Angelina Jolie on the Today Show
October 16, 2008 by Sherry
This morning, The Today Show ran an interview with Matt Lauer and Angelina Jolie. As always, she was a total pleasure to listen to. She also answered the question many people have had since she now has an equal number of adopted children and biological children: Yes, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt plan to adopt again some day.
You can watch the video here:
Edited to add: While there were some loading issues earlier this morning, the video seems to play quite well now. Also, there were a few questions in the comments as to whether this was filmed live in New York or previously taped while Brad and Angelina were in New York the last time. Apparently, she did indeed fly back to New York to do the segment live as part of her promotional obligations for Changeling. Thanks to those of you who let me know!
Image used with permission: Newscom
More photos of Angelina Jolie below the cut.
UNDER MOD: Angelina Jolie and Darfur
________________________________________ By Nicholas Kristof, 2-time Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times
. . . I once was on a panel where Angelina’s eyes filled up as she spoke of Iraqi refugees she had met in Syria; for anybody who was there, that scene was worth 100 of my columns. . . .
The Jolie-Pitt Foundation sponsored an international law & justice symposium a the Council on Foreign Relations. These are excerpts from Angelina’s kickass speech.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bS7cwgVZH4
Not as bad as I was afraid it would be -
http://thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-19/shes-actually-smart/
“She’s Actually Smart”
***CORRECTION*** & REMINDER -
CHANGELING ALERT:
HBO will have “First Look: Changeling” TOMORROW, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2008.
HBO-W 7:15 pm PT
HBO-E 4:15 pm PT.
On my Dish satellite HBO’s various channels start at 300.
“First Look” is usually airs several times on HBO’s different channels. It’s a behind the scenes look on set on the shoot, new & different mini-interviews with Clintalina.
Coming out of lurking to say how beautiful angie is.
I am from Australia and one of morning show this morning have a segment about how to safe proof your marriage from cheating husband and they actually use Brad and Angelina, stating that Angelina has mentioned during her interview ( this exact i/view w matt lauer) how she fall in love with Brad during filming Mr and Mrs Smith, which is when Brad was still married to Jen A, therefore brad wash cheating…
WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!
i was so angry …. just feel like ranting about this stupid rags magazine and tv show which only take litttle bits info and use if for headlines to attract viewer huh!!!!!!!
anyway, i can’t wait till the W mag come to oz.
I’m pleading with all Jolie-Pitt fans to attend the 1st weekend in your city, even if you usually don’t go to the theater at all. The industry and viewers in general gauge a movie’s (and by extension, its stars’) success by the 1st weekend grosses. Gone are the days when a movie could stay for months or even over a year in the theaters – now movies are gone in a week if they don’t perform up to expectations.
Success breeds success and good B.O. numbers & word-of-mouth make people more interested in going.
I think it was Cee who asked what we fans could do besides not buy the tabs. We can go to see Angie’s movies – one of the best ways to make the h8ters shut up temporarily is quote her per movie grosses and her lifetime gross. Those are numbers they can’t refute. They prove Angelina’s popularity and clout. Angelina’s lifetime grosses = (24 films) $1,191,365,852. That’s $1.2 BILLION. (All figures from boxofficemojo.)
Oscar analysts said a better AMH B.O. could have been the tipping point for Angie’s Oscar nomination. The Academy likes arty stuff – but with financial success.
Excerpts from new interview with critic Peter Travers (I think with Rolling Stone) for ABC News:
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=6057325&page=1
Asked how she shields her six-pack from the pop culture, of which she is a part, Jolie said: “The important thing is you can only censor so much,” she said.
“They’ll find things. They’ll find it at a friend’s house. You’ve got to make sure they get enough good stuff and nice stories and good messages at home and got some purity to it. But I think it’s also making sure they have a life outside all that pop culture and making sure they travel and see the world, they go outside enough and play dress up, and do all those things children should be doing so they get balance, so their mind is balanced,” she said.
When they asked him how he felt about working with Jolie, who had expressed an interest in the script, Eastwood said, “I feel great about it. I’m a big admirer of hers. I think she’s terrific, and after working with her I realize it’s super terrific,” Eastwood told Travers.
The feeling was mutual. “I got the phone call that he was, he was definitely going to do it and was OK with me doing it and I was jumping around the house,” Jolie said. “It was like getting my first job, I was thrilled. And it was everything and more that I hoped it would be as an experience.”
It’s been a while, as a reminder here are a few raves from Cannes to start with (compare these to the hatchet jobs I’ll post later):
‘THE EXCHANGE’ RAVE REVIEWS
Author: Sasha Stone http://www.awardsdaily.com/?p=345#comments
20 MAY 2008
Thanks to a tip from a reader, The Changeling has changed its name to “The Exchange,” according to Screen Daily.
