Angelina Jolie Has Left the Studio

1311 yikes : 08/06/2007 at 9:03 am

1297 Gurdian Unlimited

http://film.guardian.co.uk/thomson/story/0,,1982829,00.html

=====================

David Thompson spoken too soon in his article, I guess. BABEL won GG Best Picture, Brad was nominated for Best Supporting Actor and BABEL with a meager budget of $25 million earned $135 million world-wide.

Brad is vindicated and triumphant while David Thompson is humiliated.

+++++++++++++++

So, David Thompson is one of the those poor opinion writer masquerading as journalist then. Poor David Thompson, he should have waited a while longer … ‘cuz he seems to have lost credibility.

1317 Agreed : 08/06/2007 at 9:11 am
______________

Damm, you catch me! yeah, i hate her, i hate her so much that she is the only celebrity that i follow and admire. See how much i hate her? Ahaha… some of you people need to step back and relax.

what happened to you? i thought you were a fan of angie’s but i think you are not or possibly a faniston.

A NEW THREAD.

1307 Ette E. Quette : 08/06/2007 at 9:00 am
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

How old are you? Really? Because fine you don’t like her but why be so vulgar? If you a man you have no respect for women as you are trying to be as disresepctful as you possibly can. If your a women that is really sad, that a women would you *ex to try and belittle another women in that way, as if the world doesn’t do it enough. Truly, grow up. I am sure you can come up with an intelligent, well written response or I got an idea maybe not a response at all. I will never get if you don’t like an actor or actress why would you waste time in your case going through 1306 other post on the 44th page to vent that you don’t like them.

Hi fellow fans, I just read a remarkable article on Angie’s career, a very thorough and I thought was right on spot. It is really extraordinary, so I will post it, although it is quite long. The writer hails her in historical prospectives, her career path, and personal life. It is a long read (sorry Jared) and I never paste an article but I think this is so worth it! It’s for the UK premiere of AMH.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,2142555,00.html

Angelina - a Star Is Reborn

As bad girl or UN ambassador, Angelina Jolie makes plenty of headlines. But, writes Barbara Ellen, her vivid life has obscured the essential truth, confirmed in her new film A Mighty Heart - Jolie is a brilliant actress

For those of us who are interested in the life and art of Angelina Jolie, and how they manage to co-exist, there are many standout moments in A Mighty Heart - Michael Winterbottom ’s film of the memoir by Mariane Pearl, whose husband, Daniel, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was kidnapped by Islamic extremists in the Pakistani city of Karachi, in 2002. His subsequent beheading was captured on video and broadcast over the internet.

In one scene the heavily pregnant Mariane, played by Jolie, is asked by a reporter if she has seen the video of her husband’s death. Head lowered, eyes two dark pools of fathomless contempt, she asks: ‘Have you no decency? How do you ask me that?’ For me at least, this is the moment that Jolie nails the ‘real’ in this real-life character study. No movie creature, certainly no ‘grieving widow’ springing solely from a scriptwriter’s imagination, would be quite so arctic and unsympathetic.
And this is the way Jolie spends the movie - being real. For so long viewed as essentially a persona actress - always watchable, but prone to drenching scenes with her own charisma, like a too-powerful cologne - in A Mighty Heart she gives herself over to portraying an actual person. Her Mariane, coiled like an exhausted cobra over her computer screen, waits for news of her husband, pregnant bump sticking out unceremoniously, eyelids purple-blotched with attempts to rub out the tiredness.

With Winterbottom adopting a no-frills docustyle, a full-blown hysterical heroine act would have jarred anyway; but, against a background of grim, red tape-swaddled chaos and the vivid hum of Karachi itself, Jolie delivers a masterclass in composed naturalism. All of which serves to make Mariane’s eventual breakdown at the news of her husband’s fate that much more visceral as, weaving, stumbling, and eventually falling, she keens and bellows like an incompetently stunned beast in an abattoir.

So, a potent performance from Jolie, some are saying Oscar-worthy (she won Best Supporting Actress for Girl, Interrupted in 2000.) Other scenes in A Mighty Heart stand out for different reasons. The poignant, fluttering flashbacks to the Pearls’ wedding, honouring their everyday love story in the days before it was hijacked by hate. After the kidnap: Mariane standing in a courtyard, clutching her swollen belly, frustrated and weeping, then recovering, even smiling, not wanting to frighten the small Pakistani child playing there. And, as news of the kidnap breaks: Mariane, en route to an interview with CNN - the car flying through the gates, flashbulbs popping, her face in profile, inscrutable, unreadable.

