Jake Gyllenhaal & Matt Damon connection

Jake Gyllenhaal chews on his iPhone headphones while walking around the Soho neighborhood on Thursday afternoon (August 29) in New York City. The 32-year-old actor just secured an appearance on Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio, according to The Wrap. Jake‘s appearance on the show, which is hosted by James Lipton, will air on Thursday, September 19 at 8/7c. On the episode, he discussed his wide range of films, including the upcoming Prisoners, as well as his famous Hollywood family and his relationship with the late Heath Ledger. Source: www.justjared.com

"The nice thing about ["The Zero Theorem"] is Christoph [Waltz], thanks to Quentin [Tarantino]’s films, has become bankable to a certain level and that was fantastic and that’s how we made it; not because of the ideas but because Christoph and I were able to work together. And then I sweetened the load even more with friends like Tilda [Swinton], Matt Damon, and David Thewlis all coming into play. Source: blogs.indiewire.com

Heath Ledger and Matt Damon in "The Brothers Grimm" (2005) directed by Terry Gilliam

-I remember asking Heath Ledger after Brokeback Mountain, “How’d you do that scene with Jake?” —meaning the scene where they start ferociously kissing. He said, “Well, mate, I drank a half case of beer in my trailer.” I started laughing, and he goes, “No, I’m serious. I needed to just go for it. If you can’t do that, you’re not making the movie.” -Matt Damon in Playboy magazine

Hayden Christensen, Anna Paquin and Jake Gyllenhaal in "This Is Our Youth" (2002)

Casey Affleck, Summer Phoenix and Matt Damon, on Opening Night of "This Is Our Youth" (2002)

"This is our Youth" has seen a number of productions featuring notable film actors, many of whom were in their first stage role. At the Garrick Theatre in the West End, it featured Hayden Christensen, Matt Damon, Colin Hanks, and Chris Klein as Dennis, Jake Gyllenhaal, Casey Affleck, Kieran Culkin, and Freddie Prinze Jr. as Warren, and Anna Paquin, Summer Phoenix, Alison Lohman, Heather Burns as Jessica.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Vera Farmiga, co-stars in "Source Code" (2011)

Vera Farmiga and Matt Damon at "The Departed" New York Premiere (2006)

Gwyneth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal at Hamptons screening of "End of Watch", 2012

Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow attending "Contagion" premiere during the 68th Venice International Film Festival, 2011.


Matt Damon "Something Else" video

Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem (first clip)

The clip from Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem first appeared over at Entertainment Weekly, which included accompanying written commentary from Giliam.

The clip features Christoph Waltz as the film's lead character, Qohen Leth, an eccentric and reclusive computer genius plagued with existential angst works on a mysterious project aimed at discovering the purpose of existence -- or the lack thereof -- once and for all. However, it is only once he experiences the power of love and desire that he is able to understand his very reason for being.

Here's how Gilliam sets the scene: The scene is a man going to work and a man leaving the safety of his burnt out chapel and being attacked by the modern world with all of its noises and all of its advertising and all these things that confuse and confound and make us all crazy.

Matt Damon, Mélanie Thierry, David Thewlis, Lucas Hedges, Ben Whishaw and Tilda Swinton co-star and, as of right now, the film does not have a domestic distributor.

The Zero Theorem played the Venice Film Festival over the weekend and the only review I've taken the time to see is over at The Playlist where they weren't over the moon, but seemed to enjoy it. Source: www.ropeofsilicon.com

"Elysium": Rebooting Paradise’s System (Film Review)

Elysium (2013) is being considered one of the big disappointments this summer both in box office domestic revenue and on the artistic front. Director Neill Blomkamp’s previous effort was the highly celebrated debut District 9 (2009). In Elysium we find a classic dystopia story: we are in the year 2154, when humanity has adopted an extreme social class division. The rich and wealthy have built a new colony in Elysium, a planet outside the Earth’s orbit. A world (inspired by the Stanford Torus) with all the comforts, totally crime-free: luminosity, calm and security. Everyone else, on the other hand, keeps struggling for survival on our planet Earth, which is wrapped in pervading poverty, disease, decay in morality and overpopulation.

