Angelina Jolie: Four Weeks To Go!

1ST!!!! wow. yay i love herrrr

i hope so! but i think shes still got a while to go…. =[
cant wait

is this really true? anyway, i couldn’t be more excited.

Go Angie!!!!!!!!!!!

From men.style.com, here’s a walk down memory lane at Cannes. It’s a slideshow of their top 20 all-time men’s fashion moments. The old photos are great…even Mickey Rourke looks hot.

http://men.style.com/theupgrader/style/features/cannes-fashion?mbid=mwn

credit dulcinea13 @ jjb

IVF IVF IVF!!!!…
i love winding u loonies up. some of u guys on these threads are straight up nuts

maybe they should take a break and just enjoy this family.
8 is alot of people to get to know. when a family is too big, they become distant with one another or teams start to form (i know what it’s like to come from a big family. it is hard…)

I don’t think this article is true. The tabs are always speculating. Just because they published that she is really having twins before, now they are elaborating from their “sources.” The only ones who know for sure would be Brad, Angie, and their doctor.

I hate Angelina as much I hate Brad…they were sucks…..desperately freaky parents

Review from Empire

Quite simply, Clint Eastwood’s new film Changeling is flawless, with Clint proving yet again that he is the true master of the great American film. The French title translates as The Exchange, which is a clearer reflection of this fascinating, multi-faceted drama, which begins in 1928 when single mother Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) returns from work to find her son Walter missing. Several months later Walter is returned to her, but Christine isn’t too happy about it, chiefly because the boy is not her son: he’s a good three inches shorter, his dental records don’t match and his teacher swears blind that the kid has never set foot in her classroom.

Early next year, it’s safe to say that Changeling will be in the Academy frame itself, when the 2008 nominations are announced, with likely places in the Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor (for John Malkovich as Christine’s champion), Best Screenplay and Best Score, for the haunting theme penned by Clint himself. No praise is too high for this thoughtful, engrossing, intelligent film. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

Another review, this one from Glenn Kenny (somecamerunning.typepad.com):

Cannes, Competition: “Changeling

Changeling

Clint Eastwood opens his 1920s-’30s set film Changeling with a period logo of its studio-here, Universal, with its silvery, Deco-esque depiction of a small plane circling the globe. The slight but noteworthy irony here is that this picture is nothing like a Universal production of that era-it is instead, very much like a Warner Brothers production of that era and beyond. (Eastwood just recently stopped hanging his producing hat at Warner’s, alas.)

For Changeling rings the muckracking bells of the likes of I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, and the devoted-mother high notes of Stella Dallas. Its old-fashionedness, or I should say respect for verities, goes hand-in-hand with a particularly Eastwood-esque directness. The result is not as perfect a film as Eastwood has made, but it’s damn strong, both as a story and an exploration of the parent-child bond and a polemic. Because despite the fact that it deals with the corruption and venality of a past era, Changeling is at times a very angry picture; Eastwood’s angriest, I think, since Unforgiven.

Changeling is based on the trus story of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), a single mom in Los Angeles whose young son is abducted while she’s away at work. Five months later, Police Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) stages a press event to celebrate the discovery and return of the boy. Only Collins insists-and the audience knows-that the boy she meets at the train station is not her son. Collins insists on this fact, and for her trouble winds up locked up in the psycho ward of a mental hospital (shades of The Snake Pit, admitedly not a Warner picture, but you can’t have everything) that’s largely just a disguised repository for any woman who pisses off the cops. Intercut with her jaw-dropping travails is the discovery by an initially sceptical good cop (Michael Kelly) of a child-murdering psycho who operated on a remote ranch and may well have killed Collins’ real son. After a crusading preacher (John Malkovich) who’s on a campaign against police corruption gets Collins sprung from the asylum, the film’s storylines converge more closely, as Collins seeks justice for herself and tries to discern her beloved son’s true fate.

