Jake Gyllenhaal is My Favorite Actor in the WWW

Top 3.5 Jake Gyllenhaal movies

1. Donnie Darko
2. The Good Girl
3. Jarhead
3.5 Brokeback Mountain

Jake Gyllenhaal is my new favorite actor of all time. And this is how it happened:

On Friday night, Blockbuster night, Lucie stayed home with me and rented “Donnie Darko,” thinking it was “Donnie Brasco,” a movie with Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. Apparently Aaron thinks that was a great movie so Lucie had to see it, forgetting 1), that she saw it years ago when it came out and she hated it and 2), the correct title. So she ended up with this JG masterpiece instead of a sad gangster film.

Oh my god, he is awesome. I have to admit, I didn’t get the whole movie. There was something about time-travel in it which I didn’t quite understand. I think the idea was that he was supposed to die when that plane engine fell out of the sky and because he didn’t, the universe changed. So he had to die in order to restore the universe to its original path. But it was very strange and I don’t think I got all the nuances in it, like the old lady and the time-travel book she wrote. Like, she was all messed up. Was she messed up because she studied time-travel too much? And why didn’t she ever answer his letter? That was sort of left unraveled.

Regardless, this was sooo interesting. Lucie hated this one, too, just like she would have hated “Donnie Brasco” if she had rented it so I guess that worked out either way.

But then I had to go back to Blockbuster and get some more of JG’s movies and it turns out he did another of my favorite movies, “The Good Girl,” with Jennifer Aniston who is my all time favorite actress. He was the guy she had an affair with - I totally didn’t even recognize him. I think I was concentrating so hard on how awesome Jen Aniston was in that movie that I didn’t really pay attention to anyone else.

So on Saturday (the exact same night he hosted SNL, btw, what are the odds of that - and he was so funny and so amazing), I rented “Jarhead” which was pretty good for a war movie. Normally, I don’t like those kinds of movies. But here’s an interesting tidbit: in that movie, JG acted with a guy named Peter Sarsgaard who’s engaged to and ended up having a baby with JG’s sister, Maggie, who’s also an actor. (She played his sister in “Donnie Darko.”) Which came first, I wonder? And wow, those are two very complicated names to spell.

“Brokeback Mountain” gets an honorable mention because I didn’t see it. It was out when I went back to the video store. I heard it was an amazing movie and JG got an Oscar nomination for it (but lost to George Clooney who is pretty amazing himself so that's not so bad!), which is a good sign. But I don’t know if I can go for a two-guys-in-love movie. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any prejudices that way for real life. I totally believe you should be with whoever you love, no matter what sex they are. But in a movie? I don’t know. I’ll try it.

So there you have it, my review of the Jake Gyllenhaal oeuvre, as they call it in the business. I don’t know why he’s not a big-time superstar. He’s handsome and sexy and sweet and intelligent. What does Leonard DiCaprio have that he doesn’t? I know he’s not popular at my school because I never heard Katie Gunther in gym class talk about him and she is totally into movies and movie stars. She has Netflix and Tivo and she sees about a million movies a year, she says. She knows everything about movies.

Or so she thinks. She obviously doesn’t know about Jake Gyllenhaal. So she certainly doesn’t know everything.

And omg, I am so exhausted this morning…thank god we have the day off. I didn’t do any homework at all this weekend and I have two tests to study for!