Movie review: The Skeleton Key

And the saga continues. After a number of days of dithering (and the previous movie still unreviewed...) I finally settled on another Peter Sarsgaard movie to watch. This one was not one I was particularly eager to see, but I also felt like watching something more non-committal (watching one of his more acclaimed roles is more of a commitment, in my mind). 

This movie was... a bit better than I expected (which is good). I was thinking it was going to be kind of bad, but it turned out to be decent. It's sort of hard to do a decent review without spoiling it, so I'll do two parts. I feel like the movie is ever so slightly worth not spoiling - it's just good enough that I'd say do yourself a favor and watch it instead of reading about what happens. You'll ruin it. 3.5/5 stars. 

First things first, for some reason I keep being more surprised than I should be when I watch something where Peter Sarsgaard has somewhat of an accent that's different than his normal voice (in this movie, it's a light southern accent) and I think "wow, it still sounds like him" (through the accent). It really shouldn't surprise me as much as it does... This movie was from 2005 so he was rather young and youthful looking, and thankfully clean shaven. 
This is the second movie I've seen of his where it's set in Louisiana. The other one is the movie where he has a small role as a murder victim. I think he's been in at least one other movie set in the south, although maybe not necessarily Louisiana specifically. My associations about Louisiana (unrelated to this movie) : Lots of Republicans (like Texas), alligators, relatives, Mardi Gras, French-American culture, southern-ness. 

Non-spoilery review:The premise is that a 25 year old lady, Caroline (interestingly enough, a similar name to one of my relatives who lives in Louisiana) (played by Kate Hudson, who is different than Kate Winslet, who was in Titanic. Kate Hudson looked sort of like Chloe Sevigny in this role), gets a job to take care of an older woman's husband, who has become paralyzed from a stroke. Supposedly. Anyways, she goes to the couple's house and strange things begin to happen. According to google, the movie is supposed to be a mystery/drama movie but I would say there are tinges of the horror genre, a little. Not that I really watch horror movies so I can't really say, but I guess maybe in that it sort of was a little bit like The Shining, in some ways, which apparently was a horror movie. Anyways, the strange/sinister things begin to happen and Peter Sarsgaard's character is involved. There's an interesting twist at the end. I'm more of a fan of the not so overtly horror-esque movies, which I suppose are the genre of psychological thrillers. Which reminds me that I'd better watch Memento again while it's still on Netflix since I decided not to purchase/acquire it on DVD. Will I regret that? Only time will tell. This movie (not Memento, the one I'm reviewing) leaned more horror than sleek psychological thriller. 

This movie isn't exactly particularly special in and of itself, but hey, Peter Sarsgaard. And if you're me, that's reason enough. It might not be quite as enjoyable for non- Peter Sarsgaard fans. I was happy to look at him and hear him say things and laugh at some parts that weren't really funny but sometimes when I'm watching my favorite actors in things I just giggle happily about seeing them. That makes me seem really ditzy, I bet, and I promise, I'm not really like that as a whole. Just when it comes to certain actors I can get a little bit so. But I think I have a lot of depth to me in other areas. But one has to allow themselves a bit of indulgence in things, such as chocolate (other people) or fawning over favorite actors (me). 

Spoilery comments/review: I had a guess while I was watching the movie about what would be behind the strange things that began happening, and it turned out that I was right! How fun is that! My guess was that the old lady would turn out to be evil, and possibly some of the other characters might be in on it as well. And I was right! Oh, Peter Sarsgaard's character. He seemed so nice. Although I guess it makes sense when you factor in the fact that his character was actually possessed by a spirit of someone who had died a long time ago. So in a way, sort of like Men in Black and Vincent, but way better looking (sorry, Vincent). Probably if you're familiar with this type of movie it would be fairly easy to guess at how things would turn out, but again, this isn't really the kind of movie I usually watch so it wasn't too predictable as to be really boring. It's kind of interesting to think about what the movie would've been like had it been some other genre, such as a sappy drama like The Notebook. 

I guess the next logical step is to watch the other horror movie he's been in, where he plays a husband who, with his wife, adopts a child who turns out to be evil. Fun, I guess. 