Our protagonist, Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) belongs to this second group, and he’s gotten very sick after having been exposed to radiation while working in a robot factory, he has just five days before he will die. Max’s only hope is reaching to Elysium, where laying on a Medbed he can heal his internal damage. Also, Max reconnects with Frey (Alice Braga), his first love never forgotten whose little daughter, Matilda, suffers from leukemia.

While in Elysium, Delacourt, a ruthless defense secretary played by Jodie Foster, tries to protect the space station’s borders. Delacourt is so overzealous in her mission of preserving the well-being of Elysium’s inhabitants, she conspires to overthrow the political regime with the help of mercenary Kruger (a manic Sharlto Copley) and Armadyne’s CEO John Carlyle (William Fichtner). Carlyle develops a program that can dismantle Elysium’s security code and turn her into the new President.

Computer hacker Spider (Wagner Moura) agrees to help Max infiltrate Elysium’s orbit in a clandestine shuttle only if he’s willing to steal John Carlyle’s secret code in order to reboot Elysium’s security systems. Max is fitted with an exoskeleton, hardwired into his brain, and he’ll initiate a journey to defend his survival, and for extension millions of humiliated earthlings.

According with an interview for The Wire, Neill Blomkamp identifies as neither liberal nor conservative, which doesn’t stop people from ascribing all sorts of agendas to him and his films. Blomkamp believes that Earth will someday look a lot like his movie’s dystopian portrayal – a Malthusian catastrophe; how America’s hegemony is slowly eroding en route to a “third world deathbed.”

Despite of the superficial obviousness of the Elysium’s script at some scenes, we cannot disregard the multiple meanings that lie on its hidden symbolism. For example, it’s no coincidence Matt Damon’s character stands for the last Anglo-Saxon white man in Los Angeles and he seems equally alienated from his past criminal background with Latino gangs (his best friend is Julio, played emphatically by Diego Luna) and from his own aspirations of living in Elysium someday. The name ‘Max’ originates from English or German Maxwell or Maximilian, whose meaning is ‘the greatest.’

Although his romantic attraction to Frey is underdeveloped in the plot, there is a hint of a nebulose sexualization of Max and Frey that indicates Matt Damon’s character as merely symbolic towards the second half of the film – an outsider inherently conflicted between his natural impulses and his destiny as final martyr.

The story that triggers Max’s choice of self-sacrifice is Matilda’s tale about an altruistic hippo and a helpless meerkat. Matilda: “The meerkat was hungry. But he was so small. And the other big animals had all the food, cause they can reach the fruits. So he had to watch them eat all the nice foods and berries cause he’s so small. So he made friends with a hippopotamus, so he can stand on the hippopotamus to get all the fruits he wants. And they eat all the fruit together.”

Max cannot avoid to ask Matilda: “What’s in for the hippo?”, but Matilda assures him the hippo is rewarded simply with the meerkat’s friendship. It’s the key metaphor of the film, Elysium representing the hippo figure and Meerkat the destitute Earth.

Ensambling Max’s spinal cord into the exoskeleton can be read as the Christ figure nailed to a futuristic cross. Blomkamp even composes lingering shots showing blood dripping from Damon’s hands, as an allusion to the stigmata. Max tells Frey before he dies “I know why the hippo did it”. It’s a clear reference to the concept of Christian sacrifice needed to save all the sinners on planet Earth.

Yet curiously Elysium‘s humanist message (enhanced immensely by Matt Damon’s performance) could however be interpreted as nihilist if we follow Max’s character arc in a literal way. In the beginning of his journey Max’s only aspirations are selfish and survival-oriented, not attached to any ideal, so his drastic moral evolution can be explained as a side-effect provoked by the lethal dose of radiation he’s suffered. Twirling down a desperate frame of mind, Max could not want to stay alive anymore in such a bleak chaotic world, so he ends committing suicide in the form of retrieving the data loaded inside his brain to liberate the humans and allow their entrance into Elysium – the Paradise.