Arguably these scenes overlap in places with Jolie’s own life: her youthful wildness - her ‘madness’ and ‘badness’ - gave way to apparent emotional calm when she got together with Brad Pitt, whom she ’stole’ from Jennifer Aniston, to the glee of the gossip industry. Then there is the seriousness, the steel, with which Jolie, 32, has worked as a UNHCR goodwill ambassador since 2001; along with Pitt, Jolie has donated millions to charity, while her efforts at lobbying Washington on behalf of the global poor have been praised by the likes of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

Moreover, there are the children. Not since Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music has one film actress been surrounded and defined by so many kids. The difference being that, in a bizarre echo of Mia Farrow, this is all happening off-camera, and the children are Jolie’s own. In a few short years, she has undergone an extraordinary transformation from Bad Girl Sexpot to world’s foremost Earth Mother icon. Her ‘rainbow’ family includes the adopted Jolie-Pitt children - Maddox (five, adopted from Cambodia in 2002), Zahara (two, from Ethiopia in 2005) and Pax (three, from Vietnam this year) - and her and Pitt’s biological daughter, Shiloh, born in 2006, whose first images, carefully stage-managed by her parents, raised millions for charitable causes. And of course there is the ever-attendant media blaze, the perma-popping flashbulbs that Jolie, always contradictory, seems to court and shun, dodge and exploit, mock and accept, all at the same time.

By most criteria, Jolie’s personal, professional and philanthropic life would be judged a dizzying juggling act. The irony being that just as A Mighty Heart forcefully reminds us that Jolie has it in her to be a great and serious actress, one look at everything else happening in her life, suggests that she may not always have the time.

Is Angelina Jolie the original actress interrupted - an artist who is defined as much by the numerous outside influences that have distracted her from her craft as she is by her actual performances? Born in 1975, Jolie is the daughter of actor Jon Voight (Midnight Cowboy) and the recently deceased actress Marcheline Bertrand, Voight leaving the family home shortly after Jolie’s birth. Jolie and her brother, James, attended Beverly Hills High, and were devoted to their mother, though their relationship with their father was always difficult. (After various ups and downs Jolie is now not on speaking terms with Voight, who famously wept on a prime-time talk show about his daughter’s ’serious emotional problems’).

At the age of seven, Jolie appeared in one of Voight’s movies, Lookin’ to Get Out, and has appeared in over 30 movies since. She attended the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, and, early on in her career, won two Golden Globes for TV movies George Wallace and Gia. The latter, the true story of the drugs- and Aids-related death of supermodel Gia Mari e Carangi, was to prove a signature role for Jolie. One critic described Jolie’s Gia as ‘quite possibly the most beautiful train wreck ever filmed ‘. Certainly it is a role that showcases Jolie’s instinctive genius for open-wound vulnerability.

Jolie’s combination of beauty, ability and eccentricity was not to go unnoticed. When casting Hackers, the 1995 youth thriller about teenage computer rebels, director Iain Softley auditioned, among others, Hilary Swank, Heather Graham and Liv Tyler, before deciding that the young Jolie had something ‘unique’. As he told me: ‘People like Angelina tend to select themselves. She just had this inner self-confidence in a very understated way. She was focused, daring, bold and brave.’

Discussing the part with Jolie, Softley remembers that he mentioned her character (’Acid Burn ‘) was punky. ‘Angelina was very different when I first met her. She was quiet, she had long hair and she was wearing glasses. I explained that she would have tattoos and piercings, and we would have to cut her hair, Angelina said straight away that she would have her head shaved. That was what she was like - she threw herself into it completely.’

Indeed the finished film shows that the shy, nerdy Jolie who Softley originally met has vanished; in her place is Jolie as ‘Acid Burn’, hair shorn, her beautiful face the spiky embodiment of street-wise defiance, as she bashes away stroppily on her keyboard.

On the cusp of her twenties, Jolie possessed, says Softley, ‘a compelling quality’. ‘That thing where you’re interested in them for who they are, apart from their acting. Johnny Depp has it, and Angelina has it, too. When you have a distinctive presence like hers it will always be a very potent ingredient.’

