, Jimmy, and Ben Affleck should be the poster children for adult friendships. Source: www.glamour.com

Bipolar: Kim Novak, Amanda Bynes, Catherine Zeta Jones, The Informant (Matt Damon)

CBS has won the rights to a new half-hour comedy that will be executive produced by Oscar winners Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. The show, More Time With Family, will star comedian Tom Papa and has been given a put pilot commitment. According to Deadline, the comedy “centers around a guy (Papa) who changes his career and gives up a life on the road to spend more time at home with his family.” The project was originally created between Damon and Papa, who have worked together on several films including "The Informant!" and HBO’s Liberace film "Behind the Candelabra." The two have agreed to team up with Ben Affleck’s company Pearl Street Films and 20th Century Fox to produce the show. Source: www.pastemagazine.com

Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre in "The Informant!" (2009) directed by Steven Soderbergh

Damon is superb as a demonically smart guy who comes across as rather dim. Is Whitacre a knight in shining armor, a compulsive liar, playing secret agent or plagued by mental illness? Or is he all of the above?

With his earnest demeanor and straightforward delivery, Damon convincingly obfuscates Whitacre's motives. We don't question his veracity as much as try to muddle through it. A big part of the fun is piecing together the puzzle that is Whitacre. In a strange but fascinating touch, Damon voices his inner monologue. Often, his thoughts — an inane stream of consciousness — seem wholly unrelated to what's going on around him, which adds an intriguing absurdist quality to an already quirky tale. We come to realize Whitacre is the least reliable narrator in an already slippery setting. Source: usatoday30.usatoday.com

Kim Novak in "Vertigo" (1958) directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Kim Novak's Bipolar Disorder: After leaving her hand and footprints in concrete at Grauman's Chinese Theater (a signal honor for actors and actresses), Kim Novak was interviewed by Bob Osborne, the host of Turner Classic Movies. In front of a small live audience, she revealed for the first time that she has bipolar disorder, and that it played a role in her decision to leave Hollywood so long ago.

The Los Angeles Times quoted Kim as saying, during the interview, that her father suffered from depression and there was a great deal of conflict at home during her chldhood. She also said she wasn't diagnosed with bipolar until much later in life. Now, she indicated, she takes medication, but as her condition was undiagnosed, not treatment was available for her then. "I go through more of the depression than the mania part," she said. Kim told Osborne that she "plans to hold an exhibition of her paintings for the first time next year, and will devote the proceeds of any sales to mental health philanthropies." Source: bipolar.about.com

Following months of speculation about Amanda Bynes' mental illness, a new report indicates that the star has both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The formal diagnosis was made while Amanda was still being treated at UCLA Medical Center, which she recently left for a rehab center in Malibu. “It was difficult to process for her parents," a source said, despite the fact that Amanda Bynes' mental illness was what they both expected. Source: www.thehollywoodgossip.com

Catherine Zeta Jones in "Side Effects" (2013) directed by Steven Soderbergh. Catherine Zeta-Jones has recently battled bipolar II disorder and checked into a health care facility for treatment.

The Bipolar Boom: "In the United States, people with depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia are losing twelve to twenty years in life expectancy compared to people not in the mental health system.” Robert Post added: “Right now, fifty years after the advent of antidepressant drugs, we still don’t really know how to treat bipolar depression. We need new treatment algorithms that aren’t just made up.” Although “bipolar” illness is a diagnosis of recent origin, first showing up in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980 (DSM-III), medical texts dating back to Hippocrates contain descriptions of patients suffering from alternating episodes of mania and melancholia. Jules Baillarger, dubbed this illness la folie à double forme. In his 1969 book, Manic Depressive Illness, George Winokur at Washington University in St. Louis treated unipolar depression and bipolar illness as separate entities."

Gateways to Bipolar: "Today, according to the NIMH, bipolar illness affects one in every forty adults in the United States, and so, before we review the outcomes literature for this disorder, we need to try to understand this astonishing increase in its prevalence. Psychotropic drugs—both legal and illegal—have helped fuel the bipolar boom. In 2003, former NIMH director Lewis Judd and others argued that many people suffer “subthreshold” symptoms of depression and mania, and thus could be diagnosed with “bipolar spectrum disorder.” There was now bipolar I, bipolar II, and a “bipolarity intermediate between bipolar disorder and normality,” one in every four adults now falls into the catchall bipolar bin, this once-rare illness apparently striking almost as frequently as the common cold. Four million American adults under sixty-five years old are on SSI or SSDI today because they are disabled by mental illness. One in every fifteen young adults (eighteen to twenty-six years old) is “functionally impaired” by mental illness."
-"Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America" (2010) by Robert Whitaker.

