Sunday 7 September 2008

Too Close For Comfort

September 4, 2008

Dear Ted:
Is Baby Tile human or animal?
C.L. in Pa.

Dear Little of Both:
As human as something can be in this town.


Dear Ted:
I just had an epiphany...is Toothy Tile Liev Schreiber? Baby on the way, same age as Affleck. Come on, it's killing me not to know.
Gillian

Dear Too Close for Toothy's Comfort:
Not exactly. Actually, not at all. But L and the real Tooth do have so much in common, true.

Source: Ted Casablanca's The Awful Truth
***


September 5, 2008

One Boyishly Bothered Blind Vice

Isn't it interesting Lloyd Boy-Toyed is undertaking his latest media campaign to fight off rumors about everything under the tabloid sun—every topic save the one he wants to get out: that he sometimes likes young dudes in bed. Not Michael Jackson-style, mind you, but he sometimes likes 'em young. And to keep quiet. And you know what that means, doncha girlfriends? Occasionally Mr. Boy-Toyed's gotta give 'em the green. What a cold, hard, cashed-out town this can be, huh?

Let's see, Lloyd's busy mouthing off about his nasty battles with most everybody in the Biz, not to mention his more cherished (and known) companions and relatives. He appears to be a total crank-a-thon, really, but don't believe it for a sec. Oh, some of it's real, that's fer sure, but it's mostly for show, I assure you.

I have firsthand knowledge of Lloyd's more cunning agendas—not to mention the ones he prefers to get underway under the covers. Don't ask me how. I can't tell! I'm a married man now! I would never embark on something as nasty as tattling 'tween the sheets when I've got a superhoney at home. Quite the opposite of how Lloyd goes about things, trust.

Really, though, as sloppy as Lloyd's getting in the attempting-to-score department, he's gonna be out long before our beloved Toothy Tile, I assure you. Oh, and Lloyd-baby, I don't care, really. But, your blind-as-merde fans sure will. I say screw it, already! (Like you have so many guys.)

And It Ain't: Matthew Perry, David Duchovny, Kanye West

Source: Ted Casablanca's The Awful Truth

569 comments:

1 – 200 of 569   Newer›   Newest»
Jackie said...

@
@ Previous post's comments
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Anonymous said...

This blind vice has gotta be K. Spacey! yes or no?

Anonymous said...

I don't think it's Spacey.

First, there's not much point in writing blind items about Spacey after those butt pictures.

Second, "Lloyd's busy mouthing off about his nasty battles with most everybody in the Biz, not to mention his more cherished (and known) companions and relatives" doesn't sound like Spacey, he keeps low profile.

Anonymous said...

Alec Baldwin seems to be the popular guess.

Ent Lawyer guesses:

How about Kanye? He's always got a gripe with someone and rumors abound about his sexuality...

Diddy...non stop bitching and a lot of GAY rumours surrounding him for years right?

Anonymous said...

Gawker: "Lovable madman Alec Baldwin has so many feuds going on with so many people that he can no longer attend to them one at a time."

Alec Baldwin fits "nasty battles with most everybody in the Biz, not to mention his more cherished (and known) companions and relatives".
What about gay/bi rumors?

Anonymous said...

Would you do it? Would you vote for yourself because there is a small chance of making some additional money?

It's not just about money, it's also about possibly being in an Oscar winning film. It's the prestige factor, attention and money.

Anonymous said...

I doubt there's any chance Brothers will be an Oscar winning film. No buzz, no festivals, just mediocre reviews.

But I'm sure Jake's vote could really make a difference in case of AA nominations. That precious little vote could bring him "prestige, attention and money", so yeah, Heath who? (eye roll)

Anonymous said...

You are aware that Jake has only one vote?

Academy has almost 6.000 voting members. I can't imagine anyone so completely deluded and desperate to do it for "the prestige factor, attention and money".

Anonymous said...

I was being sarcastic hence the "(eye roll)". Too subtle, maybe?

Anonymous said...

Too subtle for me :)

Anonymous said...

... well eventually, they all bow down to The Sexiest Man Alive!!!

*Two Sexiest Men Alive think I'm hotter than the desert in August. How cool is that?*

Anonymous said...

Next time I'll try to be more obvious. ;)

Anonymous said...

I may not place Jake in the same acting category as Heath, but Jake's still a tremendously talented actor and I cannot understand these film choices he's making. It's one thing to aim to be the next George Clooney...and up until Zodiac, he was going along nicely in that direction. But now he's approaching Ben Affleck territory, or, good grief, McBongo's Velveeta.

Brothers
Nailed
PoP
Moon Project
Broadway Joe Namath

I'm looking forward to Brothers, Nailed and Moon Project. PoP could be fun, Broadway Joe Namath project sounds lame.

Anonymous said...

I cannot understand these film choices he's making...

I presume these movies are the best choices from offered projects. I'm glad he's busy.

Anonymous said...

If PoP is a blockbuster, it will give Jake huge power in Hollywood ...

Do Maguire and Bale have huge power in Hollywood?

Anonymous said...

I wanna throw my hand over my mouth in shock and say "my god, is THAT Jake Gyllenhaal?!!. I'd just love to see him do something mature, "raw", "gritty" and "emotionally" touching.

That would be great but good "raw", "gritty" and "emotionally" roles are rare. I'm very curious about Jake's new projects. He got his popcorn hero movie, what's next?

Anonymous said...

"what's next?"

Joe Namath biopic, Moon Project. He's only 28, there'll come many great things from him, I'm sure of it.

Anonymous said...

Good call 10:27. Blockbusters will help but you also have to be very talented to have power in Hollyweird. Ala Johnny Depp.

Anonymous said...

11:00 AM

I've meant new unannounced projects.

Anonymous said...

For Michelle Williams, It’s All Personal

MICHELLE WILLIAMS has an Academy Award nomination, the open adulation of major filmmakers and a résumé that is striking in its worldliness and creative ambition. But if her career has seemed to progress almost inconspicuously, it is partly because of its introspective bent — small movies, subtle performances — and partly because it has lately existed in the shadow of her personal life.

Ms. Williams’s maturity and capacity for quietly wrenching pathos were apparent even on the teenage soap “Dawson’s Creek,” on which she played the troubled Jen Lindley. In her film roles she has revealed a gift both for screwball comedy (“Dick,” “The Baxter”) and bruising emotional drama (most memorably in her Oscar-nominated performance as the spurned wife Alma in Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain”). She has repeatedly taken chances on under-the-radar indies (“The Station Agent,” “The Hawk Is Dying”) while catching the attention of auteurs like Wim Wenders (“Land of Plenty”), Todd Haynes (“I’m Not There”) and Martin Scorsese (the forthcoming “Shutter Island”).

But Ms. Williams, who turns 28 on Tuesday, has become a very public figure for reasons that have little to do with her work. While shooting “Brokeback Mountain” in 2004 she fell into a much-chronicled romance with her co-star Heath Ledger. Stalked by paparazzi, their every move monitored in the gossip pages, the couple set up house in Brooklyn and had a daughter, Matilda. They separated last summer, but the tabloid scrutiny did not let up and if anything has intensified since Mr. Ledger suffered a fatal drug overdose in January.

It has been a difficult year, to say the least, and Ms. Williams acknowledged in a recent interview — her first in eight months, since Mr. Ledger’s death — that she has coped to some extent by throwing herself into her work. She has shot four films in quick succession since last summer, two of which had their premieres at the Cannes Film Festival in May and are due to open this fall.

In the anguished, comic head trip “Synecdoche, New York,” the directorial debut of the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (“Adaptation”), she is part of a vivid ensemble cast orbiting around Philip Seymour Hoffman’s harried theater director. In “Wendy and Lucy,” the independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the acclaimed “Old Joy,” she’s in every scene as a young woman living hand to mouth on the road when her car breaks down and her dog goes missing in a blue-collar Oregon nowheresville.

“I thought a lot about what you look like when you think nobody’s looking at you, when you feel completely invisible,” Ms. Williams said of her character Wendy. “Your entire life happens inside because you don’t think anyone notices you. Which is very different from me. Not that I don’t have any inside life, but I feel watched, all the time.”

As she spoke over a long lunch at a restaurant near her home in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, Ms. Williams occasionally paused and smiled wryly as if to acknowledge the unspoken connections with her off-screen life. “It’s all so personal, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s hard to talk about work without talking about things that are personal. Work is personal. I don’t want to talk about my personal life, but it’s on my mind, and it’s in my work.”

Confessing to being apprehensive and out of practice, she thought long and hard before answering questions, searching for the right words — “I want to actually represent how I feel,” she said at one point — but also taking care to avoid unintended disclosures. “It’s a fine line between wanting to be known and understood but also knowing what’s sacred,” she said.

One subject on which she willingly opened up was “Wendy and Lucy” — “probably the smallest film I’ve made,” she said, “and I’ve made some pretty small films.” (It is set to open Dec. 10, and will be shown Sept. 27 and 28 at the New York Film Festival.) Ms. Reichardt was worried that Ms. Williams would have trouble adapting to the microbudget conditions and to her plain-Jane role. “I feared that she was too pretty for the part sometimes, and I was concerned about asking her to go without makeup and not wash her hair for two weeks,” Ms. Reichardt said. “But I think she found that completely liberating.”

Ms. Williams said she relished the intimate scale. Shooting a tiny film on the outskirts of Portland at a time when she “felt particularly adrift” — she and Mr. Ledger had just broken up — she was grateful to find her character’s anonymity rubbing off on her. “I didn’t stand out in that community,” she said. “It was this perfect safe haven.”

“Making something out of nothing,” she added. “I’ve always liked that phrase, and I feel that way about this movie. We were working with so little in every way.” That minimalism extends to her tamped-down performance. Wendy is allowed one outburst but otherwise endures her downward spiral with stoic resilience.

To convey the character’s stubborn sense of purpose Ms. Reichardt showed Ms. Williams films like Max Ophüls’s “Reckless Moment,” with Joan Bennett as a suburban supermom driven to protect her family at all costs, and “Mouchette,” Robert Bresson’s single-minded portrait of a teenage outcast. “Kelly called me her Mouchelle,” she said.

Ms. Williams related to the self-sufficiency of her character: Wendy, heading north to find a job in the Alaskan fisheries, is something like a pioneer heroine for these depressed and exhausted times. “Maybe I read too much Emerson and Whitman at an impressionable age,” Ms. Williams said, referring to her tendency “to do everything” by herself. Her independent streak dates to her teenage years. After a childhood in rural Montana, she completed a high school correspondence course and moved to Los Angeles at 15, declaring herself legally emancipated from her parents.

The New York Times

Anonymous said...