Variety’s Todd McCarthy gives it high praise, “emotionally powerful and stylistically sure-handed”:
A dozen filmmakers could have taken a dozen different approaches to the same material — sensationalistic, melodramatic, expose-minded, a kid’s or killer’s p.o.v., and so on. Perhaps the best way to describe Eastwood’s approach is that he’s extremely attentive — to the central elements of the story, to be sure (with its echoes of “A Perfect World”), but also to the fluidity between the private and the public, the arbitrariness of life and death, the distinct ways different people view the same thing, the destructive behavior of some adults toward children and the quality of life in California around the time he was born.
And Cinematical says:
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.
And Richard Corliss of TIME says:
Changeling is an epic, fact-based story — depicting sadistic, systematic corruption in the municipal government, the police department and the medical establishment of 1920s Los Angeles — that has the novelty of being virtually unknown today. It juggles elements of L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, The Snake Pit and any number of serial-killer thrillers. But at its center are the heartache and heroic resolve of a woman who has lost the one person she loves most and is determined to find him, dead or alive, against all obstacles the authorities place in her way. In that sense the movie is a companion piece to last year’s Cannes entry A Mighty Heart, in which Jolie played the wife of kidnapped journalist Daniel Pearl — except that Changeling is far more taut, twisty and compelling.
He closes his rave this way:
With flaring red lipstick on a face that hasn’t seen much time in the California sun, and with a grieving matched in severity only by her will to learn the truth, Jolie carries the burden of the first hour. As the story expands, and finds new avenues of real-life horror, Jolie can coast on the narrative instead of having to push it with her grit and tears. The movie becomes an ensemble piece, with a dozen or so character actors carrying the storyline. In other words, Changeling is exactly as good as its makings. By the end, with its purposeful accumulation of depravities, both individual and institutional, Eastwood’s non-style has paid off; the story’s weight could come close to burying you in despair.
You may ask: There’s that much evil in the world? And Clint, thinking more about storytelling craft than Cannes crockery, would say, Sure. But there are heroes too. And this time, the righteous gunslinger is a mom with no weapon but her inexhaustible love.
Well, here you go, folks. A true Best Picture contender out of Cannes.
UNDER MOD:
It’s been a while, as a reminder here are a few raves from Cannes to start with (compare these to the hatchet jobs I’ll post later):
‘THE EXCHANGE’ RAVE REVIEWS
Author: Sasha Stone
http://www.awardsdaily.com/?p=345#comments
FUN FACTS
• Angelina had to learn to roller skate while wearing high heels for scenes at the telephone exchange, a documented practice of the period.
• Eastwood sometimes asked Jolie to play a scene quietly, as if just for him. At the same time he would ask his cameraman to start filming discreetly, without Jolie’s seeing it. Some of these takes made it into the completed film.
• Amy Ryan cited the filming of a fight scene during which Eastwood showed her “how to throw a movie punch” as her favorite moment of the production.
• “One day we were shooting a scene where [Collins and Briegleb] talk about her case… We started shooting at 9:30 a.m. and it was seven or eight pages, which is usually an 18-hour day. Around 2:30, [Eastwood] goes, ‘That’s lunch and that’s a wrap.’… I’ve made close to 100 films now and that’s certainly a phrase I’ve never heard in my entire life.” —John Malkovich discusses Eastwood’s famously economical directorial style, which extended to Changeling’s set.
• To ensure the veracity of the story, writer Straczynski incorporated quotes from the historical record and direct testimony directly into the script.
• The film was still in post-production one week before the start of the Cannes Film Festival. [This is very common with festival selections; at Toronto, I saw a movie that was finished on a Wednesday and screened on Sunday.]
• Local connection: Killer’s mother who was his accomplice was given a life sentence, served at San Quentin Prison.
UNDER MOD:
CHANGELING FUN FACTS
Wikipedia’s review roundup – an objective summary of Changeling’s pluses/minuses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(2008_film)#cite_note-newsblaze-33
The film’s screening at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival was met with largely positive reviews, prompting speculation it could be awarded the Palme d’Or.[44] The award eventually went to Entre les murs (”The Class”).[45]
“Jolie puts on a powerful emotional display as a tenacious woman who gathers strength from the forces that oppose her. She reminds us that there is nothing so fierce as a mother protecting her cub.” —Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter on Jolie’s performance.
Todd McCarthy of Variety praised Jolie’s acting as “top-notch”. He said she was more affecting than in A Mighty Heart (2007) due to her relying less on artifice. McCarthy also noted a surfeit of good supporting performances, singling out Michael Kelly in particular.