Article first published as Movie Review: ‘Elysium’: Rebooting Paradise’s System on Blogcritics

"Prisoners" Telluride Review: Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, GQ Style scans

Scans of Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman in Total Film (UK)

As Keller’s interrogation continues in scenes that are gruesome but never exploitative, Villeneuve frequently cuts away to follow the lead police detective (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is pursuing his own investigation that includes questioning Alex’s lonely aunt (Melissa Leo), whose troubled family history may have led her nephew astray.

As the film weaves all the plot and character strands together, the vise tightens. There are some truly scary scenes as new suspects appear and the film twists its way to a dark, mordant conclusion. It’s worth remembering that Incendies, despite its Oscar nomination and excellent reviews, was essentially a high-class melodrama, and that’s the way that Prisoners should be viewed as well. And thanks to the efforts of an expert filmmaking team, it’s a smashingly effective melodrama. Villeneuve enlisted brilliant cinematographer Roger Deakins, who captures the rainy, chilly atmosphere of this Pennsylvania community with visual eloquence. (Pennsylvania was convincingly recreated outside Atlanta.) The editing by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach, two editors of many of Clint Eastwood’s recent movies, is also first-rate. Although the film runs two and a half hours, there doesn’t seem to be a wasted frame. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Scans of Jake Gyllenhaal in GQ Style (Germany) magazine, Fall-Winter 2013

Happy Anniversary, Fred MacMurray

Happy Anniversary, Fred MacMurray!

Fred MacMurray and Madge Evans in "Men Without Names" (1935) directed by Ralph Murphy.

Fred MacMurray and Madeleine Carroll in "Cafe Society" (1939) directed by Edward H. Griffith


"Honeymoon in Bali" (1939), starring Fred MacMurray & Madeleine Carroll, directed by Edward H. Griffith


"Standing Room Only" (1944), starring Fred MacMurray and Paulette Goddard, directed by Sidney Lanfield


"The Absent-Minded Professor" (1961), starring Fred MacMurray and Nancy Olson, directed by Robert Stevenson.

Elysium draft (extracts), Matt Damon video

Matt Damon is the last Anglo in Los Angeles, an overcrowded Mexican slum city with no sense of identity or civic unity. The – mostly white – wealthy people have fled the earth to establish another home in space, but are finally overrun a second time by illegal Third World migrants after Damon dismantles their security system. For Steve Sailer dystopian 'Elysium' is "another Malthusian tale about open borders" and its catastrophic effects on civilization, whereas the rich in their carefree, gated "Beverly Hills" space community profit from the collapse of the borders on earth.

Jodie Foster, Matt Damon and Neill Blomkamp attending "ELYSIUM" premiere in Los Angeles, on August 7th, 2013

Max Da Costa. 36 years old.
Incarcerated twice. 2.4 years, 3.5
years. Trafficking controlled substances. Grand theft auto. Vandalism.

EXT. ELYSIUM
The huge 100 km diameter ring spins ever so slowly. Birds of paradise wave gently in the clean air. We pan over to--

A large government complex. THE CCB. Its metal exterior looks like a shiny version of the Pentagon.

EXT. LOS ANGELES COUNTY HOSPITAL - DAY
The hospital is old, dirty, run down. And very overcrowded.

INT. LOS ANGELES COUNTY HOSPITAL - DAY
We move through the masses to find: MAX sitting, holding a tissue to his lip, still bleeding.

A Nurse emerges. She is beautiful, but has the look of not enough sleep and too much stress. This is FREY, late twenties. She slows when she sees him.

FREY
Max...? Max DaCosta...?

He smiles, but it pains him to smile.