Ms. Reichardt spoke admiringly of Ms. Williams’s expressive stillness on screen, her ability to tap into wells of emotion while appearing to do very little. “She can make an adjustment that is so subtle and so small it’s like she’s dialing in a station,” Ms. Reichardt said.

That kind of praise comes freely from filmmakers who have directed her. Mr. Kaufman cast her in “Synecdoche” (Oct. 24) partly because he had fond memories of her oddball turn in “Dick” as a nerdy teenager who lives at the Watergate and develops an improbable crush on Richard M. Nixon. “She can be really funny in really surprising ways,” he said. “I love watching her face change.”

Mr. Wenders, who wrote “Land of Plenty” with her in mind, spoke of her honesty, which “transcends any beauty and turns it into goodness, for lack of any other expression.”

There has been no shortage of fulfilling work, especially since her widely praised performance in “Brokeback Mountain.” Mr. Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” an adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel that also stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, is due to open next year, and two other films are awaiting United States distribution: “Mammoth,” directed by the Swedish provocateur Lukas Moodysson, and Sharon Maguire’s drama “Incendiary,” which had its premiere at Sundance.

Ms. Williams would seem to be entering her professional prime, but she is reluctant to capitalize on her recent successes. “I’m going to take a year off,” she said. “I think I stopped feeling creative a while ago, and I’m just realizing it now.”

She admitted to feeling the strain of being a working single mom. She reads bedtime stories to Matilda, now nearly 3, in whatever accent she’s practicing — East London for “Incendiary,” Boston for “Shutter Island” — but has had a hard time balancing the immersive demands of acting and the consuming duties of motherhood. “I used to have all the time in the world to daydream and even just to dream and let your unconscious do some of the work for you,” she said. “Now I’m up at 5 in the morning, and I don’t remember what I dreamed about.”

The bleakness of some of the roles has also taken a toll. In “Incendiary” she plays a wife and mother who loses her family in a terrorist attack; while preparing for “Shutter Island” she read case studies on infanticide. “When I work again maybe it should be a comedy,” she said. “I’ve always had a tendency for darker, more lifelike material. I think I had this sense that important things are heavy things. I don’t know if that’s true any more.”

In person Ms. Williams seems like nothing so much as your average 20-something Brooklyn hipster, which should perhaps be no surprise since she has been a New Yorker all her adult life. While making “Dawson’s Creek” she split her time between Wilmington, N.C., where the series was shot, and New York, where she found “wonderful friends who were all orphans in some way, not just actors but writers and musicians and painters.”

She is a little resentful but mostly rueful that she can no longer experience the city the way she used to. “I feel like that’s been taken away from me,” she said. “I’m worried what people are saying or thinking, or if they’re going to follow me, or if someone is going to pop out of a bush with a camera. I’ve started to shut down, but I also know I can’t let it dictate my life.”

She still finds herself reacting to the tabloid intrusions with bewilderment. (In recent months the talk has turned to a rumored relationship with the filmmaker Spike Jonze.) “It feels so surreal,” she said. “How is this my life? When did it get so out of control?”

To be a celebrity is to negotiate a gulf between private self and public image. “It’s a bit of an isolating problem to have,” Ms. Williams said, and so she was gratified to find that this was among the themes of Milan Kundera’s novel “Immortality,” which she read on the plane to Cannes, though she said she wasn’t sure she agreed with the book’s conclusion, “that the self people perceive is just as real because it exists.”

She is an avid reader who favors poetry over novels while filming so she’s not distracted by competing narratives. Looking ahead to her year off she said that she wanted to pick up a skill, some kind of handicraft. “I want to humble myself in front of a task like embroidery,” she said. “I like how physical work can really free your mind.” At a low point last year she signed up for night classes in bookbinding and calligraphy. “I was prouder of my little foldout book than of some movies that I’ve made,” she said.

Despite her claims of burnout, she still talks about acting with a kind of reverential awe. “I’m a Virgo, and I want everything to be fair and equal and clear, and acting just isn’t,” she said. “It’s kind of an incantation or a rain dance.” She loves the research process but is less thrilled about watching the end results (and often doesn’t). “If only the damned things never came out,” she said. “I get far too self-critical when I watch myself.”

In an e-mail message a couple of weeks later, Ms. Williams said she had been mulling over the questions that came up in the interview. “I’ve started thinking more clearly, my head hasn’t been so switched on recently,” she wrote. “I’ve always identified with loners and outcasts, I don’t know why. I guess this is why I found a home in independent film.” She added: “I wanted to work outside the system, which is why all this fame is a real brain teaser. What am I supposed to do with it? Can you work the system without it working you?

“Acting sometimes reminds me of therapy in that the more you talk about a traumatic or profound event, the more it loses its emotional tension. Switch on a bright light and find there is no boogeyman in the closet. So it is the same with a scene. Never tell the other actor or the director what you are ‘doing.’ ” The trick, she added, was to allow herself “to live in so much mystery, to rely on a feeling, an instinct, on faith, really, that everything I need is already inside me, and best I just don’t block the exit.”

The New York Times

Anonymous said...

A new HL interview promoting the Dylan film, this time with beanie on his head. He's looking GOOD. ;)

beanie

Anonymous said...

I've meant new unannounced projects.

I think he'll try out all types of genre.

Anonymous said...

A new HL interview promoting the Dylan film...

"I'm Not There" - I didn't know that Heath was in the movie thanks to Michelle.

IMDb:
Colin Farrell was originally cast as Robbie Clark. He dropped out of the film to admit himself into rehab for a dependency on back pain medication. Heath Ledger replaced him. Farrell would later take over for Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Anonymous said...

Colin Farrell was originally cast as Robbie Clark. He dropped out of the film to admit himself into rehab for a dependency on back pain medication. Heath Ledger replaced him. Farrell would later take over for Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Interesting!

Anonymous said...

A new HL interview promoting the Dylan film, this time with beanie on his head. He's looking GOOD. ;)
beanie


I love his arms. He looks hot.

Anonymous said...

NY Times article - I'm not surprised, it's not easy to be a single mom and she really is a single mom, since Matilda's father isn't alive anymore. Her nanny can't be there 24/7, in Sweden when she shot Mammoth, Matilda had to spend the days in daycare while Michelle was working. It's a very good thing though that her job allows her to take a year off, people who have "normal" jobs can't do that.
Michelle's a good actress and I hope she can prove her talent in well received movies.

Anonymous said...

I love his arms. He looks hot.

ITA.

Anonymous said...

Question, how much do indi actors/actresses like Michelle earn? She'll probably get more cash for her supporting role in Scorsese's Shutter Island, but since she mostly does this indi stuff, how much does she earn approximately for her indi films?

Anonymous said...

Depends on the budget. Nailed is an indie movie with $25 million budget.

Anonymous said...

I Love You Philip Morris is an indie comedy with Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey.

Anonymous said...

"Depends on the budget. Nailed is an indie movie with $25 million budget."

It's still a lot of money for an independant film.

Anonymous said...

A new HL interview promoting the Dylan film, this time with beanie on his head. He's looking GOOD. ;)

beanie


Thanks for posting. He definitely looks gorgeous, and is it just me or is he flirting with the interviewer ;)
He even winks at him at one point.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting. He definitely looks gorgeous, and is it just me or is he flirting with the interviewer ;)
He even winks at him at one point.


I thought I was the only one who noticed this. LOL.

Anonymous said...

The interviewer had a cute laugh. I wonder how he looks like or who he is?

Anonymous said...

1:30 PM I didn't notice that at first but I went and looked again and he does wink and then the interviewer giggles. So cute.

Anonymous said...

Ms. Williams would seem to be entering her professional prime, but she is reluctant to capitalize on her recent successes. “I’m going to take a year off,” she said. “I think I stopped feeling creative a while ago, and I’m just realizing it now.”

I wonder what will happen to Blue Valentine, movie with Ryan Gosling planned for this year.

Anonymous said...

For anybody interested, I saved Cuntara's letter to Stephen Gyllenhaal where she called WFT "sinister". It makes for interesting reading:

Stephen -
I’m more of a morning person too. If I get up this early (started this at 6) I have five good hours before going in to kisswake M.
First of all, be warned. Ally of IHeartJake let me know she’s cancelling her plans to go out of town this Sunday on the chance that you’ll grant her two minutes in person to let you know how sorry she is for the whole baby name thing. Susie of JakeWatch in England explained to me what happened, which she learned from the senior editor (or his office bumboy) at Us Weekly, after he’d pestered me with phone calls and emails for Official Verification and I told him to go jump in the lake and sent his email address to the girls, telling them that if they wanted to email Us Weekly strongly-worded messages of protest and indignation re their predatory methods I would not stop them. Which I understand she did and quite a few of the others did. This is what the senior editor at Us Weekly replied to Susie in not-so-polite terms: It wasn’t either of the core fan bases at IHeartJake or JakeWatch who spilled to the press. It was a grubby little bottom-feeder who runs a cyber tabloid called JustJared.com and who, I am told by the girls, has trawled anonymously before at their respective sites and not only stolen tidbits from their postings to palm off as “exclusives” on his, but has also passed on these so-called exclusives to rags like Us Weekly - I suppose, in sycophantic Sidney Falco fashion (you have seen The Sweet Smell of Success, haven’t you?) to get in good with them.
So I went over to take a look at this website and I’ve got to tell you I was shocked. Manong Stephen, I’m not completely naive when it comes to the online world, but I still couldn’t believe how many candid photos he had there. Suppose I’ve been aware of such places intellectually, but it’s different when someone you care about gets victimized like this. My God, the cynicism. The contempt! Got royally, royally pissed off by it and NOW I know exactly how Jake feels. Not to his degree, but exactly the type of anger.
Anyway. This is what the girls implored me to clarify to you, if you weren’t clear on this already: There’s the bottom-feeding so-called (I hate to use this word as description, your great-grandfather would be disgusted) “press” - which I suppose would include Page Six as well as Us Weekly AND JustJared; there are flabby or even sinister online places like Dave Cullen or Waiting for Toothy; and then there are well-administered, well-meaning, respectful sites like JakeWatch and IHeartJake. And they really do mean you and yours well, Stephen. If there is a Court of Gyllenhaal (and I’m not completely convinced that there’s not) they are your flower girls. Yes, they ogle pictures of Jake and Maggie - oh, and you too. But they use this as a jumping-off point to discuss among themselves other things, relationships with their own parents or children, their own dreams, aspirations, etc. Susie has an Official Ban on gossip about Jake’s love life at JakeWatch, I’ve seen her clamp down pretty swiftly. And the fans at IHeartJake - well, they were the first to recognize the references in your poems to Jake’s debut in Keith Lonergan’s In This Our Life and Maggie’s stage work in Closer. These people are not slavering fools. They know what all of you mean as artists, and they only wish to ornament and pay tribute.

