The alternative Prince of Persia diet - and the end of Doug Liman's Unnamed Moon Project?

Jake Gyllenhaal's fitness regime for Prince of Persia is well-known, involving as it does an awful amount of running, a horrendous number of pushups and way too many jacket potatoes with tuna. If you want to get fit and lithe but you can't function on two squares of dark chocolate a day, then there is an alternative Prince of Persia diet. You simply watch it. A reporter for the Independent discovered that by watching Prince of Persia you can work off 0.9 calories a minute. Admittedly, this is not a huge amount of calories and also the article doesn't state if scoffing a big pot of Ben and Jerry's through the film impacts on this amount of calories. I'd argue not.


Therefore, I can enjoy the pictures of Jake going about his workouts whilst smiling to myself and wondering when Jake will realise that he could keep in shape just by looking at himself on the big screen. I do realise that I have to watch a huge amount of Jake in order for the Jaking Health Regime to be effective. It's tough but I can do it.

You can read much more over at the Independent.


Doug Liman is a director who has interested me for a long time, not only because of the long association of Jake with Doug's Unnamed Moon Project (UMP), latterly known as Argonauts, but also because he blogs as he directs. It's been interesting watching the development of UMP from Doug's point of view (all courtesy of the 30Ninjas website) - the desire to get the special effects just so, the importance of allowing Jake's character to develop as Jake would wish and the efforts to get a studio onboard. I wrote more about this at MB.


However, at the turn of the year, the time when Doug said that shooting for Argonauts would kick off, all went quiet. Instead, Doug has been associated with other projects, such as another Musketeers movie and All You Need is Kill, while publicising Fair Game at Cannes. This film stars Naomi Watts, Sean Penn and Brothers' own Sam Shephard. So, what has happened to UMP?


The Playlist, always good reading, today posted an article about Doug Liman, and it raises the very interesting point that maybe the Unnamed Moon Project has been killed by the definitely named Moon. Although UMP has a very different plot and scenario, dramatising a race to colonise the moon, perhaps Duncan Jones' triumph Moon has filled that niche for studios. And just as Knight and Day has possibly been damaged at the box office by comparison with Mr and Mrs Smith and Killers, maybe Doug has taken the hint from studios and has moved on.


Doug's blogs are testament to the amount of work that he - and Jake - has put into creating a project that studios would wish to invest in. A difficulty for Doug was making shots of the Moon believable - to such an extent it even sounded like he was actually prepared to go there! Duncan Jones took the other tack and instead managed to visualise the moon for us on a comparatively tiny budget.


The critical success of Moon, winning Duncan Jones a BAFTA, led to Duncan's first role as Hollywood director, at the helm of the highly anticipated Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Vera Farmiga and Michelle Monaghan. Jake can't stop talking about how Duncan is the next great director of his generation and how the scifi Source Code will blow our minds.


One can't help but think that however much many of us, including myself, had longed for UMP, not least because Jake would have an active role in the development of both his character and the project as producer, the path to its demise paved the way for Source Code. But, nothing is ever certain in Hollywood and I still hope that we may get both and may still get to enjoy Jake in Space.


Includes pictures from IHJ.