Matt Damon: Behind the Candelabra clip, Tom Ripley's guarded sexual identity

EXCLUSIVE CLIP: Matt Damon Talks About 'Behind The Candelabra', Starring Michael Douglas As Liberace 'Behind the Candelabra', on home release today, sees him turn convincingly into a teenage hot-shot Scott Thorson, drawn into the extravagant world of Vegas star Liberace. The couple's long relationship, through various trips to the drug dealer and the plastic surgeon, is the subject of 'Candelabra', which won Best Movie at the recent Emmys, and another gong for director Steven Soderbergh. Source: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

With appropriate fin de siècle melancholy and the relentlessness of a thriller, ''Ripley'' nails both the wonder that has attended our century's celebratory version of the American dream and the anxiety that is stirred up by that dream's stealthy doppelganger. ''Ripley'' asks us to identify with an American man who, like so many before him, believes in the democratic ethos that says anyone can jettison the past, wipe the slate clean and with pluck and luck be whoever he or she wants to be. The earnest, upwardly mobile Tom Ripley, played by Damon, isn't particularly greedy or ambitious, but he does want to rise above his drab circumstances to grab the right, socially acceptable lifestyle, along with love and money.

Dickie Greenleaf -- a dazzling all-American golden boy and a role very likely to confer stardom on the British actor Jude Law -- is off idling in Italy, sybaritically pursuing a dilettante's calling as a jazz saxophonist and a romance with Marge Sherwood (Paltrow), an aspiring writer from his Park Avenue set. Dickie's disapproving dad offers Tom $1,000 to visit his son in Italy and bring him home to take his rightful place in the family business.

In ''Vertigo,'' James Stewart was John (Scottie) Ferguson, a smart, emotionally remote detective whose psyche plunges into voyeurism and sexual obsession once he is sent by a shipping magnate on a mission that tosses him into a bizarre plot of mistaken identity, murder and suicides both real and faked. In ''Ripley,'' Damon, only recently seen as Steven Spielberg's American Everyman, Private Ryan, portrays another smart, emotionally reticent Peeping Tom, and his parallel assignment for another shipping magnate tosses him into similar horrors.

Where Scottie wants to remake the Novak character into his dream girl, Tom wants to remake himself into his dream boy. He wants to duplicate Dickie -- in looks, in savoir-faire, in Gucci accessories -- until he can pass as being to the manner, and perhaps even to the Greenleaf manor, born. ''I always thought, Better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody,'' Tom says, and no matter what the human cost, including the annihilation of his own self, he will not be denied.

Damon is in every scene of the film and, with his initially bookish and wholesome presence, serves as its irresistible bait. There's much to like about Tom. He's cultured (he travels with the collected Shakespeare and Blue Guides), talented (he plays Bach at the piano) and sensitive (he seems to care for Dickie's variously ill-treated women more tenderly than Dickie does). ''Everybody's not been invited to the dance at one time or another,'' says Damon, who took on the gutsy and demanding assignment -- for which he lost weight, studied piano and modulated his vocal pitch and posture -- in part because of his identification with the character's ''total discomfort in his identity'' and his compassion for the character's ''deep, intense loneliness.''

Blanchett, intriguingly, plays a character that didn't exist in Highsmith: another expatriate East Side socialite who gets caught in the Tom-Dickie web. In a witty inversion of Ripley's efforts to trade up in social class, she uses an assumed name to disguise her identity as a textile heiress. As written and acted, the role adds a shimmering Jamesian portrait of a trapped American woman to the canvas, and it is but one of many significant alterations Minghella has made to the novel. Minghella, who is not gay, also had to figure out what to do about the book's use of Ripley's guarded sexual identity. In the novel, Marge says dismissively of Tom: ''All right, he may not be queer. He's just a nothing, which is worse. He isn't normal enough to have any kind of sex life, if you know what I mean."

During their final weeks on the film, the director and editor kept tinkering subtly with the closing footage of Damon so that Minghella could land the cathartic blow he wanted, in which the audience is left alone with Ripley in an inky psychological no man's land. Source: www.nytimes.com