WEIRDLAND

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Lust for Life


Bebe Buell was once my muse, when she was young, crazy and punk, and probably she would have dreamed of banging Jake, too.

Guitar Rocks!





Allison Moorer, Jenny Lewis and Courtney Love in the same post. I've always had a thing for guitar players, and I know Jake belonged to a rock band named Holeshot, that rocks my world!

In N.Y. from Peter to Jake


Here Jake seems he suddenly stalks Maggie and asks her can you gimme an autograph?

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Devastating "Proof" Review


"Oh my god. That’s one hour and forty minutes of my life I am NEVER getting back…not that I was counting…no, I was falling asleep in the back of the cinema…or trying to fall asleep and forget the utter cheese-fest that was this film. I have no idea what the director or half the cast were thinking when they signed on to do this movie.

Directed by John Madden, Proof has an all-star cast of Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins…its all downhill from here. Paltrow is Catherine, the daughter of a mathematical genius Robert, who recently kicked the bucket…not that you’d know because Catherine still has conversations with him. Oh and by the way, Robert was insane, and Catherine spent most of her time housebound caring for him and has become a bit of a junk-food eating recluse (who somehow still has a willowy figure and perfect skin and hair…how odd). Then there’s Hal (Gyllenhaal) a maths geek lecturer and drummer on the side who wants to go through Roberts last notebooks (all 103 of them); which are pretty much full of the ramblings of a man who has lost his mind, although Hal thinks there may be a moment of genius in there somewhere. And he also wants the chance to shag Catherine...naturally. Lets leave the incredibly unlikely probability of someone as ludicrously attractive as Jake Gyllenhaal being a maths geek (if that’s what maths geniuses look like these days, I know what I’ll be studying at university) and deal with Claire (Hope Davis), Catherine’s insanely cheerful and highly insensitive sister who has her own little crazy habits and who wants to sell Robert’s house and cart Catherine off the New York where she can see a good shrink. Throw in one notebook with a brilliant and ridiculously complicated mathematical proof that Catherine is convinced she wrote (Hal and Claire don’t believe her) and the most insensitive wake ever (involving a shockingly bad rock band and a lot of people getting laid), and there you have it…Proof in a nut shell.

This clearly aims for the likes of “Good Will Hunting” and “A Beautiful Mind” but ends up being more cheesy romance with a mathematical twist…well of course the lead character is a chick and she needs a nice, strong supportive guy to get her genius out into the world. Its corny and fake with the most false dialogue I have EVER heard in a movie, and its only saving grace is Jake Gyllenhaal…not that his performance is any good, in fact its abysmal, but at least he looks adorable whilst making bad maths puns.

Gwyneth Paltrow is absolutely bloody awful in this. I’ll admit I’ve never been her biggest fan, but the term “wet mop” comes to mind in this movie to consider her acting in this movie. She wibbles, she pouts and cries and makes big eyes in an attempt to seem sensitive and perhaps a little crazy, but her performance just comes off as histrionic Cuckoo’s Nest instead of a portrayal of a woman who is fragile but nonetheless gifted...kind of like her Oscar acceptance speech then. [...]

Generally all the performances are way overstated and the actors involved have clearly been instructed to go the way of melodrama…and melodrama is the way they go. Gwyneth wails, Anthony gesticulates wildly and Jake lurks in the corner looking puppydog, pouting and cracking the bad jokes. I have never been a great fan of melodrama, it makes me cringe and that’s pretty much what the acting throughout this film made me do. Gwyneth Paltrow is capable of a good performance (although most of her films will tell you otherwise), and I KNOW that both Gyllenhaal and Hopkins can and do usually deliver superb performances, so I really have to place the blame for the bad acting mostly in the hands of the director here, because all the performances are the same type of stagey, exaggerated nonsense.[...]

The relationship between Hal and Catherine makes me want to heave. Apparently, in the play that this film is based upon, Catherine takes much longer to come around to Hal. I don’t understand how such a loner could turn into a lover in such a short space of time. The whole relationship progresses far too quickly, and although I can forgive any woman wanting to jump straight into Jake Gyllenhaal‘s bed, sadly it doesn’t make for a very believable relationship, when Catherine is supposed to be an isolated eccentric genius. Paltrow plays the come-rescue-me damsel in distress card, which really shouldn’t be allowed in movies made after 1989...
and Jake Gyllenhaal will never be the stereotypical romantic hero (thankfully).


Dooyoo full "Proof" review Of course I have to disagree with passion, and I'll prepare my personal review of this film, I've watched a subtitled version (whose is the caption posted) and the original, and Jake's voice is so soft in "Proof", softer than Gwyneth's.

West Village Walk



Maggie looks like tired, understandable and probably due to her busy agenda, but what a surprise, Peter is more playful than usual, in a "Reservoir dogs" frontal rock action style.