Jolie’s performance as Collins is one of her best in years; no doubt channelling some fierce maternal instinct but at the same time dialing things down quite a bit, she very nearly transcends her somewhat otherworldly physical appearance and embodies a classic heroine. As nemesis Jones, Donovan shows his teeth a little too fiercely; as a friend observed, people don’t actually get up in the morning relishing the idea of how evil they’re going to be, the way this guy does. Far more evocative of heinous soul-crushing bureaucracy at its most rotted is Denis O’Hare’s slimy asylum head. Amy Ryan is her usual goods-delivering self as an inmate who hips Collins to the loony bin’s secret purpose, and her exchanges with Jolie flesh out the film’s powerful feminist sub-theme. I still haven’t quite processed Jason Butler Harner’s work as the genuinely deranged child-killer, but his final confrontations with Jolie do add up.

For once, Eastwood’s musical score is a little inapt-the modal format and the instrumentation seem kind of anachronistic, and the music’s not as sparely used as it’s been in other recent works of his. But hell. The directorial mastery here culminates in a genuinely wrenching coda set in a police station, which brought real unashamed tears to my eyes.

Pax at the zoo/park. A few days ago.

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj138/idycroft/pax3no9.jpg

credit sugar or spice jjb

David should pay more attention to his chest!

Compared to the rest of his body it doesn´t look very developed.

Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (which may or may not be now known as The Exchange), is a riveting drama about a missing boy and the undying constancy of a mother’s love. Angelina Jolie excels in a powerful performance as Christine Collins, whose nine-year-old son, Walter, disappeared in 1928. Five months later, police returned to her a boy they said was Walter; Christine alleged that the boy was not her son.

At the time, the Los Angeles police department was under considerable pressure due to the efforts of a Presbyterian minister, Reverend Gustav Briegleb (John Malcovich), to expose corruption within the police force. Captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), who heads up the investigation, doesn’t particularly care whether the boy is or isn’t Walter Collins; he has a publicity campaign to manage that’s all about making himself look good, so he tries to convince Christine to accept the found boy as her son. When she fights back by going to the press, Jones has her committed to the psycho ward.

The film is based on a the true story of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders in the late 1920s; Gordon Stewart Northcott molested, tortured, killed and dismembered 20 or so young boys on his rural farm before his nephew confessed to police what was taking place there. Because the film is based on real events, we know going in how it’s going to end; the film’s tension rides, therefore, not in the destination but in the journey to get there. Eastwood controls the film’s pacing with a careful touch, letting us feel Christine’s anguish, and taking us all the way down into her dark night of the soul before granting the emotional release at the film’s somewhat redemptive end.

Jolie portrays a classic tragic heroine in the film; a single mother abandoned by Walter’s father, she’s raised her boy alone, and he’s all she has. Her reaction to Captain Jones’s refusal to accept that the boy the police have brought home to her is not her son goes from earnest insistence to stark disbelief to anger. The police captain, unwilling to acknowledge the failings of his department, makes her the enemy rather than the victim, alternately painting her in the press as a negligent mother who simply doesn’t want to take responsibility for her son now that he’s found, or perhaps a hysterical woman with delusions of paranoia.

This is a case of real life being stranger (or perhaps, more horrific) than fiction. If a screenwriter had written a script like this that was purely fictional, audiences would find it hard to accept. It seems rather fantastic to imagine that the police wouldn’t simply believe a mother who says, this is not my child. Of course she would know her own child; I’d know any of my kids in a pitch black room, by the outline of their profiles, the feel of their hair, their unique scents. It’s important to keep in perspective, though, that the film takes place in 1928, during a time with corruption on the police force was rampant, women were viewed as emotional and prone to bouts of hysteria, and people could be locked in a mental hospital to get them out of the way of those in power.

Anytime a film centers on the idea of a child in peril, the dramatic tension stakes are raised accordingly, but the conflict in the film works on many levels: in Christine facing the police captain; in the captain versus the preacher; in good cop versus bad cop; and, of course, in the broader theme of Christine facing the challenges women of that time faced in society generally. Watching that very real history play out — the whole, “there now, be a good girl, keep your mouth shut and just do as you’re told” mentality, rankles me to my very core, as I expect it will to most modern women watching it.

