Filed under: Celebrities
“When I travel, people feel uncomfortable when I say I’m American. They think it’s suspicious that I want to do something positive for them. I think they wonder why the American people re-elected a president who is making foreign policy choices that are affecting other countries in a way that we should question.”
–Angelina Jolie slamming President George W. Bush
Ummm… like people don’t already know you’re American?
–Candy to Angelina Jolie
(Thanks to Holy Roller, Meg, for the tip!)
Posted by Candy ♦ January 19, 2007
Melanie
At 11:40 am Melanie said:
lol.. when I was in Japan, if I told somebody I was American, I usually either got rude comments or looks. I started telling people I was Canadian. And.. sorry, but when was “slamming” Bush’s ridiculous foreign policy/everything he’s done in office been something to sneer at? Come on people. I don’t even *like* Angelina, but now you’re starting to make fun of her for doing/saying the same things anyone else would do/say. Let’s go back to being offended by her “blob” comments.
January 19, 2007
princess bride
At 11:43 am princess bride said:
who’s making fun of her? i think a lot of people would agree!
January 19, 2007
At 6:32 pm Jo Jo said:
I am proud to be an American and am thankful to be living in a free country. There is not a greater country in the world. Many people here take what we have for granted.
January 19, 2007
At 4:41 pm Caryn James Deserves An Award for This Piece said:
After All That Goodness, a Sudden Fall From Grace
By CARYN JAMES
Before she set a toe on the red carpet at the Golden Globes last week, Angelina Jolie’s carefully molded image as humanitarian and mom was already showing some cracks. The Internet had been flooded with reports, picked up from European interviews, that she had called her biological daughter “a blob” with less personality than her two adopted kids, and had criticized Madonna’s adoption of a baby boy from Malawi. Women’s Wear Daily reported she was being difficult about designs from St. John, the staid company whose ads she appears in and whose conservatively elegant gown she wore to the Globes.
By the time she reached the end of a haughty, humorless walk down that red carpet on Brad Pitt’s arm, the Good Angelina image had crumbled to dust. In the next days columnists from The Washington Post to LA Weekly attacked her for a television interview with Ryan Seacrest on E! that made it clear she was above such drivel. His red carpet questions were drivel, but that was no reason to sneer the words “Cereal, we made cereal” when asked how the family had spent the morning.
Video of the interview was spread and ridiculed on Web sites like TMZ and YouTube; Mr. Seacrest complained about her on his radio show; the current issue of Us Weekly reported on more behavior fit for a queen in an article headlined “An Angelina Backlash?” There was really no need for the question mark.
Once famous as a tattooed wild woman, Ms. Jolie has soared to the saintly realm and plummeted again in record time. Madonna, her only rival in shape-shifting, has maintained the devoted wife and mother image for more than six years now, despite her recent adventures in adoption. Good Angelina didn’t even last two. That shattered image, a lesson in the limits of spin, is the product of a lethal combination: a public that never bought into the reformed persona and a star who may have bought into it too much.
The backlash had been building all along, and not simply because, while married to Billy Bob Thornton, she wore a vial of his blood around her neck. (No fair blaming the press for her vampirish image.) She adopted her son, Maddox, from Cambodia just before that marriage broke up, and has always seemed sincere about motherhood. But from the minute her name was linked to Mr. Pitt’s, there was plenty of snickering at her claim that they were just friends while filming “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” when he was married to Jennifer Aniston. Only the Jolie-Pitts know the truth; let’s just say the public remains skeptical. Once they became an acknowledged couple, Ms. Jolie assumed a saintly manner, deglamorizing to the point of wearing a bandanna on her head for a “Today” interview while visiting orphans in Africa; did she think viewers wouldn’t spot her cat’s-eye makeup and heavily glossed lips?
Such doubts about the noble Angelina accelerated especially fast over the last month. In the January issue of Vogue, talking about how her relationship with Mr. Pitt developed, she restated that they were “very, very good friends” for a long time, sounding as disingenuous as ever. And she added, “It was clear he was with his best friend,” which on the surface is matter-of-fact, yet manages to desexualize Ms. Aniston. Venom in the guise of kindness?