So maybe you’re convinced that Ally’s people and Susie’s people would never act in bad faith but now they’re imploring me to implore you to try to convince Jake and Maggie and Peter as well that they would never knowingly betray their confidence or exploit their private moments. I’m figuring if the Cubs can forgive Steve Bartman the girls can be forgiven too.
Am also hoping that you’re out of the doghouse for joyfully announcing to me and that I’m out of the doghouse for joyfully announcing to the girls, who took it in the same joyful spirit. They promise not to be so careless next time if you help them not to be.
Other items. About that big review: If Dave Herrle had been on the payroll you couldn’t have gotten a better overview and analysis of your life and works. He’s even gone so far as to rent Losing Isaiah AFTER he wrote the review, because he wants to round out his comments. I told him to go get Certain Fury as well.
Michael woke me up at 1AM out of sound sleep Saturday night to get up and watch The Shield. He’d seen this episode first-run (it’s one of his favorite shows) but the fact that you directed it didn’t register the first time around because - well, of course, we didn’t know you then. I was pretty groggy, but he kept pointing out to me your directorial choices - you know, look, look! This is how he establishes an interior scene; a hierarchical relationship; power struggle; family tension; etc. He NEVER used to talk like that.
He’s dragged me out of bed before to talk about you, but it’s usually been about your poetry.
Oh, and there’s a woman living in Riverside who’s seriously planning to fly to Boulder for your reading.
I’m going back to my own writing now. Let me know if you ever want to read it.

Your friend in Woodside,
- Cantara
This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 12:00 pm and is filed under To Stephen. You can feed this entry. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site

Anonymous said...

I wonder what will happen to Blue Valentine, movie with Ryan Gosling planned for this year.

Maybe that'll be her very last project before she takes a year off?

Anonymous said...

Am also hoping that you’re out of the doghouse for joyfully announcing to me and that I’m out of the doghouse for joyfully announcing to the girls, who took it in the same joyful spirit.

I'm still puzzled like I was 2 years ago - just how stupid are Cantara and Stephen?

Anonymous said...

I saved Cuntara's letter...

ROFLMAO!

Anonymous said...

What a load of shit! And funny how she labels Just Jared as one of the bottom feeders, seeing as how PR has repeatedly used him to promote Reeke.

Anonymous said...

Homer Hickam, universally known for his classic memoir ROCKET BOYS (which became the major motion picture OCTOBER SKY starring Jake Gyllenhaal) has expressed interest in helping to write the memoir of Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Unfuckingbelievable.

Anonymous said...

If I recall correctly Stephen G could be kinda potty-mouthed in his correspondence with Cantera. found it unpleasant reading.

Sinister? Flabby? Maybe they meant Simply Flabulous. (who knows what they meant who cares)

Anonymous said...

U.S. short on tough guy actors

Filmmakers turn to U.K., Australia for action stars

Where have the manly movie stars gone? Not so long ago, Hollywood’s male stars were men’s men. Think John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart and Steve McQueen.

Over the decades, that generation has given way to the likes of Johnny Depp, Keanu Reeves, Brendan Fraser and Tom Cruise. Casting the titular tough-guy New York hero of his upcoming adaptation of “The Spirit,” Frank Miller also had trouble finding the right actor.

“Hollywood is great at producing male actors, but sucks at producing men,” says Miller. “I found them all too much like boys.” (He hired New York TV actor Gabriel Macht, 36.) “We spend a lot of time in the industry talking about that issue,” says Robert Relyea, who produced movies for McQueen and wrote “Not So Quiet on the Set: My Life in Movies During Hollywood’s Macho Era.” “My directors always tried to seek out people who had ‘it,’ which does not exist today. You’ve got copycats trying to be McQueen. They don’t get it.”

These days, studios are hard-pressed to find home-grown traditional male leads to carry their pictures. Their star rosters include countless boy-men who even after they turn 40 are less than credible macho movie stars. Depp powered the “Pirates” franchise with a fey perf that was more fussy Marlon Brando than athletic Errol Flynn.

Even with “The Matrix” series behind him, Reeves is still often defined by “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and other wayward youth roles. He was less than believable as a doctor in “Something’s Gotta Give.” That’s because he’s a boy-man.

So is goofy Fraser, who aged from a boyish “George of the Jungle” to a boyish mummy-fighting father in “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.” “In a global culture, so what if the tough guys come from another country?” asks producer Sean Daniel, who padded “Mummy” with Hong Kong action stars Jet Li and Michele Yeoh. “It’s one big movie culture.”

Not atypically, the year’s top-grossing film, “The Dark Knight,” stars Brits Christian Bale and Michael Caine alongside the late Heath Ledger, from Down Under. Even New Yorker Woody Allen is drawing his male stars from Europe, with Spain’s Javier Bardem in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” Britain’s Ian McShane in “Scoop” and Scotland’s Ewan McGregor and Ireland's Colin Farrell in “Cassandra’s Dream.”

These days, when John Travolta or Ben Affleck aren’t the right fit for a big actioner, the studios often turn to the likes of rugged Aussies Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe, whose perfs can range from both scary and dangerous to powerful and tender. Affleck, like original Jack Ryan Alec Baldwin, could have used a boost from more Tom Clancy installments after “The Sum of All Fears,” but the studio is going another way.

Even comicbook superheroes are boy-men — Brandon Routh as Superman, Edward Norton the Hulk and Tobey Maguire Spider-Man — unless they’re from another country, like Brits Bale (Batman) and “X-Men” stars Ian McKellen (Magneto) and Patrick Stewart (Professor X), or Aussie Hugh Jackman (Wolverine). And while Will Smith played post-apocalyptic hero in “I Am Legend,” his “Hancock” is a post-modern superhero, an alcoholic homeless man — not the stuff of myth and legend.

Two of the top rising action stars right now are both from the U.K.: “300” star Gerard Butler and Jason Statham (“Death Race”). “We all wish there were five more guys like Jason Statham,” says producer Mark Gill. “There’s no shortage of roles for them. There’s a shortage of guys who can plausibly do them. The more expensive the budget, the narrower the list.” When James Cameron was casting “Avatar,” he found Sam Worthington, now 32, in Australia, and also recommended him to McG for “Terminator Salvation,” as one of the few young actors who could stand up to Bale’s John Connor.

Where did America’s tough guys go?

Along with stars in the classic mold like Charles Bronson and Charlton Heston, the ’50s and ’60s brought more self-conscious method acting, men who revealed their sensitive side, like Brando, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty. These men explored irony, questioned authority and knew how to engage with a psychotherapist. With the Me Generation came the move toward impishly rebellious Peter Pans: Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy and John Belushi.

Of course, movie stars are a reflection of their times and culture. Ours is no longer the era of straight-ahead nationalism. Americans question everything, including authority. And they have never been more anxious about staying young. “It’s like the crisis of the American male,” says screenwriter Kirsten Smith (“The House Bunny”). “We just can’t find a real man.”

For his part, Cruise seems to be trying to pick roles that will deepen his gravitas. But when he played a doctor in “Eyes Wide Shut” and a U.S. senator in “Lions for Lambs,” he seemed out of his league. Now he’s trying again, as a German World War II hero in “Valkyrie.”

Recently, Cruise ran into resistance at Warners when he sought to play a maverick third-party president in “The 28th Amendment.” Instead, the studio wanted Cruise to play the prexy’s ally, a burned-out special forces operative who helps him overcome a shadow government. The star deemed the part too close to “Mission: Impossible.” “I truly thought Tom would be great in the role of an outsider elected to the highest office,” says director Phil Noyce. “The studio wanted to explore further possibilities for the president, including Denzel.” For them, it was about finding the right balance between the two leads, in a very high-budget political thriller.”

Washington declined the part, but he’s one of the few American stars who can carry a movie as a president. He’s on the short list of in-demand Hollywood stars — all well over 50 — who define larger-than-life heroic masculinity. The others are Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones.

Most American drama stars gain authority with age —Smith, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Nic Cage are all seasoning well — but just what did a star like McQueen have that today’s lack?

“Steve felt less was better,” says Relyea, “Less lines, less everything. In ‘The Magnificent Seven’ when he was going up Boot Hill, he took out a shotgun shell and shook it by his ear. He did it so well you believed it. If someone does it today they make it a three-act play and it’s phony. These guys had a masculinity and toughness that came across. McQueen didn’t give a damn who his makeup man was. It’s not fashionable for actors to be all-American men now; they have to be strange and different.”

Which is perhaps one explanation for the surprise success of AMC’s “Mad Men”: Star Jon Hamm reminds auds what ’60s stars used to be like: laconic, mysterious … and masculine.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117991319.html?categoryid=2508&cs=1

Anonymous said...

Good article. Jake definitely has a boyish quality, like he is still the baby in the family. A big contrast to Heath. Even in pictures of Heath as a teen, he reads man. All man.

Anonymous said...

All man. With a little bit of femme.

Anonymous said...

subject: masculinity.

BBMt was the first real challenge to the "cardboard lover" image - hey, men with real feelings and real sexual feelings - and willing to surrender to these feelings!

(curious it had to be in arms of another man, rather than woman, but thats okay . . . interesting, in itself!)

as culture-shattering, at least in the USofA, as Elvis movin' his pelvis in the 60s.

Anonymous said...

Wow that Cantera letter is a sycophantic rant if I ever read one. How does she "know" Stephen and who the hell wakes up in the middle of the night to watch the directorial choices in an episode of The Shield?? LOL Anyway THE GIRLS never did get to apologize did they? They got told to shove it up their asses and they still worship this family for some strange reason. I'll stick to the sinister and flabby thanks very much. Pompous, smug, fake intellectualism doesn't impress me.

Anonymous said...

yes well you should read some of the other Stephen/Cantera letters if you want an earful of pompous, smug and potty-mouthed snark.

these were around at this time, dont know where. . . maybe on her site?

Papa used Jake's fame to sell his books.

Anonymous said...

From the Cantara letter ... "They know what all of you mean as artists, and they only wish to ornament and pay tribute."

OMG.. can it get anyore cringeable.

You can imagine someone's massive ego getting pumped with lines like that.

Anonymous said...

"All man. With a little bit of femme."

I completely agree. I think the delicate femme bit only added to his beauty, that perfect combination of rough and soft that he had about him I find fascinating.

Anonymous said...

Their star rosters include countless boy-men who even after they turn 40 are less than credible macho movie stars. Depp powered the “Pirates” franchise with a fey perf that was more fussy Marlon Brando than athletic Errol Flynn. Even with “The Matrix” series behind him, Reeves is still often defined by “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and other wayward youth roles. He was less than believable as a doctor in “Something’s Gotta Give.” That’s because he’s a boy-man. So is goofy Fraser, who aged from a boyish “George of the Jungle” to a boyish mummy-fighting father in “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.”