Current Sarsgaard movie rankings, sort of in order: Experimenter (this is first because it was my first), Shattered Glass (good performance, subject matter of personal interest), The Killing (very good performance), Jarhead. These are all actually pretty much equal in my book.
This second part of the list is more... muddled.
The Skeleton Key (main-ish role, decent movie), Lovelace (decent movie; main, but unsavory character), Black Mass (fairly small part but it packed a punch in a movie filled with unsavory characters), Dead Man Walking (very tiny role; I liked it more so for the rest of the movie which is why it's below Black Mass), Man in the Iron Mask (he looked nice, young and youthful in this movie), The Magnificent 7 (this one I'm fairly sure about the position of; I didn't really like the movie)

Yet to come (sometime, eventually): An Education (just freaking watch it already, I know...), Boys Don't Cry (apparently he got quite a lot of female attention for playing a murderer in this movie...), Flightplan, Orphan, Robot & Frank (voices a robot), Jackie, Rendition, Garden State, Pawn Sacrifice, etc....  

Documentary review: Get Me Roger Stone

This came up while I was browsing Netflix and it seemed vaguely interesting and I was bored so I decided to sink 90 or so minutes of my life into it, which was... maybe kind of a mistake. I could've spent those 90 or so minutes watching a Peter Sarsgaard movie and maybe I should've. I think that would've enriched my life much more than having watched this documentary did. I have two prevailing thoughts about this documentary: 1) What the fuck did I just watch? and 2) How repulsive. (that's the tl;dr of this post right there) The documentary itself I guess was alright, but the subject matter was varying degrees of repulsive. As some might say, it offended my delicate liberal sensibilities. (That sentence was supposed to be humorous/satirical/etc)

The documentary is about this one guy who you could say orchestrated Donald Trump's campaign, at least before he got fired (according to Trump)/quit (according to him). Despite no longer working for the campaign, his influence lingered. That's basically the gist of it. This guy, the titular Roger Stone, is a Nixon worshiper and to this end, has a tattoo of Nixon's face on his back. No lie. Watch the documentary (if you can bear to) and you'll see. In addition, his office is plastered in Nixon posters. Anyone who worships Nixon shouldn't be trusted. Despite his claims to the opposite, Nixon was indeed a crook and this Roger Stone guy comes across pretty similar, as does Donald Trump, and all the other people associated with him. 

At one point in the documentary, he claims that there's a difference between his actual self and a character of the same name, in the same way that Colbert Report Stephen Colbert is a character. I'm not sure if I buy his claim about that. 

I thought that this documentary took too much of a dithering tone towards Roger Stone, and I would probably have preferred if it had taken a less objective (fight me) stance and denounced the guy. I can't be the only one who found him repulsive. Here's a nice recap/review to that effect: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/get-me-roger-stone-the-recap_us_594c4d88e4b0c85b96c657fd 

I don't really have much more to say about this... piece of work than I already have (see tl;dr at the beginning), so here is a decent summary/review of the documentary from The Atlantic: 

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/get-me-roger-stone-donald-

Warhol/Sedaris writings

Along with Andy Warhol, famous author David Sedaris also keeps/kept a journal of his day to day life, which has recently been published as a book titled Theft by Finding. In my quest to potentially become the next either/both of them, I think I'd better be more scrupulous about attempting to keep a journal as they did.

So, here goes (again).

SUNDAY 
There was a lady at Costco who was wearing a cool looking blue skirt; it was sort of billowy and reminded me of things they wore in the olden days. I wish you could find things like that in stores these days. Another time at Costco, I saw a man who I think may have had plaque psoriasis, like they advertise medicines on television for. I'm glad I don't have plaque psoriasis. We were almost going to buy a new plant at Costco, but it was $20 and we already have house plants. It was called an aglaonema, which is a cool name but sort of sounds like a disease. Aglaonema. Anemia. Leukemia. Algae. 
I like house plants or just indoor plants in general, like in people's offices or something. If it were up to me I'd start a greenhouse probably. If I had my own office, I'd put plants in it. But only plants that aren't too easy to kill. In the event of me going on vacation, I'd make sure to arrange for someone to water the plants during my absence. 
It was less crowded at Costco this time so the conditions weren't as good for doing an observational 'study' of the lengths of men's shorts. 
I had been considering watching the show House of Cards, but it's not filmed on location and it's set in DC, so I think I would notice the little inaccuracies as far as the visual aspect of the outdoor setting goes and it would bug me. So that's out. 