Dancing with brunettes



The actor (our Jake) recently hit New York City hot spot Butter, where he made his way to Jamie-Lynn Sigler's booth, and with a Corona beer in hand, he rocked out to Fergie's "London Bridge." Later, he started dancing with one of the Sopranos star's brunette friends.[...] -
Jake Watch source

According Imdb Jamie battled an eating disorder in the late 1990s while starring on "The Sopranos" (1999), and was named #42 in FHM's "100 Sexiest Women in the World 2005".
I love women who blow kisses, it's one of my multiple weaknesses, but if we compare this more calendar girl type Jamie looks like versus a more slender porcelain prototype Jake favors as Emmy Rossum, I think we don't have motive to bother too much. Jake deserves an Emmy no less.

Go to Bed


After numering my Vintage Weird 10, I've decided thereafter it's a bit ridiculous, because some posts are not 100% exact to the formers -humbly there are being more complete this time, in part because of my English improvement-, when I started bloggin', my English was FC level and so weird as my homonymous blog.

Abysmal American Male Beauty





Vintage Weird 10. Nobody in their senses can deny his shocking beauty in these pictures. Dynamite for our eyes.

Vintage terrifying smile



That shady crooked smile, I impute it after effects like neurasthenia and dim vision. For me Donnie Darko it's his best actor work so far.

Déjà vu, Time Travel or "Deadly is the male"



More Vintage Jake Weird stuff, a bit more extended this time: Peggy Cummings was a noir femme fatale in "Deadly is the Female" by Joseph H. Lewis (1949), a film about obsessions with guns.
"But it’s Peggy Cummins’ Annie that ensures Gun Crazy hits the target. Cummins steams up the screen with the low-boil defensiveness of a woman who’s been kicked around the block a few times. Not content to let her past drive her into her shell, Annie lashes out at the world and demands that she be paid back, with interest, for the injuries she’s endured. What we’re left with is a petulant, erratic, sneaky, id-driven thrill seeker who’s a whole lot of fun to watch." -review by Filmcritic.com
Of course, Jake was way more sexy as an angry Marine sniper.

The Two Jakes

Extracted from an article previously published in:
jgf-news.livejournal.com, and sent to me by Penny Lane (thank you for this article, Penny): THE TWO JAKES

Jake Gyllenhaal and I are deep in conversation in a cozy corner banquette at master chef Mario Batali's Greenwich Village restaurant, Babbo. Raved by The New York Times, the place is packed and noisy but the food is sublime. [...]Gyllenhaal says, "You should record my voice really fast so that you can slow it down and I can sound really weird." He beams. It's the first goofy thing he's said all evening.

I'd expected more. Goofy and weird have been such leitmotifs in Gyllenhaal's work that when we meet, it's startling to see how handsome he is. Fresh from a month at his family's place on Martha's Vineyard, he's tall, muscled armed, and tan, with bright blue eyes and sun streaks in his thick brown hair. But shouldn't those eyes slew sideways at me with a terrible sick slyness, the way they do when his character is hearing voices in Donnie Darko? And the hair would be more familiar if it were sticking out at right angles a la Bubble Boy. Or dyed black to set off the goth pallor he sports as Catherine Keener's jailbait teen lover in Lovely & Amazing. Or maybe he should just be pitifully grubby, like the depressed dropout whose life depends on the love of Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl.

Not that these offbeat, often troubled characters haven't been good to Gyllenhaal. As Donnie's girlfriend-to-be (Jena Malone-no slouch at otherness herself) observes, "You're weird...That was a compliment." Capturing an impressive swath of the anguish that afflicts the young, from outgrowable ego wounds to serious derangement, he burnished his talent and forged an identity with such roles. But grooves have a way of turning into ruts, so Gyllenhaal is moving on. For starters, he treated himself to a leading role in one of last summer's guiltiest pleasures, the global-warming disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow. Gyllenhaal's part wasn't exactly a stretch. At 23 he once again played a teen, but at least the teen was bright, competent, and even lucky in love.

"He was always kind and he respected me as an actress even though I was so much younger," says Emmy Rossum, who was just 16 when she played Gyllenhaal's love interest in the film. It was the first blockbuster for the both of them, and as Hollywood baptisms go, this one featured plenty of water and mutual rescue scenes. "It took a week to shoot one," Rossum says. "We were in the tank all day doing take after take, and there was pounding rain. Jake was fun, always trying to keep up our morale."