My Prince will be laconic, mysterious and masculine.

Anonymous said...

I completely agree. I think the delicate femme bit only added to his beauty, that perfect combination of rough and soft that he had about him I find fascinating.

IA. There was a review about Heath in one of his movies where a reviewer mentioned this fascinating combination.

Anonymous said...

6:19, I definitely think Jake's gonna look hot as the Prince. That's one thing that's for sure.

Anonymous said...

"My prince will be laconic, mysterious and masculine"

O pussycat, I was hoping your prince would be hot, seductive as Cleo of the Nile, and gay as a goose. . . ! Pu-leeeeze!

Anonymous said...

My Prince will be more macho than John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Steve McQueen rolled into one. (Gemma would totally kick my ass otherwise.)

Anonymous said...

Really, though, as sloppy as Lloyd's getting in the attempting-to-score department, he's gonna be out long before our beloved Toothy Tile, I assure you. Oh, and Lloyd-baby, I don't care, really. But, your blind-as-merde fans sure will. I say screw it, already! (Like you have so many guys.)

Sorry Ted aint none of these closet queens coming out. Don't have the balls. Especially Jake.

Anonymous said...

Was it RDJr who said Jake would get along well with Steve McQueen?

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Mr. G has SHITTY taste (but I don't think Cantara is his gf--I heard it was some woman who teaches film at Vassar College).

As for Steve McQueen--it's funny you brought him up because (I kid you not) Heath used to remind me of him...(certainly in BBM).

Anonymous said...

I believe 8:20 is correct about the Vassar film prof -

Anonymous said...

I don't think it was so much the femme sexual quality in Heath, but a physical grace in his movements. Like a dancer. His body was well proportioned, but not overly muscular like the POP Jake. He looks fabulous in his Joker suit and Nurses uniform. His presence was hypnotic.

I did feel bad for the jake watch girls. The worst part was that they ran into Stephan on the street after the whole mess happened and he did not recognize them, even though he had just met them. I guess he had a lot on his mind, but still.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

I don't get why Jake's fans went to Stephen Gyllenhaal's readings. They are fans of Jake, I don't get why they had to support the whole Gyllenhaal family. Or Jake's fansites announcing the birth and name of Maggie's daughter. If the Gyllenhaals don't want that, then they should continue to just concentrate on Jake, it's his fandom after all.

Anonymous said...

IHJ and Jake Watch was not intereseted in Jake's family until Cantara found out about those sites and exploited them to sell Stephen's book.

It all started when one of the girls on JW saw some pics of Stephen and thought he was cute and made a very funny post, that and the fact that he wrote a book of poetry, she wants to be a writer anyway.

The post popped up on google by Cantara and there you have it. She contacted JW, IHJ to let them know about the book readings, some of the girls posted on DC as well and that's how they got involved.

Cantara manipulated them and when Ramona was born she blabbed to them. I don't know why Stephen blamed the girls for that other than guilt: He was fooling around with Cabtara at the time. He has now moved on to some chick he met at the Univ. of Colorado at one of his book readings, a filmmaker. Some fans observed them together.

Jake's fandom started to go down hill since then. The 1st casualty was Ally at IHJ, she was one of the girls at that NY book reading. You may notice she is MIA over at IHJ along with most of Jake's fans. Steph runs that site now and ally was one of the most loyal, passionate fans. It had nothing to do with Reese, she popped in last year to give them her blessings but she said that she has moved on, more important things going on in her RL. Good for her but I don't think she ever got over that foul tounge lashing from mr. G.

Anonymous said...

I forgot to add: Picturegate. Cantara found about the site and started to moniter them, JW posted some pics of Stephen and zjake that were taken from Cantara's site (they appeared on IHJ as well).

Cantara had a fit and posted on JW that they had better take down the pics oe else and she didn't know how they got them, blah, blah.

They made up afterwards and later she allowed JW to post those pics on their forum.

I always thought that was a set up by Cantara, you don't put pictures on an open blog, especially pictures with a popular actor and his father, the girls were played from day one IMO.

Anonymous said...

Well, thanks for the explanation.

Anonymous said...

C. is a nasty piece of work. Recently on her site she tore into Naomi. A long piece of vicious commentary. Mr G must be pretty naive to get involved with such a person.

Anonymous said...

I suppose, in sycophantic Sidney Falco fashion (you have seen The Sweet Smell of Success, haven’t you?) to get in good with them. So I went over to take a look at this website and I’ve got to tell you I was shocked. Manong Stephen, I’m not completely naive when it comes to the online world, but I still couldn’t believe how many candid photos he had there...

too much hilarity to quote. but to the poster of this cantara letter...thank you. BEYOND HILARIOUS.

poppa g must have a massive ego to be friendly with an ass-licking bloviator like this.

the other thing that's incredibly funny is this person introducing fansites to sg as though they are new lifeforms. roflmfao. jake & co are WELL aware of what's out there, and that includes dad. trust. it's a basic rule to never admit you read stuff about yourself, but all celebrities do. all of them. (well, maybe dear old fossils like peter o'toole do not trawl the net for name-mentions, but he sure trawled the print media back in the day.)

anyway, thanks again for making my day.

Anonymous said...

"I don't get why Jake's fans went to Stephen Gyllenhaal's readings. They are fans of Jake, I don't get why they had to support the whole Gyllenhaal family. Or Jake's fansites announcing the birth and name of Maggie's daughter. If the Gyllenhaals don't want that, then they should continue to just concentrate on Jake, it's his fandom after all."

Fansites are run by fans. The fandom belongs to the fans not the actor. Fuck what THE GYLLENHAALS want. Most actors want to be worshiped and somehow also have their privacy respected. These two diametrically opposed scenarios do not coexist unfortunately. The Gyllenhaals all seem to think they are exceptions to this rule. They all need to get over themselves and word to whoever posted that Stephen must be a total douche to befriend and get his ass routinely kissed by Cantara.

Anonymous said...

Dad was feeling a bit left out, having one of those mid-life crises. Everyone paying attention to his sheltered and conservative son. Nobody paying attention to dear old dad. Along comes a fan of Jake's under the guise of a book publisher who happens upon Dad's "poetry" and offers to publish him, while at the same time trying to get in good with him to find out about her original crush, the son.

The rest is history.

Anonymous said...

Cantara sounds like the mother of all babblers.

Anonymous said...

^^^ So very true! lol

Anonymous said...

C. is a nasty piece of work. Recently on her site she tore into Naomi. A long piece of vicious commentary.

What a bitch!

Anonymous said...

Everyone paying attention to his sheltered and conservative son.

Jake is conservative?

Anonymous said...

Even comicbook superheroes are boy-men — Brandon Routh as Superman, Edward Norton the Hulk and Tobey Maguire Spider-Man — unless they’re from another country, like Brits Bale (Batman) and “X-Men” stars Ian McKellen (Magneto) and Patrick Stewart (Professor X), or Aussie Hugh Jackman (Wolverine).

Wow, even Brandon Routh and Edward Norton aren't masculine enough.

Anonymous said...

August 31, 2008

New book offers sad and funny stories from Annie Proulx

It was Annie Proulx's award-winning "Brokeback Mountain" — a tale of love between two Wyoming cowboys — that became an Academy Award-winning film. Her brilliant new book of nine short stories still centers on the state where she has lived for more than a decade — it's subtitled "Wyoming Stories 3." She has a marked soft spot for ranch life and doesn't sentimentalize it.

"For Archie," she writes about one of her least fortunate characters, "the work was the usual ranch hand's luck‚ hard, dirty, long and dull. There was no time for anything but saddle up, ride, rope, cut, herd, unsaddle, eat, sleep and do it again."

The stories are mostly melancholy, such as the one about the young woman who breaks with her lover in a silly quarrel over an iceberg lettuce. She refuses a reconciliation and starts alone on the long hike they had planned to take together over a dangerous, closed and hardly used trail. Her adventure moves so rapidly and fatally that the reader does well to avoid going too fast and missing the beauty and vividness of a scene. For example, this of a summer mountain: "It’s year-round snow cover was gone and the peak stood obscenely bare, a pale grey summit quivering in radiant heat. Rock that had not seen sunlight in hundreds of years lay exposed. Another hot, dry summer, the sky filling with wind-torn clouds and lightning but no rain. Occasionally a few drops rattled the air before the clouds dragged them away."

General sadness about the West and a bitter final story about war in "Eye-rack" are tempered by two out of the nine. In those, the protagonist is no less than The Devil. An annoyingly fussy type, the Evil One becomes a vehicle for exposing some of the author's dislikes: the Tour de France, oddly enough, and air travel.

In one called "I've Always Loved This Place," he devises a new routine for arrivals in "the main Welcome to Hell foyer": "(H)e or she would find combined features of the world's worst air terminals, Hongqiao in Shanghai the ideal," he says, "complete with petty officials, sadomasochistic staffers, consecutive security checks of increasing harshness, rapidly fluctuating gate changes and departure times and, finally, a 27-hour trip in an antiquated and overcrowded bucket flying through typhoons while rivets popped against the fuselage."

Some of The Devil's projects for the improvement of Hell annoy Charon, the boatman from Greek mythology who ferries the dead across the river Styx.

"Fine just the way it is," snarls Charon, both silencing The Devil and furnishing the title for Proulx's book.

On the dust cover the title surmounts a photo of a wretched shack in the desert.

http://www.newsminer.com/news/2008/aug/31/new-book-offers-sad-adn-funny-stories-annie-proulx/?book-review

Anonymous said...

I know for a fact that Cantara did/does not have a crush on Jake, it has always been Stephen. She doesn't think much of Jake from the little contact she had with him, seems to like Maggie and Petetr a bit more.

Doesn't like Naomi of course. The sexual part of her relationship with Sg is over I hear and he has moved on to someone else.

Jake is conservative compared to his parents and sister, not a right wing nut of course but some of his views do slip out at times like his comments last year about the Government needing to act like a parent sometimes during Rendition pr, Cantara really hated that.

Her only interest in Jake was the fact that they could get them to buy his fater's book, that's it.

Anonymous said...

...his comments last year about the Government needing to act like a parent sometimes

But the purpose of the Government is to act like a good parent all the time, isn't it?

Anonymous said...

^ Well, testosterone is not the first thing that comes to mind with either Routh or Norton.

Anonymous said...

But the purpose of the Government is to act like a good parent all the time, isn't it?

No, the purpose of a democratic government is to represent the people, not "nanny" the people. To be for the people, of the people, by the people.

Totalitarian regimes and military dictatorships take on the role of a parent who knows what's best.

Jake was rightly smacked down for his silly statement.

* * *

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
(you may be surprised that this quote is by C. S. LEWIS, of all people.)

Anonymous said...

5:54 AM, thanks for the heads up about new stories from the brilliant Annie Proulx.