Postsecret review 6

Boy am I late on this one. But at least it's here now. Better late than never. 

"I consider it INCREDIBLY RUDE when someone YAWNS in my presence." It isn't exactly something you can always control, and just because they might possibly be yawning out of boredom, maybe they're just tired. What a ridiculous prejudice to have. I think maybe I'll make a point out of yawning whenever I feel like it in front of people. If they've got a problem with it, that's their own ridiculous fault.

"I always wash my hair BEFORE I go to the salon, because having the girl wash my hair is TOO INTIMATE!" That's... different. I love having someone else wash my hair at the salon. I don't consider it to be 'too intimate.' 

"I left with my head held high. I still wish I'd chosen revenge." This one resonates with me because I consider myself to be a somewhat vengeful person.

"Those traffic lights that count down really, really stress me out." Weird; I don't think it's traffic lights that count down, the walk signal signs do. Maybe that's what this person meant. Unless you walk really slowly and/or start crossing a large intersection when there's, say, 4 seconds left, this shouldn't really be a problem... the thought of people running red lights and therefore hitting pedestrians stresses me out more than the counting down walk signals. To quote the PSAs around here, "You can't fix a pedestrian at a body shop."

"I'm an atheist but sometimes it's nice to pray" I... guess this makes sense? Kind of? The only way I can think for it to make sense is in the context of people praying together (for the sense of community) as opposed to an atheist just praying on their own.

"I want to go back and visit his grave. Then I want to visit the drunk driver, and ask if he ended up doing anything worthwhile with his life." The secrets about death tend to be more interesting to me, I think, and this one is no different. 

Movie review: Nightcrawler

I'm at it again. This movie has to do with two subjects I have been trying to branch out from, news and murder/crime. I decided to watch a movie with Jake Gyllenhaal where there weren't any actors (Mark Ruffalo, Peter Sarsgaard, etc) that would distract from his performance. This one fit the criteria and happened to be on Netflix (72% match, which I guess ended up being fairly accurate). 

This was an interesting movie that I think can be taken as a commentary on certain aspects of journalism; the main character engages in various degrees of unethical behavior as he pursues events he can film for shock value. However, it's a different kind of unethical than what Stephen Glass did by making things up. The main character, as played by Jake, seemed somewhat... psychopathic in a way. He could be quite cold and manipulative, and he was always spouting off various mantras about business. It made for an interesting character. This was certainly a respectable acting performance by Jake, so that helps my opinion of him a little bit. 

It was a good movie; I don't want to say too much about it and give all the interesting parts away. I would be up to watching some other movie that Jake Gyllenhaal has been in (although not because I find him particularly beautiful, he's a decent actor but not one of my favorites). 

Other people's blogs

Look what I found! An interesting (I say that gingerly) blog post by someone else, criticizing Mark Ruffalo for his liberal beliefs about feminism. Me personally, I'm glad he has those beliefs. Vincent and Peter are also liberals, from what I can gather. I also don't think that I go on long rants against certain people's political beliefs on this blog akin to this lady's post. Do I? It looks like she put a lot of effort into that post, as it's really quite long. I, on the other hand, put a lot of effort into my posts about a topic that sort of actually matters more/is more respected/less likely for people to read and laugh about the ridiculousness of the post, that of journalistic fraud. Remember those posts? One of my books came but the other still hasn't and I'm impatient. I don't really have too much to say about this lady's post because it's... out there. It's too bad that she felt it was necessary to go on a long rant about the beliefs of some liberal actor. I wonder how many people read that post. I'd be embarrassed to write a post like that. The author of that blog comes across as a backwards jerk. There, I said it.  

You can find a lot of interesting stuff on other people's blogs. This is more the kind of blog post that I would write and not be embarrassed about (at least not embarrassed for having [backwards] conservative beliefs, but perhaps some could consider it embarrassing in a different way to always be blogging about and fawning over actors. I have no regrets. I don't care.) This post as well, from someone else's blog. And this one from yet another person's blog. I really do wonder if anyone has happened to come across one of my blog posts in their googling of the things that I write posts about... I hope that they found my blog to be interesting (in a good way). 