Another director, Simon West, was attracted to these same qualities for another definitive Jolie role, 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. ‘I needed someone with a bit of edge, a bit of darkness,’ says West. By this time, Jolie was as known for her personal life - her somewhat sexualised outlaw image - as she was for her acting.

When she married her Hackers co-star Jonny Lee Miller, Jolie wore a white shirt with his name daubed in her blood on the back . Later, during her second marriage to Pushing Tin co-star Billy Bob Thornton, the couple famously wore vials of each other’s blood around their necks. The talk was all of tattoos, self-harming, torture chambers, bondage and knives. When she kissed her brother full on the lips at an awards ceremony, some headlines even claimed she was capable of ‘incest’, moving Jolie to comment wryly about how ’sick’ people’s minds were.

Clearly the nerd was dead; long live the cult of Crazy Angelina. Indeed a recurring motif of Jolie’s success was that, creatively and in her personal life, she dared to live out the silver screen rebel fantasies of Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean in a way that her male contemporaries could only dream of. In this way, Jolie, quite apart from her acting, became an important anti-authority cultural touchstone for girls and boys. With her epic body, full lips and cappuccino skin, Jolie - a rare and exotic beauty - may have invited endless comparisons with the femmes fatales of old Hollywood, but in reality she was living less like a female starlet and more like a male rock star.

‘People perceived her as dangerous, not just for her roles but in her real life,’ recalls West. ‘She had a danger about her, an edge, and I quite wanted that baggage.’ It was while filming Tomb Raider scenes in Cambodia that Jolie first encountered the real-life scenes of poverty and despair that would change her perspective for ever. As West remembers:

—continued:

‘She’d grown up in LA and hadn’t seen much of the world, and being in Cambodia completely opened her eyes. Being an actress in Los Angeles, you can easily get self obsessed, and I think Angelina realised that she’d much rather spend her time helping other people.’

Playing Lara Croft, Jolie didn’t just physically encompass a teenage boy’s wet dream of computer-generated tits and ass - she managed to psychologically flesh out the video game heroine, making her funnier, blacker, hungrier. But it was Jolie’s role as mental patient Lisa Rowe in James Mangold’s 1999 film of the Susanna Kaysen memoir, Girl, Interrupted, that defined her, arguably, as a major creative force. It is a Hollywood truism that some actors steal their character’s wardrobe while others take home their actual characters. One can only speculate whether any of Jolie’s more controversial roles tended to linger with her, but, if they did, Lisa Rowe would be the first suspect.

Even allowing for cinema’s suspicious predilection for screwed-up babes, this was a tour de force: Jolie a vision, with birds’ nest nicotine-yellow hair, eyes that burned in their sockets like coals in snow, limbs imperceptibly jerking in that slow, secret dance of ceaseless self-hatred that only a certain kind of lost teenage soul could hope to recognise. As Jolie’s performance unfolded, all different shades of madness, one almost felt a sneaking sympathy for co-star Winona Ryder. Ryder had bought the rights to Kaysen’s book, giving herself the plum role of Susanna as her comeback, and here she was being blasted off the screen by a full-voltage Jolie.

‘You think you’re free?’ Jolie/Lisa spits in one scene. ‘You don’t know what freedom is. I’m free. I can breathe. And you will choke on your average ******* mediocre life!’ Rarely has a Best Supporting Oscar been so deserved - as a portrayal of madness, Jolie’s performance was as vivid as Jack Nicholson’s in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was also as definitive a study of unravelling femininity as Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, Bette Davis in Now Voyager, Beatrice Dalle in Betty Blue or Jessica Lange in Frances. The problem for Jolie, as for any young actress given the role of a lifetime, was, of course, how to top it?