"I was tired if thinking that as an actor you had to look bad on-screen," Gyllenhaal says about doing the role. "You had to play a 'character'. I think when I started working, doing those odd characters, I wanted to prove myself." Gyllenhaal turns 24 this month, and he's started proving himself in earnest. He's at a turning point in more ways than one, and he's highly, sometime painfully, conscious of it. "Scared shitless", as he puts it, but exhilarated, too. Last spring he was about to film the much buzzed about Brokeback Mountain when Kirsten Dunst, whom he'd been living with and has called his first real girlfriend, asked for a split after nearly two years together. He doesn't try to hide how much this rocked him. When he says with touching urgency, "I want to grow," he means it. [...]
First up is the aptly named Proof, the film version of the Tony-and Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway play directed by Shakespeare in Love's director John Madden, costarring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, and Hope Davis. Currently in post-production is Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, based on a famous New Yorker short story by Annie Proulx and featuring Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as young macho cowboys in pre-gay-liberation1961who fall furiously in love. The third film, Jarhead, directed by Sam Mendes and based on Anthony Swofford's lacerating memoir of his Marine service in Iraq during the first Gulf War, stars Gyllenhaal in the title role. At dinner, he describes with some trepidation the weeks of authentic boot camp Mendes is scheduling before shooting begins. I ask if authentic means actually crawling through mud on your belly under webs of barbed wire while bullets whiz overhead. " I don't know," he says, his eyes wide as he performs a a cartoon gulp.

Listening to Gyllenhaal describe these projects is like watching someone take a giant, trembling step into his own future, the breakup with Dunst a poignant reminder of the uncertainty of it all. Madden says, "Jake's got a face where you can see the weather change clearly." Because Gyllenhaal is candid about his fears, it's easy to forget the nerve - and underlying confidence- his choices reflect.[...]
Gyllenhaal can be intensely serious but he's also a serious flirt. At one point, as we sit side by side, he offers to show Batali the poison ivy he got on the Vineyard by hugging his dog, Atticus. Before you know it he's yanked up his shirt, exposing much of his torso. The poison ivy's nothing to write home about, but the Gyllenhaal torso, all golden and washboardy, is an edifying sight to behold. It's bold, impudent gesture, and flat-out sexy, too, not least because men don't usually flirt by flashing their bodies- not straight men anyway. But part of what makes Gyllenhaal such a smart-woman's heartthrob is an uncovered quality that has no place in the armored smugness of conventional masculinity. [...]

"Jake auditioned, but I'd seen his work," Madden says. "He's incapable of being unspontaneous- he approached every line as if the thought has just formed in his head. The only thin I wanted to be sure about was that he and Gwyneth matched in age onscreen. It's a very tricky part to cast because of the geek factor" Proof is set un the world of cutting -edge mathematics. Paltrow, who did the play with Madden in London before making the movie, stars as Catherine, the daughter of a math genius (Hopkins) whose mind is disintegrating. Having lived for too long in his shadow, she knows she may have inherited his genius but fears she may have his mental illness as well. After his death she is wooed out of out of isolation by his graduate assistant, Hal (Gyllenhaal), but not without frightening complications. Proof is much more than a love story; nevertheless, Catherine and Hal's relation is its pivot. Madden cast Gyllenhaal, he says, because he could handle the geek factor and still have "a masculine and romantic dimension."

Watching the movie, I felt that I was seeing Gyllenhaal play a man for the first time- a math nerd, but who's sexual and decisive and who makes a terrible mistake. There were no quirks to make him interesting , no boyish fumbling to win your heart. More that anything he seemed naked, with only himself to get him through, and that was exciting. Despite the demands of his other new films, only in discussing this role does he mention having to summon his nerve. "In Proof I just wanted to be courageous enough to show myself, and f--cked up and unclear as I am," he says, "and somehow it wasn't that odd." During the shoot he had moments of anger at having to play a character who felt so close to home. "And in a weird way it was sad," he says. "It felt like the death of something, as if I'd lost a little imagination. I want to move back from that now a little bit."[...]
The rest are, well, a little weird. But who would want it otherwise? A touch of strange is catnip to women- the interesting ones, anyway. Just ask Lovely & Amazing director Nicole Holofcener, who had never seen Gyllenhaal;s work when he auditioned to play a 17-year-old Fotomat clerk whose shyness doesn't cramp his besotted pursuit of Catherine Keener;s cranky married woman. "He came in with really high hair," Holofcener says, an audible grin in her voice. "He has some kind of rockabilly thing going. It was so weird but not pretentious at all. And then he read, and he was perfect - sweet and inherently funny without being too immature. He had a kind of wisdom, which convinced me that he could play the part without making disgusting. Probably everyone in the room was attracted to him."

"There's a playful quality about Jake that I think is very helpful to him," Rossum says. "I think women respond to him on-screen because he seems to be a sensitive but playful man, and we like that." Over dessert (all five of them), I ask Gyllenhaal where he lives." I have no idea," he says, adding that he last lived with Dunst in Los Angeles and he hasn't figured out where he wants to make his home. He loves New York and wants to do theater here, but L.A, is where he grew up, and he leaps to its defense with the passion of a native son. "I'm left with a real problem: where I want to live-and essentially, who I want to be." Looking startled by his own words, he explains, "I'm really questioning what I want to do right now. Questioning everything.
Yes, and already finding some answers."

Friday, August 25, 2006

Vintage Woman of Jake?








And what would Jake Weird be without the "pristine" presence of Miss Kirsten Dunst? She has been Jake's most important relationship until today. And I like her. Very Much. Haters can go fug themselves.

Cuddly Cuties


Comparison Mania








Former Lookalikes & Reese