My dream is that she write an article about Heath someday. She really admired him.

Anonymous said...

^^^^ITA

Anonymous said...

To be for the people, of the people, by the people.

OK, but what is the purpose, the task of a democratic government? To take care of the citizens, to protect, to make plans, to make decisions. Not so different from the parenting.

Anonymous said...

Jake was rightly smacked down for his silly statement.

Just a different opinion, there is nothing silly about it.

Anonymous said...

Posted on OMG

tMF CONTROVERSIAL: Gay roles for "real men" - Who's afraid of playing gay?

I don't see what all the fuss is about playing gay characters. When I did Y Tu Mama Tambien, I was asked, 'Don't you worry about what people will say to you in the street?' It seemed like it was such a huge deal. Why would it be an issue for me? I think it is a very American thing. In Mexico, no one has given me any s**t for playing gay roles, for playing a transvestite, whatever. They don't confuse the actor with the role. I mean, they don't think Al Pacino's a cop!"

That's awesome actor Gael Garcia Bernal talking. Man, he certainly has balls! Many young actors nowadays would rather keep mum or ignore offers to play gay, and why shouldn't they? Aside from the hungry press that can put the "bad news" within minutes, it could ruin their careers permanently. But we're talking Hollywood of course.

European actors certainly have different outlook. As you might have noticed, even the young Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is interested in playing drag. Can he pull it off? Also, if you noticed, in Little Ashes, the upcoming movie starring Radcliffe's co-star, Robert Pattinson is also playing gay. It seems the British threw away their so-called "traditional values" long before we even thought about it. But is this a new phenomenon? Are actors from the other side of the Atlantic more open and ready to take on controversial roles including dressing up in women's clothes and exposing their feminine side? I think not. French and German actors have been doing the same thing...

Best Gay Roles Ever. Let's look back at some of the most acclaimed gay roles in cinema. But let me mention names first: Daniel Day-Lewis, Dustin Hoffman, Tom Hanks, Johnny Depp, Hugh Grant, Heath Ledger, River Phoenix, Gael Garcia-Bernal, Javier Bardem, Jake Gyllenhaal, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Linus Roache, Robert Carlyle, Charlie Hunnam, James Marsden, Scott Speedman and Rupert Graves.

If playing gay is the kiss of death in Hollywood, why are so many of these guys still making movies? After the jump, we pick the tMF Top 5 Gay roles (by real men).

Honorable Mentions: Daniel Day-Lewis (My Beautiful Laundrette), Jake Gyllenhaal (Brokeback Mountain), Gael Garcia Bernal (Bad Education), Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (Velvet Goldmine) and Robert Stadlober (Summer Storm).

Anonymous said...

tMF Top 5 Best Gay Roles: This is quite hard. There are a lot of fantastic performances, but we narrowed it down to just five - take a look:

# 5. Hugh Grant in Maurice. You might be surprised to know that one of Hugh's earliest movies was EM Forster's gay coming-of-age story, Maurice. Adapted for the screen by the Merchant Ivory duo, it also stars James Milby and Rupert Graves. Says Grant Balfour:

The film opens on a stormy, windswept beach, as an older man awkwardly instructs young, fatherless Maurice Hall (James Wilby) in the "sacred mysteries" of sex. The same turbulent, wordless struggle with passion lasts throughout this slowly evolving, beautifully filmed story. Novelist E.M. Forster's brainy, British melodrama hinges on choice and compulsion, as the pensive hero falls for two completely different men. First comes frail, suppressed Clive (Hugh Grant), who wants nothing more than classical Platonic harmony... and a straight lifestyle. (Grant's performance is so convincing, one wonders how he ever became a heterosexual sex symbol.) After Clive's wedding, Maurice turns to hypnosis to cure his unspeakable longings. Unfortunately, his "cure" is interrupted by Clive's lustful, brooding, barely literate gamekeeper Scudder (Rupert Graves), a worker more at home gutting rabbits than discussing the classics. Maurice's love for a "social inferior" forces him to confront his illicit desire and his ingrained class snobbery.

# 4. Cillian Murphy in Breakfast on Pluto. I'm a big fan of the Irish actor Cillian Murphy. Aside from Disco Pigs and On the Edge, I think this is one of Murphy's most amazing performances. Says Bret Fetzer:

Both epic and intimate, Breakfast on Pluto uses the life of Patrick "Kitten" Braden (Cillian Murphy, Batman Begins), a queer orphan boy, to explore the hidden worlds that lie beneath so-called "normal" society--the subcultures of homosexuals, the Irish Republican Army, and prostitutes. At odds with his conservative Irish town, Patrick rebels with the fearlessness of someone whose life feels worthless. When he leaves for London, where he hopes to find his mother, he joins a touring rock band, is almost murdered, becomes assistant to a magician (Stephen Rea, The Crying Game), is arrested as an IRA terrorist, and joins a peep show--and those are only half of the markers on his odyssey (the movie struggles to encompass the novel by Patrick McCabe). Though the first half of the movie feel almost weightless in the headlong rush of events, a rich emotional heft sneaks up on you; by the end, Breakfast on Pluto has become almost unbearably sad and wonderfully buoyant. Murphy's superb performance is both delicate and willful, ably supported by an excellent cast, including Liam Neeson (Kinsey), Brendan Gleeson (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), and Ian Hart (Backbeat), as well as rock stars Gavin Friday and Bryan Ferry (who has a particularly creepy cameo as a serial killer).

#3. River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. River Phoenix is definitely one of a kind. It was his intense, absorbing portrayals of a lost youth, a hustler, a young spy, and someone in love that endeared him to a loyal fans who still remember the fallen actor up to this day. Directed by Gus Van Sant, it also stars Keanu Reeves.

More about the movie: River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves star in director Gus Van Sant’s haunting tale of two young street hustlers: Mike Waters, a sensitive narcoleptic who dreams of the mother who abandoned him, and Scott Favor, wayward son of the mayor of Portland and the object of Mike’s desire. Navigating a volatile world of junkies, thieves, and johns, Mike takes Scott on a quest from the grungy streets to the open highways of the Pacific Northwest, in search of an elusive place called "home." Groundbreaking and visually dazzling, My Own Private Idaho is a stirring look at unrequited love and life at society’s margins.

#2. Linus Roache in Priest. I simply don't care what critics have to say about Priest. Many of them have lambasted this Antonia Bird film because they are offended by the so-called 'attack on the Catholic Church'. Please take your misplaced traditional values somewhere else. The movie is totally absorbing and allows you to think more about the relevance of religion today. Linus Roache plays the confused yet sexually active Priest to perfection. Says Dave McCoy:

Despite its title, forget about finding this controversial drama on the Vatican's screening list. The film explores a provocative checklist of religious taboos--celibacy, incest, sexual abuse, homosexuality, the debatable secrecy of the confessional--as director Antonia Bird delivers a bold condemnation of what she views as the outdated politics and harmful nature of Catholic doctrine. The story concerns the ideologically strained relationship between two clergymen, the misleading conservative Father Greg (Linus Roache) and his older and more practical colleague, Father Matthew (Tom Wilkinson). Upon arriving at his new Liverpool parish, Greg is shocked to learn that Matthew ignores celibacy and openly sleeps with his black housekeeper. Greg chooses to satisfy his earthly desires in a more secretive way. Sometimes, he likes to lose the cloth, grab a leather jacket, and pick up guys at the local gay pub. He's got other problems as well. While torturing himself with his own moral dilemma, he's hit with another, as during confession a young girl confides that her father is sexually abusing her at home. While this drags out the old "bound by secrecy" cliché of many religious melodramas, Bird uses it to bolster her theme of unwarranted secrecy in the face of faith and social scorn. Ultimately, both the priest and the girl are victims of their own fear, and must find courage to destroy it. Thankfully, Bird's wicked sense of humor keeps the film's tone from slipping into saccharine sentimentality, while Roache's intense performance and a honest, shattering finale rescue the film from swerving too far into shallow TV movie-of-the-week sensationalism.

I was surprised to discovered that the film was actually available on youtube, divided into different parts. Here's part one.

#1. Heath Ledger in BrokeBack Mountain: Robbed of the Oscar for Best Actor, and the victim of the Academy's elite 'force', Brokeback Mountain gave us a defining role for the late Heath Ledger. While another actor won the award (Oddly enough, for portraying another gay role), Ledger's performance in this movie is moving, honest and heartbreaking. No wonder fans of the actor still remember Heath's Ennis DelMar and share his grief over love lost forever.

the movie-fanatic

Anonymous said...

My dream is that she [Annie Proulx] write an article about Heath someday. She really admired him.

That would be great.

Anonymous said...

Just a different opinion, there is nothing silly about it.

You think it's not silly for Jake to think that the Government, and our President, are just like our collective parents? You would have loved Mussolini then. And North Korea's "dear leader," who is expressly defined as the "father and parent" of his people.

When this statement came up, Jake was also - I hope inadvertently - defending the right of a "parenting" government to conduct torture.

His movie, Rendition, meanwhile, tried (not very successfully) to make a point about due process and the limits of torture.

Jake's incoherence on this topic is something I'm sure he and his civil liberties-defending parents are embarrassed about.

Maybe Reese should do the talking.

Anonymous said...

7:44 Thanks for posting.

Anonymous said...

Maybe Reese should do the talking."

She's also a ditz. Did you hear her idiotic speeches to the people who were participating in the Avon Breast Cancer Walk in D.C. (the one she did not participate in but pretended to)? She was unprepared, largely uninformed on the issue and kept punctuating every other word with "awesome."

Those two are not a brain trust.

Anonymous said...

Doesnt the word "gyllenbabble" refer to Jake's line of bullshit that is considered endearing? I should talk, I used to think it was kinda cute, myself.

Anonymous said...

Oh he's so cute the way he shops all the time.

Anonymous said...

Oh he's so cute the way he shops all the time.

LOL

Anonymous said...

"gyllenbabble" was coined by the girls over on JW, they did several posts about how he would babble through interviews, not making any sense at times and trying to sound smart, it was all tounge in cheek, no harm but true.

The girls on gyllenbabble named their blog that because they agreed that Jake babbles.

Maybe he should have finished college....

Anonymous said...

Liev Schreiber at Wikipedia

became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s, having initially appeared in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywood films

His father is of Austrian, Irish, Swiss and Scottish descent while his mother is Jewish, the descendant of immigrants from Poland, Ukraine and Germany

father is a stage actor and director.

uncanny instinct for isolating the frightened, frail, goofy parts of his characters

One of Schreiber's half brothers, Pablo, is also an actor.

Schreiber is a good friend of Dustin Hoffman. He enjoys basketball and cycling.

He has previously dated Kate Driver, sister of Minnie Driver and Kirsten Dunst sorry I mean Kristin Davis.

