The eight-year war between the still not-yet-fully-divorced Brad Pitt and Angelica Jolie has devolved into something truly sick and diseased.
And the proof in the pudding are those smug-ass, VillageoftheDamned Jolie-Pitt kids…their Val Lewton-ish, zombie-like submission to Angie’s “Brad is truly evil and therefore must be shunned” belief system.
What kind of deranged mom indoctrinates her kids (natural and adopted) into this kind of hate theology? This is fucking cultbehavior. This is Manson family stuff.
Who in the world believes that Brad is as “bad” as she seems to believe, or that he’s even “bad” at all? As in unredeemable, deserving of damnation, etc.
Has anyone in the history of Western Civilization ever waged a Mexican standoff war over divorce terms and child custody that lasted eightfeckin’ years?
Did Pitt do something ghastly and demonic? Answer: Not by normal people standards. Not if you’re coming from a place of mental health.
Whatever happened to “we’re sorry you let alcohol turn you into a different person eight years ago, dad, but we‘re also glad you embraced sobriety so let’s construct something new…let’s open our hearts, move forward and take it one day at a time”?
I believe that Jolie is definitely the bad guy here.
Pitt’s David Mills character in Se7en: “She’s a nutbag.”
Can kids “catch” emotional dysfunction from their mother? Like mumps or the measles?
Try to flush this out of your mind as you watch Pablo Larrain’s Maria in Telluride.
I’m looking very much forward to seeing Malcolm Washington’s ThePianoLesson (Netflix, late ‘24). Because the writing will be excellent —- that I know. An adaptation of August Wilson‘s revered 1987 play, pic stars John David Washington (who also starred in a 2022 Broadway revival of same) and was directed and co-adapted by Malcolm, his brother. DenzelWashington and Todd Black have produced.
I’m presuming The Piano Lesson will screen at Telluride before playing Toronto.
John David Washington needs a leg up as performance-wise he hasn’t really connected thus far. If you ask me he was fairly blah or so-so in Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman (’18). Chris Nolan‘s Tenet (’20), which wasn’t an acting platform for anyone, offered no acceleration. Then JDW suffered a one-two punch with his mac-and-cheese wolfing scene in Malcolm&Marie (Netflix, 1.19.21), followed by another flat performance in David O. Russell‘s Amsterdam (’22), which caused me great anguish.
Elizabeth Taylor: TheLostTapes, which began streaming yesterday on Max, is an attractive, watchable gloss that plays it safe and tidy at every turn. It’s a valentine — nothing funny or nervy or the least bit impudent. No Larry Fortensky jokes. No clip of John Belushi‘s “Liz choking on chicken bones” skit. Not so much as a glance at Ron Galella‘s Fat Liz photo.
Director Nanette Burstein deserves a certain kind of cynical credit for sanding every possible edge off the legend of La Liz. So much material has been ignored. Too damn friendly.
Even the brief mention of Taylor’s suicide attempt during her marriage to EddieFisher feels somehow soft, mainly because it doesn’t make sense.
Sometime in ’79 or ’80 I saw Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh. She was standing about ten or twelve feet away in a dense crowd of guys at an after-party at the Roxy, the popular Manhattan roller disco on West 18th. I managed a glimpse or two of her eyes, and was slightly surprised to discover that they really were as beautiful as I’d been told. I was mesmerized. I think I actually said out loud, “Wow.”
I’d been looking at Taylor in film after film all my life, of course, but those real-life peepers had an extra-glistening, pools-of-passion, send-your-hormones-to-the-moon quality that I’d never quite gotten from a live female before. And they actually did seem to be violet colored, as legend had it.
Screenshot
The once-legendary Taylor hit her career peak between ’51 (A Place in The Sun) and ’60 (Butterfield 8). This was also when she seemed the most erotically enticing.
I heard and read a lot about her over the decades, and gradually became persuaded that she was tough and real and super-loyal to her friends…although I never understood why she befriended that freak known as Michael Jackson.
I had read once that Taylor saved Montgomery Clift‘s life just after his 5.12.56 car crash by extracting a dislodged tooth that had been stuck in his wind pipe. By all accounts she was a good person to know and share time on the planet with, and also that she was feisty and steady and reliable and no fool. And she liked to drink and have fun and laugh through it all….hah!
I think, in short, that she might have been a better person than she was an actress.
I’m not dismissing her very good ’50s performances in A Place In The Sun, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Butterfield 8. But she was seriously miscast in the lusciously miserable Cleopatra, and with the exception of her brilliant, possibly all-time best performance in Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, she stopped getting the good roles after that and just wasn’t a very interesting presence in the ’60s and ’70s.
Taylor was pretty much out of the game by the early 80s.
Her golden time was the 1950s, period, and she was at her hottest back then also. She started to put on weight after Butterfield 8 (i.e., after she hit her early 30s), and the hard truth is that she looked vaguely plump in Cleopatra, and that roundish, slightly boozy and besotted look never went away after that. I’m sorry but that’s how it pretty much was. But those eyes of hers were givers of rapture and splendor.
My only other first-hand connection with La Liz came with my numerous sleepovers at the Nicky Hilton-Elizabeth Taylor house on Route 102 in Georgetown, Connecticut, as the guest of the late cartoonist Chance Browne. It’s a small cottage where Hilton and Taylor stayed for a period in 1950 during their brief rocky marriage before she sued for divorce (she complained of spousal abuse) — local legend says Hilton threw Taylor out a window during one of their drunken fights.
There’s really not much feeling in Burstein’s film. It’s too admiring, too subservient to generate anything that truly hits home.
It’s possible, I suppose, that a few old biddies will be shocked to learn that Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s attorney husband of ten years, cheated on ex-wife Kerstin in 2009 with nanny + elementary school teacher Najen Naylor, who was 32 at the time.
The prospective First Gentleman has admitted to the episode. Even the N.Y. Times has reported on the matter.
Big deal, right? Professionally prominent husbands blowing up their marriages by fucking the family nanny…isn’t that a cliche in the annals of affluent domesticity? Didn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger do the same with housekeeper Mildred Baena?
Naylor and Baena both got pregnant and gave birth, but Naylor apparently didn’t keep the child.
Fucking the help is, of course, a passive-aggressive way of dissolving a marriage as the betrayed wife will inevitably sniff things out sooner or later.
Boiled down, Emhoff has been exposed as having been an imperfect human specimen 15 years ago…an average, sexually frustrated fellow who succumbed to temptation, got busted, apologized, accepted responsibility and moved on.
Emhoff met Harris on a blind date in 2013; they were married the following year.
This matter obviously has no bearing upon Harris’s presidential campaign. We all understand that men in their frisky prime (Emhoff was 45 when the affair occurred) are fundamentally dogs.
What I personally find surprising is the fact that Kerstin, the 57 year-old chief of a “creative think tank” called PRETTYBIRD, is clearly a hotter number than Naylor. My first thought after glancing at a recent photo of the 47-year-old Naylor (posted by the Daily Mail) was that whomever or whatever she may have been at age 32, the last 15 years have taken their toll.
Top photo (l. to r) : Kerstin Emhoff, daughter Ella, Doug Emhoff.