The new Us Weekly article reports that Ms. Jolie was “a nightmare” during the Vogue photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz; that she pushed through a crowd at the premiere of “God Grew Tired of Us,” a do-gooder documentary about the lost boys of Sudan that Mr. Pitt helped produce; and that she coolly pulled him away from a conversation with Courtney Cox Arquette, Ms. Aniston’s close friend, at the Golden Globes. Even if some of those incidents are exaggerated, the backlash is real. A kitschy painting of Ms. Jolie as the Virgin Mary holding her children and hovering saintlike above a Wal-Mart, a work too banal to be half-good as satire, made a media splash when it was shown at Art Miami 2007.
The backlash isn’t entirely her fault. The press helped it along by playing fast and loose with her quotations, gleefully picking up the Shiloh-is-a-blob comment without context. In the full interview in British Elle, when Ms. Jolie hesitated in describing her newborn daughter, the reporter suggested the word blob. Ms. Jolie foolishly responded: “Yes, a blob! But now she’s starting to have a personality.”
In response to a question about Madonna, she did tell the French magazine Gala that adoptions are illegal in Malawi and, “I prefer to stay on the right side of the law.” You can almost hear her coo her superiority as she says it, and you can almost hear anyone who reads it thinking, “Witch.” But her first response was to say that the happiness of Madonna’s child is all that matters; most second-hand reports made that seem like an afterthought.
Still, at best her own bumbling led her to this state. At worst, blame her self-importance. When she was interviewed on the Globes red carpet for “Access Hollywood,” she was shown an old clip of herself jumping into a swimming pool fully clothed after the 1999 awards, not exactly a tough reminder of her wild past. Yet New Angelina seemed royally unamused. And while she looked ultra-glamorous at the premiere of her latest film, “The Good Shepherd,” the perfectly upswept hair and self-contained demeanor of her recent appearances have also made her seem plastic.
In part she is suffering from a common problem: movie stars who make too few movies and are forced to coast on their fame. In “The Good Shepherd,” as the wife of a buttoned-down C.I.A. agent (Matt Damon), she goes from vibrant young femme fatale to brittle, middle-aged alcoholic. It’s a fine performance but a minor part. Her next film, “A Mighty Heart,” isn’t scheduled to arrive until June. That leading role might help restore her saintly image; she plays Marianne Pearl, whose husband, Daniel, was kidnapped and murdered while reporting in Pakistan.
But as Ms. Jolie’s horrific month has shown, reshaping an image is harder than you might think. Despite the charity work and the bun on her head, the burning question all along has been: Who is that woman in the St. John suit, and what has she done with Angelina Jolie?
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First of all, I must say that Caryn James deserves an award for her intuitive investigative piece here. She, within a relatively small space, voiced the opinions of many intelligent people regarding Angelina Jolie.
And for those of you who are quick to scream, “This means nothing!” well, I would kindly beg to differ.
You see boys and girls, The New York Times is NOT, and has never been, a “fly by night” news source. Far from it. Now if this was in The Enquirer, The Star, or US Weekly, I hardly think that anyone would give it a second thought.
However, the New York Times IS an EXTREMELY reputable source and as such, it serves as a reminder to Jolie and her PR Machine what her public REALLY thinks of her, or shall I say, how little they REALLY think of her.
Furthermore that the New York Times would run this article is undeniable proof that the halo on Jolie’s head has indeed tarnished….and notice that I did not say “tarnishing” …because the damage has already been done! Too late for back-tracking!
Given Jolie’s wild and psychotic past, there was no way that intelligent people would have ever regarded her as someone to be admired, and most certainly not a “saint.”
Whenever intelligent people hear the word “saint” with the words Angelina Jolie, we can’t help but laugh because it’s like trying to combine oil and water….simply, the word “saint” should never be used with the name “Angelina Jolie” unless the sentence in its entirety is “There is no possible way that someone with a reputation like Angelina Jolie should ever be considered a saint” which is a lot more reasonable and TRUTHFUL given the person that we are really talking about here.