Oliver Séguret of Libération said the cast was the best aspect of the film. He had praise for the “magnetic” performances of the supporting actors and called Jolie “intense but discreet… beautiful but never dazzling”.
Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter also praised Jolie, saying she shunned her “movie star” persona to appear both vulnerable and resolute at the same time. Honeycutt noted that with the exception of Amy Ryan’s character, the supporting characters had few shades of gray.
David Ansen writing in Newsweek agreed that they could be easily sorted as “black or white”, but that “some stories really are about the good guys and the bad”. He said that when the distractions of Jolie’s celebrity and attractiveness were put aside, she carried the role with “admirable restraint” and “slow burning ferocity”.
David Denby of The New Yorker said that while Jolie’s acting was “skilled and selfless”, the performance and character were uninteresting. He said Collins was one-dimensional, lacking desires or temperament. He cited similar problems with Malkovich’s “uncomplicated” and “impersonal” Briegleb, concluding, “The two of them make a very proper and dull pair of collaborators.”
McCarthy expressed admiration for the “outstanding” script, which he said was ambitious and deceptively simple. He praised Eastwood’s respecting the script through not playing up to the melodramatic aspects of the story, and not telegraphing its eventual scope at the start.
Honeycutt wrote that due to Changeling’s close adherence to the true-life facts of the case, the drama sagged at one point, but that the film didn’t feel as long as its 141 minutes, as the filmmakers were “good at cutting to the chase”
Ansen said Straczynski’s dialogue tended to the obvious, but that while it lacked some of the moral nuance of Eastwood’s other films, the “copiously researched” screenplay as a whole was “a model of sturdy architecture”, each layer of which built audience disgust into a “fine fury”. He said, “when the tale is this gripping, why resist the moral outrage?”
Séguret said that while Eastwood proved he was capable behind the camera, and had presented a solid recreation of the era, he never felt the director was inspired by the challenge the reconstruction posed. Séguret noted that Eastwood kept the embers of the story alight, but that it seldom burst into flames. He said the effect was like placing the audience in the position of a passenger in a limousine with all the options and air conditioning on: comfortable but a little boring.
Denby and Ansen commented that Eastwood left the worst atrocities to audiences’ imaginations. Ansen said this was because Eastwood was less interested in the lurid aspects of the case, and McCarthy praised the more thoughtful than sensationalist treatment.
Denby cited problems with the austere approach, saying it left the film “both impressive and monotonous”. He said Eastwood was presented with the problem of not wanting to exploit the “gruesome” material because this would contrast poorly with the delicate emotions of a woman’s longing for her missing son. He said that Eastwood and Straczynski should have explored more deeply the perverse aspects of the case. Instead, he said, the story played out by methodically settling the emotional and dramatic issues, “reverently chronicling Christine’s apotheosis”, before “[ambling] on for another forty minutes”.
Ansen said the film’s classical approach lifted the story to another level, and that it only embraced horror film conventions while on its way to transcending them.
McCarthy said Changeling was one of Eastwood’s most vividly realised films, citing Stern’s cinematography, the set and costume design, and CGI landscapes that merged seamlessly with the location shots.
Damon Wise of Empire called Changeling “flawless”, and McCarthy said it was “Emotionally powerful and stylistically sure-handed”. He maintained that Changeling was a more complex and wide-ranging work than Mystic River, Eastwood’s 2003 entry at Cannes, and stated that the characters and social commentary were brought into the story with an “almost breathtaking deliberation, as dramatic force and artistic substance steadily mount”. He said that as “a sorrowful critique of the city’s political culture”, Changeling sat in the company of films such as Chinatown and L.A. Confidential.
Honeycutt said that the film added a “forgotten chapter to the L.A. noir” of those films, and that Eastwood’s “melodic” score contributed to an evocation of a city and a period “undergoing galvanic changes”. Honeycutt said that “[the] small-town feel to the street and sets… captures a society resistant to seeing what is really going on”.
Séguret said that while Changeling had no obvious defects, it was “perplexing” that other critics had such effusive praise for the film, and Denby said that it was beautifully made, but that it shared the chief fault of other “righteously indignant” films in its congratulating the audience for feeling contempt for the “long-discredited” attitudes depicted.
Ansen concluded that the story was told in such a sure manner that “only a very hardened cynic” would be left unmoved by the “haunting, sorrowful saga.”
UNDER MOD:
Wikipedia’s review roundup – an objective summary of Changeling’s pluses/minuses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(2008_film)#cite_note-newsblaze-33