life. love. films.

Film director, poet, and famous father Stephen Gyllenhaal turns sixty today.

This past year the man has gone through tribulations no man should go through. The dumping by his wife of thirty years, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Naomi Foner, who also publicly shamed him in her divorce papers with several odd disclosures. The loss of his house on Martha's Vineyard. The loss of his house on Mulholland (Conan and Springsteen's drummer, Max Weinberg, now owns it). Gawker.com's ridicule of his Huffington blog, particularly his post entitled "Free Bernie Madoff Now!" The exposure on Page Six of the New York Post that he and Naomi were broke from overspending. The strained relations with his children, Jake and Maggie. His sexual insecurity publicly humiliated in this YouTube video.

But let's not dwell on Stephen's real-life stumbles. Let's recall, instead, the bottle-rape scene in Paris Trout—the dreamlike stabbing of David Strathairn by Debra Winger in A Dangerous Woman—Lena Headey's shrieks in a sun-dappled forest while undergoing an illegal abortion in Waterland—Barbara Hershey's graphic ax murder of her love rival in Killing in a Small Town—and wonder that this film director once had it in him to be the American Claude Chabrol, with a little Sylvia Plath thrown in.

And so I urge you: Cheer him up! Send him your warmest, most encouraging birthday greetings here! And tell him Cantara sent you.