It could be argued that until A Mighty Heart came along, Jolie had struggled to find a role that truly stretched her in the way Girl, Interrupted did. Or maybe Jolie didn’t struggle enough. One could conclude that, on occasion, Jolie has been creatively lazy, more than happy to take the money and run (though in fairness, this was often to fund her various charitable concerns). Who remembers Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), The Fever (2004), or even last year’s The Good Shepherd - the spy drama directed by Robert De Niro, featuring Jolie as a neglected housewife? Certainly in recent times, Jolie’s canon, though impressive in quantity, has been nowhere near as consistent as certain of her contemporaries - Hilary Swank, Kate Winslet and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Indeed, while Jolie’s bewildering cameo as Colin Farrell’s mother in the 2004 Roman sandal epic Alexander could at least be said to exude a certain camp appeal (Jolie would have rocked in I, Claudius), in too many of her recent movies she seems to feature only as a ludicrously beautiful (and expensive) afterthought. Even in 2003’s Beyond Borders, a well-intentioned issue-movie close to her heart, La Jolie was judged to look faintly ridiculous - crashing glamorously into refugee camps around the globe in Lady Bountiful mode, romancing Clive Owen’s noble medic en route. Then there was 2005’s hired assassin caper Mr & Mrs Smith, where Jolie met Pitt on set, earning herself the somewhat sexist soubriquet Most High-Profile Home-Wrecker in America (as if Pitt played no role at all in their getting together).

This year, Jolie has certainly been busy - grieving for her mother, who died of cancer in January, as well as immersing herself in family life and her myriad charity concerns. But now with A Mighty Heart it seems that Jolie has found her creative stride once more.

Mariane Pearl has gone on record as saying that she wanted Jolie to play her, precisely because she ‘trusted’ her, despite the fact that Pearl being black raised tricky race issues. ‘Aren’t we past this?’ said Pearl in Jolie’s defence. ‘I am Cuban, but I am also Dutch. Should a Dutch person play me? It’s not about skin colour, it’s about how a person behaves that matters.’

After A Mighty Heart, Jolie also has several projects in the pipeline (Beowulf; Atlas Shrugged; Kung Fu Panda), though, following these, she is quoted as saying she is having at least a year off.

Film critic and author David Thomson has a few misgivings about A Mighty Heart. ‘It’s trading on a personal story in a war that a lot of people feel very uncomfortable about,’ he says, but concedes that movies such as A Mighty Heart are rarely expected to do well at the box office. Thomson also wonders whether Jolie, as an actress, may have fatally stalled, her life perhaps getting in the way.

‘While I find Angelina more comical than she finds herself, she’s actually a good actress, and an authentic raving beauty,’ he says. ‘I’d love to have seen more solid work from her, but there’s the issue of that private life that remains so obstinately public.’

In fact, says Thomson, she is in danger of becoming ‘an upmarket Paris Hilton’. ‘Paris Hilton has zero going on. Angelina has humour and talent, but she’s becoming a fabricated personality.’

Roger Ebert, the hugely influential Chicago film critic, disagrees, describing Jolie’s performance in A Mighty Heart as ‘physically and emotionally convincing’. ‘Jolie was a movie star to begin with but an actress now,’ he says. ‘She is as good in the Tomb Raider movies, in terms of what they require, as she is in the serious films. She has a genuine screen presence. She holds the attention without asking for it.’

Ebert goes on to say that, in his opinion, Jolie’s career is most comparable to Jane Fonda’s. ‘Both are physically fit, sexy with brains, engaged in world issues, and are able to move from entertainment to serious films.’ Ebert adds that Fonda and Jolie also seem to share a talent for Oscars, becoming gossip fodder, falling out with their fathers, picking interesting partners, and ‘making people angry’.

One wonders if this will end up being Angelina Jolie’s rather complicated career epitaph: she came, she conquered, she adopted children, she ran off with Brad Pitt, she tried to save the world, she made people angry? If so, considering her undeniable talent, and this most ‘interrupted’ of careers, Jolie could probably do a lot better. At least to the extent of expending a bit more energy and commitment in picking out roles.

On the other hand, as a person - as a veritable icon of good causes, now routinely compared to Princess Diana - this most interesting and genuine of women could also have done a lot worse. Certainly, all the evidence points to the fact that right here, right now, still in her early thirties, Jolie is doing exactly what she wants to do - that this is precisely the work-life balance she was trying to achieve. As in, more good works, less work (good or bad) in Hollywood.

After all, as Jolie herself said in a rare recent interview: ‘I love being an actress. I love telling a good story, but I feel that at the end of the day, when I die, what contribution will I have made?’

1326 to juju : 08/06/2007 at 9:23 am
_____________

Do you want me to answer you?

Yeah I hate Angelina, love her work, her personality… but hate her.

You right I love Brad’s ex wife, i love her so much that i don’t even find the need to speak about her. I’m that kind of a fan, the least i heard and talk of her , the more i love her.

Oh, please…

#1335 juju,i hate everything in brad x wife.