Schreiber is dating Australian actress Naomi Watts.

Anonymous said...

OT - Does anyone believe there is an afterlife after death? For instance that your soul lives on?
Or do you just stop existing, completely?

Anonymous said...

^ ^ ^ ^

ROFLMAO ! ! !

Anonymous said...

ROFLMAO ! ! !

11:18, good that you find my questions amusing.

Anonymous said...

A new HL interview promoting the Dylan film, this time with beanie on his head. He's looking GOOD. ;)

Finally had a chance to view this...thanks 11:24AM, but damn.

Sweet how he would turn and look at the poster whenever he talked about the other actors on the film. Humble about his own contribution. And what he said about consumerism. Did this guy have any vanity at all? Well maybe not enough.

11:11, I don't know about afterlife, but Heath had a lot of soul.

Anonymous said...

11:11 I don't believe in God but I definitely think one's soul lives on after death in what form though, I have no idea.

11:18 What's so hilarious about 11:11's post???

Anonymous said...

11:11, I don't know about afterlife, but Heath had a lot of soul.

True.


11:11 I don't believe in God but I definitely think one's soul lives on after death in what form though, I have no idea.


I hope so, that the soul lives on, it would be sad if we completly stopped existing in whatever form.

Anonymous said...

11:11, I'm not sure - but I defintely cannot say for certain that it doesn't live on. I've always wondered, that vital force that make someone alive, must go somewhere after death, so yes, lean toward believing there is an afterlife, and I wonder if it doesn't enter another living being, to repeat the cycle over and over again, as some world religions believe, and scientists, in that energy can change and take many forms, but cannot be created nor destroyed. Just something to think about. :)

Anonymous said...

OT - Does anyone believe there is an afterlife after death?

I'm agnostic and pesimist so I don't believe in an afterlife.

Anonymous said...

11:29 #2, so you basically believe in reincarnation?
I think it's better when your soul/vital force finds a new vessel rather than "floating around" endlessly.

Anonymous said...

His father is of Austrian, Irish, Swiss and Scottish descent while his mother is Jewish, the descendant of immigrants from Poland, Ukraine and Germany

What a mix!

Anonymous said...

11:40, yes, I tend to lean in that direction. I wonder about it. It seems like a natural, physical property, that humanity has deified, and rightly so! Only, I don't think that we humans are the top, far from it from what I've been able to observe, all living beings have this force in equal measure, and it many enter any, even the environment, seas, mountains, trees. :)

Anonymous said...

When anything is blocking my head or there's worry in my life, I just go sit on Mars or something and look back here at Earth. All you can see is this tiny speck. You don't see the fear. You don't see the pain. You don't see thought. It's just one solid speck. Then nothing really matters. It just doesn't.
- Vanity Fair (August 2000).

Having a child changes every aspect of your life — for the better, of course. The sacrifices are large, but what you get in return is even bigger than the sacrifices you make. I feel, in a sense, ready to die because you are living on in your child. Not literally, not ready to die — but you know, that sort of feeling in a profound way.
- November 2007 interview quoted by Susan Chenery, "Who Is That Man?", In Touch Weekly, January 23, 2008.

Anonymous said...

^^He's the best - every time I read something about him, I am amazed. ITA with Heath. :)

Anonymous said...

When anything is blocking my head or there's worry in my life, I just go sit on Mars or something and look back here at Earth. All you can see is this tiny speck. You don't see the fear. You don't see the pain. You don't see thought. It's just one solid speck. Then nothing really matters. It just doesn't.
- Vanity Fair (August 2000).


Wow, he really was an old soul in a young body.

Anonymous said...

(and it wasn't easy to dredge even this up)

I'm going to continue doing what I want to do. And if it means I want to go and make a big movie, if it has something to say, I will want to make it. I don't want to spend my life wasting my time. If it's a big movie, I want to do it. If it's a small movie, I want to do it.
- Jake Gyllenhaal

Anonymous said...

When anything is blocking my head or there's worry in my life, I just go sit on Mars or something and look back here at Earth. All you can see is this tiny speck. You don't see the fear. You don't see the pain. You don't see thought. It's just one solid speck. Then nothing really matters. It just doesn't.
- Vanity Fair (August 2000).<7


That's a good method to decrease your problems mentally. I hope he really practiced it.

Anonymous said...

Aww 11:59 AM, it's not fair quoting one after the other. lol

Anonymous said...

Crazy people don't sit around wondering if they're nuts.

- Jake Gyllenhaal

Anonymous said...

Since we're talking about Heath...

If you can say "fuck"...I think you can smoke a cigarette

Anonymous said...

^^^
Heath: Would you like a fuckin M&M?

Carrie Keagan: I would definitely like a fuckin M&M.

Anonymous said...

Crazy people don't sit around wondering if they're nuts.

- Jake Gyllenhaal


If this quote is accurate, Mr. G. sometimes has wise things to say. ;)

12:36, that's a funny interview. I think he didn't like the interviewer much though. She's over the top. LOL.

Anonymous said...

I think he didn't like the interviewer much though. She's over the top.

I think so too.

Anonymous said...

The sheep were interesting. They were the easiest thing. They just naturally herd, and they are naturally stupid.

- Jake Gyllenhaal

Anonymous said...

The movie's already exceeded any expectations I had. I think pleasing Annie Proulx, the writer, and getting her nod of approval was the biggest success for me, for us.

- Heath Ledger

Anonymous said...

^^That's mean! Also, I thought Jack handled them a little too roughly in Brokeback, in the scene where the "paint brands wore off". ;)

Anonymous said...

FUCK Aguirre!

Anonymous said...

Jack. :*

Anonymous said...

How Heath inspired a star in me

HEATH Ledger's co-star, British model Lily Cole, has revealed her sorrow at the death of the Aussie actor so soon after befriending him on the set of his last movie.

Cole, one of the world's leading catwalk queens, had been helped by Ledger in stepping off the runway and in front of the film cameras for her start in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The pair had spent time together in the days before his death from an accidental drug overdose, going to gigs around London, between scenes for the Terry Gilliam flick.

"When he died it was one of the hardest, most devastating experiences. It was for everyone on set," Cole said. "When the three actors came to replace him it must have been hard for them too. What was amazing was the things they did came from being friends with Heath."

Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law answered a call from Gilliam to continue in Ledger's role. Cole told UK magazine, Now, the experience of working alongside Ledger, who plays the Joker in Batman sequel The Dark Knight, had inspired her to focus more on her acting career. "I'd always been very interested in an acting career, and that is taking priority over modelling now," she said.

Images of Cole and Ledger on the set of Imaginarium were among the last photos of the acclaimed actor released before his death in January this year. She has made a committment to her next film role, playing Alice in Wonderland, in Marilyn Manson's Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll.

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,24312188-5012985,00.html?from=public_rss

Anonymous said...

So Liev's father isn't Jewish, just his mother--so another thing he has in common with Jake.

Anonymous said...

Universal Announces 'Jarhead,' 'Action/Thriller' Bundle for Blu-ray

Universal has announced a late-November release for the war drama 'Jarhead' on Blu-ray, as well as a bundle featuring three of the studio's latest catalog releases. Originally released on HD DVD over a year ago, Universal will debut the Blu-ray version of the Jake Gyllenhaal-Peter Skaarsgard starrer on November 25.

Supplements announced thus far include a pair of audio commentaries with director Sam Mendes and screenwriter William S. Broyles, though not any of the documentary or other video-based materials that were featured on the previous HD DVD. We'll keep you updated on any future spec updates.

Anonymous said...

Oh man . . . can I stand watching Swoff in Blu-ray? ;)

Anonymous said...

The question is - can you resist freezing and zooming in certain scenes? :)

Anonymous said...

and licking the screen, hoping nobody's watching you?

Anonymous said...

LOL!

Anonymous said...

When I was in 'Jarhead,' I felt really good about my body, really confident.

- Jake Gyllenhaal

Anonymous said...

Hey, Jake, when you were on the cover of Out magazine, I felt really good about your body, really confident.

just sayin', fella.

but I really like your t-shirts.

Anonymous said...

Jake is naturally big. Now after all this working out, it's too much, his head looks small in relation to his huge torso. I hope it'll look better in the movie.

Anonymous said...

E! Online video

Anne Hathaway's Baby Talk

Anonymous said...

Jarhead workout

Anonymous said...

I like Anne as an actress. But I hope she didn't know about her ex's money stealing ways (he even stole money aimed for kids in need!). If she knew it wouldn't make her much better than him.
She has much money herself to enjoy a luxurious life, which I heard she's very fond of.

Anonymous said...

I'm into more scrawny Jake (Zodiac, Proof, DD, BBM) rather than buff Jake (Jarhead). The PoP look is just too much for me and not in a good way. :/

Anonymous said...

Brokeback Sheep

Anonymous said...

Goofy Jarhead

Anonymous said...

5:44 Yes she does, I have a feeling Trevor is a great guy who'll be there for her. That wasn't my point though. ;)

September 06, 2008 5:53 PM


I get your point. I know I would choose an old, trusted friend as the Godparent of my child, not a colleague (co-star in Heath/Jake case) who I barely knew, just because he looked at me with googly eyes. I'm betting he didn't want life-long friendship or to take care of his child, if something happened. He probably wanted into his pants. That's a difference.
To tell you the truth, I would have been pissed if I was Trevor. Good thing that despite everything, he seems to be there for the girl.
Heath seemed to be a chaotic guy and probably felt a connection with Jake. Resulting in him choosing Jake over trusted, childhood friends.
I think Jake will choose Chris as the Godfather for his child. How it should be, I think.

Anonymous said...

^^You can't compare Tobey/Leo with Jake/Heath. The first were pals from childhood and are still very close. Leo loves Ruby very much.

Anonymous said...

6:29, I agree with you. Tobey/Leo are VERY good, dear friends--who have even vacationed with their significant others. Ditto for Matt/Ben. (Is Ben a godfather to one of Matt's daughter? And is Matt a godfather of Violet, Ben's daughter?).

I think Busy Phillips, a very close friend of Michelle's, fulfilled the good friend quotient when picking a godparent to Matilda while Jake fulfilled the symbolism (Brokeback Mountain--where Heath met Michelle). I also think Heath expected to have other children--for which he would have named Trevor as a godfather. I don't think he expected to die at 28.

Anonymous said...

(Is Ben a godfather to one of Matt's daughter? And is Matt a godfather of Violet, Ben's daughter?).

I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if they chose one another.

Your theorie about Busy and Jake might be true.

Anonymous said...

Yes, the symbolism: in other words, the nod to the Brokeback experience that was sweet for everybody: "we made out, she got pregnant. . . " it was it seems to me a sentimental and lovely gesture. too bad it got lost in the shuffle.

