Jake Gyllenhaal is getting parts that he likes, and as a result, his work is improving.
Donnie Darko really made him a name, but he moved on to projects like Bubble Boy and The Good Girl/Lovely and Amazing (in which he played very similar type characters. The Day After Tomorrow marked the project that he likely despised the most, but made him a "name" in the mass market recognizability game.
If all actors could be so lucky to break away from the type assigned to them by whichever casting director doomed them to play "the little Jewish guy" or "the shy plain girl" or "the mother", actors would be happier people all around.
Proof was a baby step away from the sensitive Child of the Millenium type he had been playing. I didn't buy him as an upper-level math grad student, and kept wanting Tobey Maguire in the part (my guess is he was too busy doing Spider-Man 2). Jake has his intellectual qualities, but not enough of that geekitas for me to believe he's studied string theory. There's something that is more distinctly him that hasn't been dug into.
Well, until very recently, that is.
Jake Gyllenhaal and guys like Peter Saarsgard (as Jeff mentioned just today) are finally being given the material that really properly shows them off on a consistent basis.
Jarhead and Brokeback Mountain provide Jake with the kind of meat that really gives us a look at what Jake has available underneath all the shy, pretty late-teen junk he's been thrown through most of his career. I haven't seen Brokeback yet, but Jarhead I saw on Tuesday at an advance screening.
Cracking into Jarhead
We had near-record attendance (in terms of those turned away) for Jarhead. People started lining up at 3:30pm for a 7pm screening. My weekend prediction: Jarhead wins big.
Attached to the print of Jarhead was a very important trailer, one I think is going to make up a lot of minds early on about what they're going to see around Christmas.
King Kong made a surprise visit to the screen, and there were cheers and gasps throughout the audience. People are still loving their escapism, and though Jack Black was initially met with chuckles of "holy shit the School of Rock guy", everyone shut up and quick.
I was disappointed that they gave us tasty chunks of (I suppose) most of the film, but I enjoyed the whole thing.
Jarhead holds the uncommon honor of keeping our entire audience silent throughout its entire runtime. It is rare to see an undergrad audience not checking their text messages every couple minutes or whispering to their friends.
Around the time the boys were called up for active duty in Iraq, I had a moment of perspective shift.
I was 8 years old when all this was happening.
I remember Schwartzkopf on the TV, preventing me from seeing evening TV shows I was too young to watch (Alfred Hitchcock Presents comes to mind), and being relatively bored watching all the coverage.
I remember all the right-wingers-in-training wearing the Soddumb Insane shirts and so on, not knowing why they hated The Enemy, but knowing they were towelheads and evil and savages.
I remember nothing of substance from the "over there" side of things (thanks CNN), but I pick up new, vivid memories of the "over here" every once in a while.
Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland, in addition to countless other films about Iraq I or Iraq II, will never get the exposure this decidedly un-Full Metal Jacket film will get. The biggest complaint I've heard is that people don't think it's enough like that film, or Coppolla's Vietnam film, or Malick's Vietnam film.
No matter what, comparing this movie to a Vietnam movie is an effort in futility. As similar as the two wars/actions/failures may be in a number of ways, they are significantly different conflicts. Comparing Vietnam flicks to Gulf War ones is like comparing bananas to bagels.
Particularly affecting are scenes of lost long-distance love, for their realism and how close to home they hit me. My favorite line, which could have been muddled with the word "like", was "the earth is bleeding".
Jarhead is about the cocktease of war that was Gulf War I for Marines. If you want the boom-ka-bang type of movie the trailer leads you to believe you're gonna see, you'll be disappointed.
One Night Stand with a Shopgirl
Shopgirl is too adult for the 18-24 crowd to get. Too many people my age have slept with one, maybe two people, often (believe it or not) even none. I kept hearing people talking about how creepy Steve Martin's Ray Porter character was.
Yes, finding out Mirabelle's address and sending her gloves was a rather stalkerish first move, but it was far removed from how terribly scary Jason Schwartzmann's Jeremy could be for most of the runtime.
I think the movie really does work, but it doesn't leave you satisfied like a full-serving romantic comedy full of preservatives to keep it from spoiling. For me, that's a good thing, but audiences have really been trained for a number of years to accept some fallacious, idealistic sense of romantic resolution.
I loved the novella, and even invested in the audiobook. Martin has crafted a story that encapsulates a certain nugget of these peoples' lives, and it doesn't try too hard to expose too much of who they are. It does what it needs to do and gets it over with.
Curiously, I spoke to people who thought the "pacing" was off. The same people disliked the "pacing" of Broken Flowers, and I think they really meant "it wasn't 80 minutes long, and didn't have a Top 40 soundtrack".
Speaking of, I also heard complaints that the soundtrack was "creepy". Do I just like creepy movies, or are these kids (my peers) just not okay with the world being a shitty place on a regular basis?
One of my favorite parts of the movie involved Rebecca Pidgeon (also in the cast of The Spanish Prisoner with Martin) as an old flame. Very dark, very seedy, very real. More thoughts after the weekend.