ROBOT PAROLE OFFICER
Police officers noted violent anti social behavior. We regretfully must extend parole. Elevation in heart rate detected. Trace amounts of testosterone in bloodstream. Would you like a pill? Personality matrix suggests a 78.3% chance of regression to old behavior patterns. Would you like to talk to a human?

MAX: (mocking in robot voice) No, I am ok.

ROBOT PAROLE OFFICER
Change in speech pattern noted. Are you being sarcastic and or abusive.

MAX
(still in robot voice) Negative.

ROBOT PAROLE OFFICER
It is a federal offence to abuse a parole officer.

MAX lies on a surgical table. Sandro stands over him. The other gangsters are getting ready. We see carts wheeled in, full of the most godawful looking saws and instruments.

MAX
When this thing is installed, will it hurt?

The gangsters laugh.

SANDRO
Yeah bitch, it's gonna hurt.

A gangster grabs Max's hand and shoves a needle in between his fingers. Max winces in pain, but doesn't make a sound. Max wakes up. He feels his neck, it's neatly bandaged. He looks down to see his stomach bandaged.

SPIDER
Please If you're re-atomized now, it'll scramble the data. You can't heal yourself, not yet.

INT. GANTRY ELYSIUM
The gantry is suspended hundreds of meters up, like a bridge over the immense sub-structure of Elysium. It looks like something out of STAR WARS. Huge volumes of wind swirl.

Kruger keeps coming, a relentless killer.

MAX: You got nothing to fight for.

Max and Kruger collide in a deadly sequence of moves.

KRUGER
I have everything to fight for. I have all this.

Max struggles. But he makes a desperate move, GRABBING hold of the NERVE CENTER on the back of Kruger's HULC. Max tears it off with all his strength. SPARKS explode and shredded circuitry come out in his hand. We hear Kruger's suit power down, and--

KRUGER: You fucking idiot... That data will kill you the second it's retrieved. You wanna save... all your little earthlings... then you're gonna die.

Max collapses next to the central computer. Spider closes and seals the door behind them. The glass floor of the protocol room is the final barrier between the inside of Elysium and space. EARTH looms directly under them. Max looks down at the world that raised him.



Matt Damon (Baby Be Mine) video

Happy Anniversary, Preston Sturges!

"A pretty girl is better than a plain one / A leg is better than an arm / A bedroom is better than a living room / An arrival is better that a departure / A birth is better than a death / A chase is better than a chat / A dog is better than a landscape / A kitten is better than a dog / A baby is better than a kitten / A kiss is better than a baby / A pratfall is better than anything." -Preston Sturges (on his "golden rule" for successful comedy)

In the course of his career, Preston Sturges employed the simplest cinematic syntax to convey the hypothetical stories, achronological timelines, and meta-linguistic reflections that we have analyzed thus far. While some of the most prominent Hollywood filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s were adopting deep-focus, tracking shots, montage sequences, masks and other striking visual solutions, Sturges’s lack of cinematic virtuosity was so blatant as to appear almost in conflict with his complex narrative style. This absence of easily recognizable cinematic marks has often been interpreted as a deficiency in terms of aesthetics that prevented Sturges from making it into Andrew Sarris’s “first line” of auteurs because—as Sarris himself wrote—he “may have been contributed more to the American language than to the American cinema.”

The modest, unobtrusive visual style of Sturges’s movies, in fact, is perfectly functional in relation to a narrative structure and comic style that are mostly based on “external focalization”—the case in which (to use a literary terminology introduced by Gérard Genette) the events seem to happen before the spectator’s eyes, without the intrusion of an internalfocalizer (a character’s viewpoint) or an external narrator’s viewpoint (zero focalization). Sturges’s comic style relies entirely on an unpreventable chain of self-triggered events that unfold “naturally” before our eyes and rely on fast-paced, witty dialogue, fully appreciable only through a high degree of technical transparency. In Sturges’s films, gags and events unfold before our eyes. And even if sometimes an internal focalizer might emerge (a character whose point of view is used as a representational filter—for example, Jean commenting on Pike’s behavior through her mirror in The Lady Eve), or if the dormant implicit narrator unexpectedly appears (as in the silent music sequences from Sullivan’s Travels previously analyzed, or the “narratage” technique that will shortly be discussed), external focalization remains the main narrative strategy used by Sturges to make us laugh.

