"There's only room for one Toby MacGwire in Hollywood...and that's me...Jake Gyllenhaal!"

My question is this: who does Jake Gyllenhaal think he's fooling with that goofy "macho" stubble, anyway? It reminds me a little of my grandfather wearing sunglasses, a clear-cut case of trying too hard.

Jake Gyllenhaal gets me juiced like a cranapple (as opposed to his dopier and considerably less sexy doppleganger, Toby MacGwire), so imagine my great delight to hear that a huge chunk of the promotional materials for the movie "Prince of Persia" centers around him bulking up, doing his own stunts and being shirtless a lot. At first I was all prepared to be sarcastic and catty...after all, Hollywood tends to do this a lot with varying degrees of sincerity. Remember how part of Terminator 2's publicity was centered around Linda Hamilton getting "buff?" (That level of muscle wouldn't even get her in a bikini contest, much less Fitness-class.)

But the truth is, all sarcasm aside, the guy does look good! I've never seen anyone get this built for a role, with the possible exception of Harrison Ford preparing for "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom."

Apparently, "Prince of Persia" is a real thing. I actually didn't know that. The first place I ever heard of "Prince of Persia" was in Russian author Victor Pelevin's short story "Prince of Central Planning," which showed the life of a Soviet-era drone in a slothful bureaucracy where all everybody does is play computer games all the time, with bureaucrats that live vicariously through their game characters. I thought "Prince of Persia" was as made up as the TV show "Galaxy Quest" until I saw the trailers for the movie and wondered for a minute if I had slipped into an alternate universe.

By the look of things, the film seems like Pirates of the Caribbean 4: an action romantic comedy with rapid-fire dialogue, and even has the Pirates trademark of awkward, totally inappropriate and out of place fantasy elements. For the record, I never liked the Pirates of the Caribbean films after the first: the "ghost story" horror elements were handled so broadly after the first film that they just became awkward and inappropriate, like an episode of Melrose Place that involves time travel. The Jim Henson Creature Shop ship of the dead was especially inappropriate; it felt like something that Guillermo del Toro would have Hellboy encounter instead of Captain Jack.