Anonymous said...

They also could have asked Ang. He called himself their "matchmaker".;)

Anonymous said...

Ang's new film "Taking Woodstock" stars Emile Hirsh and Liev Schreiber. I didn't know that. The story sounds interesting. I'm looking forward to the film.

Anonymous said...

Dear Too Close for Toothy's Comfort:
Not exactly. Actually, not at all. But L and the real Tooth do have so much in common, true.


Liev and Jake both starred in an Ang Lee film. Liev is together with Naomi Watts, who was with Heath and Heath was Jake's co-star in BBM.

Anonymous said...

Ang's new film "Taking Woodstock" stars Emile Hirsh and Liev Schreiber.

Liev Schreiber is "in talks" to play a drag queen named Vilma.

Liev Schreiber - 1994 cast as a drag queen in Nora Ephron's "Mixed Nuts".

Anonymous said...

Liev Schreiber is "in talks" to play a drag queen named Vilma.

Liev Schreiber - 1994 cast as a drag queen in Nora Ephron's "Mixed Nuts".


LOL. What's up with him playing drag queens?

Anonymous said...

The Fifty Greatest Gay Movies!

When we here at AfterElton.com originally conceived the idea to present our first annual poll of the best gay male movies of all time, we wondered how many gay movies could possibly be considered “great.” Fifty seemed like a nice solid number, but we weren’t quite sure. We opened the polls anyway, and you voted.

For a grand total of 570 different movies.

At AfterElton.com, gay movies are much of what we do. All day long, we watch them, think about them, and write about them. But even we were surprised by the quality and diversity of the films selected in this poll: big budget dramas, quirky indie darlings, romantic comedies, musicals, and even a certain gay teen sex comedy. In short, there are a lot of gay movies that are damn good!

Here are some interesting statistics. Except for two films, The Boys in the Band (1970) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), every movie on this list was produced in the 1980s or later. What’s this? Don’t gay people like classic films? A more likely explanation, of course, is that gay-related content rarely existed on film until the 1980s — and if it did, it was almost invariably offensive.
...
Since this will be an annual poll, it should be fascinating to watch older movies fall off of the list and new ones climb on to it. No doubt some movies that received a great deal of press this year, and subsequently placed high on this list, will fade somewhat over time while new movies — the soon-to-be released Milk comes to mind — will no doubt make a big splash on next year's list. Hopefully there will be a great deal of movement as gay cinema continues to grow and thrive.

Without further ado, we present AfterElton.com’s Fifty Greatest Gay Movies!

1. Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Ferragamos or Birkenstocks? Mojitos or good ol’ beer? Gay men don’t seem to agree on much. But by a wide margin of nearly two-to-one, you chose Brokeback Mountain as the greatest gay movie of all time. And how could it be otherwise? “It’s not ‘gay,’” said some, trying to broaden the film’s appeal, “it’s a ‘universal love story’!”

But is it really? Plenty of heterosexuals have had the experience of hiding a love affair, but how many of them know what it’s like to be forced by society to deny themselves the very possibility of love? This is the daring and fundamentally “gay” question at the heart of Ang Lee’s 2005 masterpiece: can two men simply allow themselves to love each other? And though the movie is set in the past, it is, ultimately, the very choice that every gay man still must make.

Jake Gyllenhaal is flawless as Jack Twist in arguably the movie’s most difficult role. But Heath Ledger’s heartbreaking portrayal of Ennis Del Mar, a walking cautionary tale of homophobia’s logical end result, is a revelation — a total acting transformation made all the more tragic by Ledger’s death earlier this year. But the indignities and injustices that Jack and Ennis faced did not end at Brokeback Mountain’s closing credits. Upon the film’s release, the movie’s makers and fans were subjected to a six-month orgy of tasteless jokes from clueless comedians and bile-filed commentary from right-wing pundits. All of this negativity culminated when the movie, long considered the Oscar front-runner, lost Best Picture to a fine but unremarkable movie called Crash, perhaps the most egregious upset in Oscar history and almost certainly the result of lingering homophobia in Hollywood’s old guard.

But that fusillade of ridicule and outrage is already fading into the gloom of a bigoted past while the movie’s artistry and quiet power shines brighter than ever. Let’s face it: this isn’t just the greatest gay movie of all time, it’s one of the greatest movies ever.

2. Beautiful Thing (1996)
3. Shelter (2007)
4. Latter Days (2003)
5. Maurice (1987)
6. Trick (1999)
7. Get Real (1998)
8. Big Eden (2000)
9. The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy (2000)
10. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
...

After Elton

Anonymous said...

Liev Schreiber is "in talks" to play a drag queen named Vilma.

That will be ... interesting :)

Anonymous said...

I think Jake will choose Chris as the Godfather for his child. How it should be, I think.

Jake has already chosen Chris. ;)

Anonymous said...

Jake Gyllenhaal is flawless as Jack Twist in arguably the movie’s most difficult role. But Heath Ledger’s heartbreaking portrayal of Ennis Del Mar, a walking cautionary tale of homophobia’s logical end result, is a revelation — a total acting transformation made all the more tragic by Ledger’s death earlier this year ...

... All of this negativity culminated when the movie, long considered the Oscar front-runner, lost Best Picture to a fine but unremarkable movie called Crash, perhaps the most egregious upset in Oscar history and almost certainly the result of lingering homophobia in Hollywood’s old guard.

But that fusillade of ridicule and outrage is already fading into the gloom of a bigoted past while the movie’s artistry and quiet power shines brighter than ever. Let’s face it: this isn’t just the greatest gay movie of all time, it’s one of the greatest movies ever.


That pretty much sums up what I think. Cheers, After Elton.

Anonymous said...

Jake is naturally big. Now after all this working out, it's too much, his head looks small in relation to his huge torso. I hope it'll look better in the movie.

CGI can do wonders for the pinhead effect.

Anonymous said...

"Jake Gyllenhaal is flawless as Jack Twist in arguably the movie’s most difficult role. "

ITA. The Twist character is five times more difficult than the Del Mar character. Most of the B-List and borderline A-List male actors could portray Ennis Del Mar, which is why many actors wanted it. Very few actors could, or wanted to, do Twist. Jake's performance is an absolute masterpiece.

Anonymous said...

Gyllenbabbler (why do you guys hate Heath so much and begrudge him so much???). You're twisting what After Elton said out of context to feed your Jake is superior to Heath in every way. Yes, Jake did a good job but Heath was stratospheric--read what they say about him (and HE was the one whose performance was a masterpiece):

"But Heath Ledger’s heartbreaking portrayal of Ennis Del Mar, a walking cautionary tale of homophobia’s logical end result, is a revelation — a total acting transformation made all the more tragic by Ledger’s death earlier this year."

Anonymous said...

11:53 PM, I have doubts about your intellect.

Anonymous said...

Gyllenbobbleheads resent Heath because he is a threat to their fantasy that Jake is more than a handsome guy and talented actor. They can't stand it that Heath is perceived in the film industry, especially among directors, as being not just "talented," but transcendent at times.

If they had more confidence in Jake, they could be more gracious about Heath.

Jake is sweet, and, I think, sexy and adorable, but face it, he's not that deep. Maggie clearly got the brains in the family. The main thing that makes Jake interesting - as opposed to handsome-dreamy - is his supposedly tortured sexuality.

The bobbleheads should LOVE Ted for making Jake appear complex.

Anonymous said...

The bobbleheads should LOVE Ted for making Jake appear complex.

Bobbleheads don't want Jake to be deep or complex - straight and cute will do!

Anonymous said...

Interesting blog post (by a guy):

True. True. False.

True: Kissing is beautiful
Even More True: especially when its onscreen
Truer Still: Especially if it's man on man / girl on girl / star on star. (I like reflective surfaces. What can I say?)

Obscure Truth: This friendly photo of Jonny Lee Miller and Jude Law always delights.
Strange But True: Sometimes I feel like I'll never recover from watching Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal make out.
Resulting Truth: That kiss made it easier to imagine any number of other pairs of male movie stars kissing each other.

Commonly Known Truth: I heart Ewan McGregor
Lesser Known Truth: I like Jim Carrey
FALSE: I want to see Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey kiss.

<--- This movie is worrisome. Why are they making this movie I Love You Phillip Morris? I haven't talked about it at all -- or shown this picture you've probably already seen -- because I've been trying to pretend it doesn't exist. Mainstream Hollywood cannot be trusted to make gay movies. Especially comedies. They just can't. You need a brilliant queer fringe dweller or an emotionally mature world class auteur or other types who aren't worried about the delicate sensibilities of easily offended boring moviegoers who can barely handle it when gay is even mentioned and won't be seeing any decent movie made in which men smooch each other anyway. Is this going to be another I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry because who needs that?

Film Experience Blog

Anonymous said...

Happy Birthday Michelle!

Anonymous said...

ITA. The Twist character is five times more difficult than the Del Mar character. Most of the B-List and borderline A-List male actors could portray Ennis Del Mar, which is why many actors wanted it. Very few actors could, or wanted to, do Twist. Jake's performance is an absolute masterpiece.

Hi QB! Still spewing your Heath hate everywhere, eh?

Anonymous said...

Most of the B-List and borderline A-List male actors could portray Ennis Del Mar, which is why many actors wanted it. Very few actors could, or wanted to, do Twist.

And you decided to make this up because ...?

Anonymous said...

Sometimes I feel like I'll never recover from watching Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal make out.

Nathaniel, you are not alone.

Anonymous said...

Jake is far more popular than Heath, especially in the BBM fandom, of course most, like 11:53 PM, will prefer his performance.
I liked both portrayals, but I'm imipressed with Heath naturalness, he came across very realistic. You forgot it was an actor playing a character.
Jake was very beautiful and charismatic in the movie and a great partner for Heath.

Regarding Heath. I think, and I might be wrong, that playing someone so realistically, someone who comes across so real, is more difficult. It's just my opinion and I'm not a movie critic... ;)

Anonymous said...

Jake is far more popular than Heath, especially in the BBM fandom, of course most, like 11:53 PM, will prefer his performance.

It's OK to prefer someone's performance.
It is not OK to rewrite history to prove your "point".

Anonymous said...

If you watch BBM and many other movies of Heath's, you'll notice there is a complete lack of vanity. He's not too worried if he comes across sexy, he is just very commited to portray the character accurately.
Some of his early films and roles didn't require him to dig deep into a character, but he got much better and challanging roles later on in his career and even better ones would have come his way, if he didn't die.

Anonymous said...

If Heath, who was responsible to carry the film, didn't do such a great job, BBM wouldn't have gotten so much attention. I think even hard core Jake fans and the anti Heath brigade has to realize that much.

Anonymous said...