Eastwood relies largely on the strength of Jolie’s performance to carry the film, playing up the bully-victim relationship to the hilt to create a sense of opposing forces crashing into each other. Jolie’s mama-lioness performance is powerful — she plays Christine as both strong and vulnerable, a woman who is both tethered to the restraints of the society in which she must maneuver, and fiercely resilient in her search for the truth about what happened to her son. Jolie’s performance evokes her stylistically similar performance in A Mighty Heart; she spends most of the film wrenched in anguish that resonates to the core. In the latter third of the film, Christine undergoes a dramatic shift from the tragic woman who’s lost a child to a heroine who must advocate for the rights of other women in similar situations, and one can’t help but draw parallels to Jolie’s own personal activism.

Donovan, as corrupt and dictatorial police captain, is infuriatingly smug, which is just as he should be for the role of a man who will stop at nothing — not even the life of a child — to protect his own sorry hide. John Malkovich sizzles as the preacher-with-a-cause, arcing his character nicely; Malcovitch’s Brieglib starts out feeling like a grandstander, but his sympathies for Christine’s plight ultimately shift his priorities. Amy Ryan sneaks in a nice supporting role as a former prostitute and fellow psych-ward detainee.

My one beef with the performances was with Jason Butler Harner as the murderer; this is a wretched, morally abysmal character, yes, but Harner kind of looks and feels like Kyle Maclachlan if he went on a really bad lost meth weekend and never came all the way back. His hysterical craziness is just a bit over-the-top and detracts from the film, but I suppose when you’re playing a man who tortures little boys and chops them up with an ax, it’s hard to find a middle-ground.

Regarding the other elements of the film, J. Michael Straczynski’s script is first-rate; he’s an excellent storyteller, and does a solid job of translating true events into a dramatic story. There’s no jarring wooden dialog here, no overt exposition; Straczynski knows how to show rather than tell, and the powerful script does much to carry the film. As with most of Eastwood’s films, it’s artfully shot and directed and very pretty to look at. Eastwood wrote the music for the film as well, and you could practically imagine the orchestra at the Oscars playing it in January; the film telegraphs “Oscar nominations” for Jolie and Eastwood, at the least, but of course, we’ll have to wait and see how the rest of the year pans out. Changeling opens November 7.

From the front page of Cannes Film Festival.

COMPETITION: “CHANGELING” BY CLINT EASTWOOD

Five years after premiering Mystic River at the Festival de Cannes, Clint Eastwood returns to Competition with Changeling, a thriller which takes place in the late 1920s in a working-class suburb of Los Angeles. Angelina Jolie stars as Christine Collins, a mother whose son Walter mysteriously disappears one day. After an intensive search effort lasting several months, a nine-year-old boy who says he is Walter is returned to her. Unfortunately, the boy is not her son. Christine, accused of being delusional and irresponsible, allies herself with a minister (played by John Malkovich). Together, they continue investigating the matter, eventually implicating the city’s legal officials.

Based on a true story, the screenplay written by Joe Michael Straczynski immediately grabbed the attention of producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, as well as that of director Clint Eastwood. “I took it with me on a trip to Berlin,” recalls Eastwood. “On the way back on the plane, I read it and I liked it a lot. As soon as I got in, I called Brian and Ron and said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do this.’ And they said, ‘Angelina Jolie liked the script and wants to do this.’ I said, ‘She’d be great. I like her work a lot.’ And that’s how it came about - very quick and simple.” Clint Eastwood remarked, “Angelina Jolie is unique. She reminds me of a lot of the actresses from the Golden Age of movies in the 40s - Katherine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Susan Hayward, all of them. They were all very distinctive, and they all had a lot of presence. She’s a tremendous actress.”

Jury President in 1994 and also present in Cannes for the out-of-competition presentation of Absolute Power in 1997; in Competition for Pale Rider in 1985; Bird in 1988 (which won the Commission Supérieure Technique Grand Prize), and White Hunter Black Heart in 1990, Clint Eastwood has a reputation for speed and efficiency on the set. He deliberately cuts down on rehearsal times to preserve the spontaneity and authenticity of the acting, and rarely does several takes. He arrived at this approach from his own preferences as an actor: “Everything I do as a director is based upon what I prefer as an actor. It’s all a learning process over the years. No matter how you plan it, things happen that either work for you or against you. So there’s always the excitement of trying to make it work, of taking a little stack of paper and make it into a living thing.