Celebrity Mound

Jake Gyllenhaal said Sunday his new movie, “Rendition,” shows that torture is wrong, but it also questions whether it might help save lives in the fight against terrorism.

The film, which also stars Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep, focuses on the practice of extraordinary renditions, or transferring terrorism suspects to other countries where their interrogators could abuse or torture them.

The U.S. government has said it only uses renditions after it is assured that transferred prisoners will not be subjected to torture.

The movie tells the story of an Egyptian-born man suspected of involvement in a Middle East bombing who is abducted by U.S. authorities and sent overseas for questioning at a secret facility.

“It says that torture is wrong. I think you can see in the film that it does not work,” Gyllenhaal told a news conference after the movie was screened at the Rome Film Festival.

“But I also think it presents the political side of it, too, which is saying that you could be torturing one innocent man, but at the same time 5,000 people are alive … because of information that the government elicited through (extraordinary) rendition.”

Gyllenhaal plays a CIA analyst who comes to question the U.S. government’s sanctioning of the practice.

Director Gavin Hood, whose South African drama “Tsotsi” won the 2005 foreign-language Oscar, said he hoped the film would spark debate about the practice of extraordinary renditions.

“It is easy to talk about arbitrary detention and enhanced interrogation techniques and all these fancy words in the abstract,” Hood said. “(Then) we realize that in fact it is about people, not just the people to who it happens, but the people who are involved in having to do this.”

Jake Gyllenhaal is way beyond the simple choice of boxers vs. briefs. A shopper in Bloomingdale’s underwear department recently watched the “Brokeback Mountain” star with a salesman “combing through every style . . . A good 10 minutes later, Jake was still at it . . . holding up a pair of tight white briefs that he’d pulled out of the package to examine, as if he’d never seen tighty whities before in his entire life. It was hilarious. He looked very confused and had a furrowed brow . . . He was examining undies like an anthropologist in the city’s most highly trafficked department store.”

(source)