It is for this reason that Sturges’s cinema is characterized by an extraordinary frequency of long takes and one-shot sequences that usually punctuate the most verbose and motionless sequences: the long discussion between Sullivan and the producers, at the beginning of Sullivan’s Travels, is introduced by a brief shot in the screening room, and followed by a four-minute take in the producer’s office; moreover, the scene from The Lady Eve in which Jean tries to seduce Charles in her cabin features a three-minute static close-up. In general, Sturges reserves long takes for discussions between couples, like the four-minute single-shot sequence between Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea having dinner in The Palm Beach Story, or the second daydreaming scene in Unfaithfully Yours (a threeminute sequence including a two-minute long take).

In all these examples, the long take appears every time Sturges wants his audiences to sit back and concentrate on what his characters have to say (which is usually a relevant piece of narrative information). Examples of this characteristic include the first meeting between Woodrow and the Marines in Hail the Conquering Hero (a five-minute take that includes a tracking shot onto Woodrow’s face, to intensify his monologue about the Marines) and the hysterical existential reflections of Harold in The Sin of Harold Diddlebock—the Sturges movie that featured the highest number of long takes.

Barbara Stanwyck and director Preston Sturges on the set of The Lady Eve, 1941

When Sturges’s venture into independent cinema (the California Picture Company, co-founded with Howard Hughes in 1944) failed miserably after only a couple of movies, Sturges ran back to the studios, signing contracts with Fox and MGM, and even trying to negotiate a return to Paramount. It was too late, as the system had rapidly changed: The end of the war, the loss of profits, the beginning of serious competition from television and, soon after, the Paramount Decision (1948) of the Supreme Court forcing the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains had forced Hollywood to restructure its modes of production and to re-focus on more alluring aspects.

That this change affected Sturges’s creative freedom is quite clear, if we compare the 1933 advertising campaign for The Power and the Glory with the 1949 one for The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend—the former pinpointing the “radical innovation” of Sturges’s “story telling technique,” the latter focusing on the essential value of Betty Grable’s legs. Sturges tried to adapt his creativity, by structuring his script for The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend entirely around the character of Betty Grable, with a storyline and a series of gags centered on her body and her musical numbers.

Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert in "The Palm Beach Story" (1942)

Sturges’s work reflects in many different ways this attitude, by presenting reservations towards most of the moral, sociological and economic values effectively portrayed in Classical Hollywood Cinema, and by underlining the contradictions of that all–American way of life that many other directors were sanctifying. His cynicism towards the myths and beliefs of Western culture gave birth to explicit parodies of the American West (The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend), as well as of the British and French cultures (Les Carnets du Major Thompson), and his satirical approach emphasized the contradictions of the capitalist system (Diamond Jim [1935], The Power and the Glory, Christmas in July, The Palm Beach Story [1942]), wartime propaganda (The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero), the institution of marriage (The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, The Palm Beach Story —originally titled Is Marriage Necessary?), and even the tales of the Bible (The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek).

Far from singing the praises of the American common man, Sturges’s characters strive for survival in a world that forces them to embrace values such as the pursuit of money, success, career and self-esteem. When they are not mistaken for heroes (The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero), they either end up miserably defeated (The Power and the Glory, The Great McGinty), or they are left with the bitter taste of a highly questionable “happy” ending (Christmas in July, Sullivan’s Travels [1941], The Palm Beach Story). Sturges, however, doesn't propose solid alternatives, let alone “universal truths.” He simply exposes the contradictions and the absurdity that lie beneath the cultural, social and economic values commonly accepted by most people. -"The Cinema of Preston Sturges (A Critical Study)" by Alessandro Pirolini