Other actors' interviews: a sequel

As usual, I've been looking for new (to me) movies to watch. Somehow I thought of the movie Brokeback Mountain, which I haven't seen but is decently famous, I think. It's about two men out in the west who have a secret gay relationship in the 1960s. Seems more or less interesting, right? Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger have the main roles in this movie. Jake is Peter Sarsgaard's brother in law, so tangentially he's relevant. I decided to look up what other movies he had been in, to see if there was anything particularly interesting. In the process, I came across an interview... (yes, we're back on this subject) 

It was an interview from The Guardian done earlier this year. He came across somewhat badly in this interview, which may spell disaster for my personal opinion of him (see: George Clooney). Apparently, he's very protective about his personal life and the interviewer dared to ask him a question that touched on the subject of his personal life. I would certainly not consider it to have been a particularly intrusive question. A proper answer to it would not have required a deep discussion of his personal life. But I guess he doesn't even want to even touch on the topic of his personal life one bit. At the end of the interview, he began ranting (maybe that's a bit harsh of a word to use) about politics. To top it off, he also came across as sort of pretentious in the interview. You can read it for yourself and see. In contrast, Peter Sarsgaard comes across as a nice, easygoing and thoughtful kind of person. Vincent seems like a dear. James D'Arcy comes across well in interviews too. So, happening to have read this interview of Jake does not bode too well for my personal opinion of him. At least he isn't as creepy looking as Johnny Depp. 

I decided to read a few other interviews of his to get a more filled out idea of what he's like. He didn't come across quite as badly as in the aforementioned one, but he also didn't come across as lovely either. Eh. I think he still came across as a little stuck up in these other interviews too. http://iheartjake.com/2017/03/jake-gyllenhaal-covers-esquire-uk-magazine-april-issue/#more-13616

I have seen two movies with Jake in them in the past, but he didn't particularly stand out -he was overshadowed by other actors. One was Zodiac, in which I was more focused on Mark Ruffalo, I think because he somewhat reminded me of Vincent. It wasn't a particularly good movie anyways, so the other actors didn't make much of an impression on me because they didn't resemble Vincent, even though they're pretty famous (Jake and Robert Downey Jr). As for the other one, I was paying more attention to Peter Sarsgaard for reasons that should be obvious. I'm going to give Brokeback Mountain and Nightcrawler a shot, and if I'm not impressed, Jake Gyllenhaal goes into my overrated pile as well. Maybe if he were more my type in terms of looks I'd be more enthused about him. But alas, he's not. He's kind of weird looking.   

Anyways, while we're at it... some choice tweets:
"Jake Gyllenhaal & Johnny Depp are the BEST actors out there. Don't @ me on this." I beg to differ. A lot.
"Jake Gyllenhaal's voice is either the nicest or creepiest one ever depending on the context" In relation to this tweet, I had to find an example of how he talks. I found an interview from Jon Stewart's Daily Show, which was actually pretty good although maybe it's just because it was Jon Stewart and you can't go wrong with Jon Stewart. Jake's voice is surprisingly... light and high pitched. I expected he'd have a more intimidating/forceful voice. I wouldn't consider it to be particularly creepy or nice, just... regular, but not what I was expecting. Now as for Peter Sarsgaard... (no, I will probably not shut up about him anytime soon) http://www.cc.com/video-clips/3jbfst/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-jake-gyllenhaal
"My memoir is coming out next month! It's called "Jake Gyllenhaal, I Love You"" Imagine what my memoir would be called..
"I love Jake Gyllenhaal so much. He is so pretty. I love him" He is... okay looking. Better looking than Johnny Depp by a little bit, but not as good looking as (insert favorite actors here).

As it stands, Mark Ruffalo > Jake Gyllenhaal in my book. And I don't even like Mark Ruffalo a huge amount. Not that I dislike him. I have a mildly positive opinion of him. Also, Peter Sarsgaard > Jake Gyllenhaal. Fight me.