Jake is far more popular than Heath, especially in the BBM fandom,

I agree and disagree with this. Jake WAS more popular than Heath on the internet after BBM came out and yes, especially in the BBM fandom. The speculation about his sexuality, his single status and his easy going, charming Hollywood personality did that. But I think outside of the internet Heath was more popular, for example most of the people around me knew him from 10 Things but they had no idea who Jake was.

Months before Heath's death he became more famous than Jake because the Joker buzz. Now you can't even compare, because of his performance in TDK and sadly his death he's far more popular than Jake. The slowly dying BBM fandom has started to turn its back on Jake too.

I think they were both amazing in BBM and I don't understand why some people need to put Heath's performance down to elevate Jake's. Heath carried the movie, as much as I love Jack Twist (and Jake, even though I’m disappointed in him at the moment) it was Ennis' story and without Heath's impressive performance the movie simply wouldn't have worked.

Anonymous said...

Happy Birthday Michelle!

Slowely approaching 30. I remember her as the chubby, unattractive teen in Dawson's. After she hooked up with HL her looks improved immensly. I think she's prettier than Katie Holmes now. Never thought I'd say that.

Anonymous said...

The slowly dying BBM fandom has started to turn its back on Jake too.

I hope the fandom isn't dying and I don't think the fandom turned it's back on Jake. There was the initial disappointment when he didn't pay some kind of tribute to H. and so on. But after what he said about Heath to Ted and
Lisa, his reputation is good again.

Anonymous said...

Williams then

Williams now

Anonymous said...

Michelle and Jamie Lee Curtis - small Hollywood!

Anonymous said...

Jamie Lee used to be so pretty. Now she looks pretty bad, her hair is awful, she should dye it.

Anonymous said...

I think plastic surgery helped Michelle get pretty. JMO

Anonymous said...

I don't see it. What do you think she changed 7:23 AM?

Anonymous said...

THE DARK KNIGHT star AARON ECKHART loves talking to kids about his role in the BATMAN film - because they want to know all about working with the late HEATH LEDGER.
The actor feels he's doing his bit to promote his tragic co-star's legacy every time he tells a bunch of eight year olds what the Joker was really like.
He tells WENN, "To talk about Heath is fun for me to do; because of his unfortunate death he obviously isn't there to talk about his character and the fun that he had making the movie and the kids would've really wanted to hear what Heath had to say so it's fun to talk to them about his character."
And Eckhart loves the fact he now has an army of young fans: "Kids recognise me more. I get fan mail from eight year olds, which I really enjoy because the movies I've done in the past haven't reverberated too much with the kids.
"I was taking photographs of fishermen on the pier in Manhattan Beach, California the other day and I was taking pictures of this one kid and he looked at me and goes, 'Two Face.' The guy couldn't believe that Two Face was taking his picture, fishing on a pier.
"I always try to talk with them and answer all their questions. It's fun for me to talk to kids about the make-up and to talk about Batman and the suit and the car."


AARON ECKHART

Anonymous said...

I think it helped a lot that Michelle lost weight. Being fat doesn't suit her, it makes her ugly. Some peoople look good fat, she doesn't.

Anonymous said...

Now she looks pretty bad, her hair is awful, she should dye it.

Jamie Lee Curtis—growing older, becoming new again.

“I want to be older. I actually think there’s an incredible amount of self-knowledge that comes with getting older. I feel way better now than I did when I was 20. I’m stronger, I’m smarter in every way, I’m so much less crazy than I was then.

“Years ago my husband and I were at the Golden Globes. I was wearing some borrowed dress that wasn’t me, my hair was done in a way that I never wear my hair, and I had earrings on. And my husband said, ‘You know who is the most beautiful woman in the room?’ And I was hoping he was going to say me. And he pointed across the room at Jessica Tandy. She was sitting at a table wearing a cream-colored silk-shantung pantsuit. Single strand of pearls, short white hair, a little lipstick—nothing else. And I thought, ‘He’s totally right.’ There was none of the pretense, none of the trying so hard.

“My style is a distillation. I’ve etched out who I am through myriad haircut attempts, outfit attempts, beauty attempts, diet attempts. It’s been an evolution. I’ve let my hair go gray. I wear only black and white. Every year I buy three or four black dresses that I just keep in rotation. I own one pair of blue jeans. I’ve given away all my jewelry, because I don’t wear it.

http://www.aarpmagazine.org/entertainment/essential_jamie_lee_curtis.html

Anonymous said...

Thanks 7:34, well if she's happy to look like that..

Anonymous said...

Because it's her birthday. Here she is at the Today Show with Jon Steward.

Jon and Michelle talking

Anonymous said...

^^^ Michelle Williams discusses her new movie, "Me Without You," on the daily show.

That was in 2002 (I presume).

Anonymous said...

That was in 2002 (I presume).

I think so, it was shortly before the last season of Dawson's Creek started.

Anonymous said...

I don't see it. What do you think she changed 7:23 AM?

Her nose and there's something about her face. I don't think it was the weight loss alone, her face just looks different IMO.

Anonymous said...

Birthday Sluts

Hugh Grant (48)
Michelle Williams (28)
Michael Bublé (33)
Goran Visnjic (36)
Henry Thomas (37)
Rachel Hunter (39)
Adam Sandler (42)
Constance Marie (43)
Tom Wopat (57)
Michael Keaton (57)
Sylvia Miles (76)
Cliff Robertson (85)

Anonymous said...

Maurice (1987)
Hugh Grant (48)


How time flies!

Anonymous said...

THE DARK KNIGHT star AARON ECKHART loves talking to kids about his role in the BATMAN film - because they want to know all about working with the late HEATH LEDGER.
The actor feels he's doing his bit to promote his tragic co-star's legacy every time he tells a bunch of eight year olds what the Joker was really like.


I'd love to see that.

Anonymous said...

7:28 Thanks for posting. After Heath, Aaron and Gary Oldman's performances were the best in TDK for me. I'm glad he's getting recognition for it because he’s a very good actor and he seems like such a nice guy.

Anonymous said...

Ledger voted top summer movie villain

Heath Ledger's chilling portrayal of the Joker in Batman blockbuster "The Dark Knight" easily surpassed rivals to be named the summer's best movie villain in a poll released on Wednesday. Australian actor Ledger, 28, who died of an accidental drug overdose six months before the July release of "The Dark Knight", won 95 percent of votes in a poll by AOL's Moviefone.com Web site.

The Batman sequel, which has taken $505 million (284 million pounds) at the U.S. and Canadian box office alone, also won every category in which it was nominated for the end of summer season poll, including best sequel, best superhero movie, best action sequence and "movie most worth your cash."

"'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull' had all the hype going into the summer but when people saw 'The Dark Knight', they really responded in 'Titanic'-like proportions," said Moviefone editor Scott Robson. "Indiana Jones" -- the much-anticipated fourth movie in the lucrative franchise -- got only five percent of votes for best movie in the Moviefone end of summer movie poll. The poll got a total of 646,917 online votes.

"Sex and the City" edged out "Mamma Mia" as best chick flick, while "Tropic Thunder" beat "Pineapple Express" 32 percent to 24 percent as the funniest comedy.

Summer was no fun, however, for comic actors Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers. Murphy's "Meet Dave" came top of the "least worth your cash" category with 33 percent of votes, closely followed by Myers' vehicle "The Love Guru". "When you think what these guys were 10 years ago and you look at these two movies, you feel like the wheels have come off their careers," said Robson.

It was the opposite story for Robert Downey Jr, who hit a career rock bottom in the early 2000s because of drug addiction. The actor won the "hottest summer leading man" and "best combined performance" category in the poll for his back-to-back roles as the superhero in "Iron Man" and for playing a black actor in "Tropic Thunder." "It shows that film fans can be a very forgiving lot as long as you put something great on screen," Robson said.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUKSP3397420080903

Anonymous said...

Page Six
SIGHTINGS

NAOMI Watts checking out photos of late ex-boyfriend Heath Ledger at her brother Ben Watts' exhibit hosted by Belvedere at Milk Studios . . .

Anonymous said...

BIs

"This one is from the accountant. Turns out, this A list movie star is bad at something else besides fixing his hair. Last year, he managed to lose almost $7 million playing poker. No wonder he wants to make another installment of his franchise." [CDaN]

"This famous twin is doing whatever she can to start pregnancy speculation just to get some positive publicity. She's gone so far as to make sure that others know she can't drink or smoke, especially in public, and taking to wear even more hideous and baggy clothing than usual."

http://gawker.com/5047195/which-famous-twin-is-faking-a-pregnancy-for-attention

Anonymous said...

NAOMI Watts checking out photos of late ex-boyfriend Heath Ledger at her brother Ben Watts' exhibit hosted by Belvedere at Milk Studios . . ."

Awww...

Anonymous said...

NAOMI Watts checking out photos of late ex-boyfriend Heath Ledger at her brother Ben Watts' exhibit hosted by Belvedere at Milk Studios . . .

Aww. She and Heath seemed to be so in love.

Anonymous said...

There are few actors who are liked by EVERYONE. And there is no journalist or publicist I’ve talked to in two years at TIFF who has anything negative to say about Mark Ruffalo. He’s a doll. So nice and so kind and so considerate and so normal and SO in love with his wife. - Lainey, Sept 8

Mark Ruffalo on Jake: "Like I said," Ruffalo replied, "Fincher only has a problem with people if they're not prepared — if they're not ready to work when they show up. Whatever form that takes — whether it's a prop person, an actor or whatever. I thought there were a lot of weird sour grapes in that New York Times article.

[he is referring to Jake's thinly-veiled Fincher critiques -"So there came a point where I would say, well, what do I do? Where's the risk?" - in a New York Times interview]

We're actors, man; we get paid way too much. It's like 'Wah, wah, wah' to me to hear an actor bitching and moaning when they get paid as much as they do and we have a pretty great life. I don't have much sympathy for it." - MR, Feb 2008

Anonymous said...

I love Mark. Jake is a spoild boy. Mommy and daddy are rich, have great contacts in Hollywood. He never had to fight for anything. I worked my ass off while going to school and college, to be able to survive.

Anonymous said...

Heath Ledger - Ben Watts photoshoot

Ben Watts Official Site

Anonymous said...

[he is referring to Jake's thinly-veiled Fincher critiques -"So there came a point where I would say, well, what do I do? Where's the risk?" - in a New York Times interview]

Mark should learn not to put down his colleagues, it doesn't make him look good.

Kissing Fincher's ass is his business but who is he to teach others what to think, do or say?

Anonymous said...

Well, maybe he shouldn't have critisized a colleague publicly, but he has a point. They earn way too much and then complaining about shooting many takes? C'mon!

Anonymous said...

Mark should learn not to put down his colleagues, it doesn't make him look good.

jake should learn not to put down his director, it doesn't make him look good.

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