I also laugh when Jolie always claims in interviews that she and her live-in lover never read their own press. Is she serious? I mean, really serious? It is during moments like these that I can see this woman for a bigger liar than she already is!
If she does NOT read her press, why did her “Look at me and what I’m doing for charity!” cry become unbearably loud the minute that she was linked with a married man? Obviously, Jolie’s PR Team reads their press and I am sure that Jolie, the liar that she is, reads it herself!
Jolie’s PR people obviously gave her a “tip” on how to minimize her negative press and this was to adopt humanitarian causes that would take attention away from her psychotic and selfish nature.
What’s funny is that she and Brad’s PR people never counted on the fact that there will always be intelligent people in the world who could see through their charade.
If the entire world were their “oyster,” we would be eating this up, but unfortunate for them, the world will NEVER be their “oyster.”
Instead, what is happening?
MANY people are crying “Not only does the emperor not wearing new clothes, but the emperor is crazy, a bisexual, a liar, a hypocrite, a phony, a manipulator who deliberately got pregnant for her live-in lover, a selfish woman, a tease, a snob, a father hater, a druggie, a uber-diva, and a not too nice person to be around!”
These days, I don’t think that Jolie wants to be Jolie!
And the stress of the affair has definitely taken its toll on Brad, who has aged in 10 years since hooking up with such an unstable woman. He now looks to be in his early to mid-50’s, with deep crow’s feet and perpetual look of worry and fear of what little public he has turning on him.
Jolie, whether or not she is aware of it, is digging her own grave. Yet, rather than just “lay low” she is proudly promoting this adulterous affair and MOST people will never forget how she and Brad got together. Sadly, regardless of what she and Brad’s PR Team cook up in terms of fake humanitarian efforts, people will NEVER forget how they got together. Never.
Interestingly, Jolie, even in the wake of doing supposed “good” is still being linked to scandal. Always scandal. Always. But then again, she has built her life, pre-Brad on scandal (e.g., making out with her brother at the 1999 Oscars, sharing with the public her sexual attraction to women, getting involved with Billy Bob when he was still with Laura Dern, admitting to trying every drug possible, etc.), so it seems rather hypocritical for her to suddenly want people not to remember the woman that she used to be, or shall I say, still is.
Jolie must realize that she can live how she wants, but sadly, she’s only drug Brad down in the mud with her.
St. John’s must be regretting their decision to hire her since they have literally lost millions since hiring Jolie. St. John’s represents class, and Jolie, in her past AND present life, has never represented that virtue.
MY OPINION? Without a doubt, Caryn James Deserves an Award for this Piece!
January 22, 2007
At 7:16 pm Karen said:
I am not even reading the other responses…this is just all media drivel. Who the hell is Caryn James? I don’t know. PLEASE! AN AWARD!? FOR CRAP!?!
Anyway: I hope Brad and Angelina kick the shit out of all of you, make great movies, raise great children who will carry on the “power of the people” (which they will have) even if Brad and Angelina don’t stay together as a couple. I hope that even given their “humanity”, they can pull off their better goals But they are a part of all of you so who knows!? I just want the children to kick butt.
Here is another update: Babies ARE “blob-like” in the beginning! HELLO! Have you birthed one?!? She (Jolie) also said that Shiloh was beginning to exhibit personal “stuff.” I know moms (and dads) all over the world are shaking heads over this because they GET it but probably don’t “dare” to admit it!
“YOU” want THEM to “fall from grace” because you put them on top and now you have determined it is time to “take them down.” Wow. Check out YOUR lives.
I like Jennifer Aniston, BUT–we know Brad wanted family a long tine ago and she didn’t. So now if Jen is saying something different….?OK Go find a new father.
Also: Who cares about St. John’s?. The clothes looked beautiful but who can buy them? Not me! GET OUT OF THEM ANGELINA!
January 25, 2007