Nov
21
Astonishing details have been leaked by insiders about the baby-photo deal offered up a few months ago by Angelina Jolie.
According to the report, Jolie and her team not only wanted millions of dollars in exchange for photos of her newborn twins but they also sought a promise that the winning bidder would never — even in the future — publish an unflattering word about her family.
People won the deal for a rumoured $14 million and published the photos in its August 18 edition, the publication’s highest-selling issue in 7 years. Though the magazine denies its editorial integrity was up for sale, the People story did run a fluffier-that-usual piece that spoke about the Jolie-Pitts’s charity work and did not use the tabloid term “Brangelina,” which the couple (quite rightly) can’t stand.
Nov
20
The latest installment of the public rehabilitation of Britney Spears is Britney: For the Record, MTV’s soon-to-air “documentary” (assuming it’s still a documentary if the point of view can be controlled with marionette strings as a public-relations vehicle).
The film was shot over three months following Britney’s awkward appearance at this year’s VMA awards. You remember, of course, the stilted almost-funny to-and-fro with actor Jonah Hill, followed by a lot of focus on Britney just walking to the stage; it seems all she had to do was illustrate that she was looking normal again.
This time around, we have a candid series of confessions, in which Britney is philosophical on her freedom, her mistakes, her relationships. She is seen being stalked by paparazzi. She is heard saying she married “for the wrong reasons” and that the breakup with KFed, whom she calls “my babies’ daddy,” was way harder to handle than the split with Justin Timberlake (which left her merely “devastated”).
“I had totally lost my way,” she says of her mental collapse in 2007. “I lost focus. I lost myself. I let certain people into my life that were just bad people…because I was lonely.”
And she compares her life now to a prison. “I’m kind of stuck in this place and I’m like, How do you deal? I just cope with it every day….It’s better not to feel anything at all and have hope than to feel the other way….It’s bad. I’m sad.”
Yes, this is sad, sad, sad, sad stuff. But isn’t filming her life for others to consume another brutal exposure of such a fragile person?
I found this video, a snippet of the 90-minute film, unbearable to watch. She is gyrating with backup dancers in a kind of empty, lifeless way and yet speaks about finding healing through her “art.”
“People think that when you go through something [traumatic] in life you have to go to therapy,” she says. “For me, art is therapy, because it’s like you’re expressing yourself in such a spiritual way.”
Britney, therapy is therapy.
Oct
17
The other day, my husband, Dino, came home, whisked off the baby for his usual round of major cuddles, and then gave me an amazing gift: Two tickets to the Madonna show on Saturday.
This blew me away.
Just before I became pregnant, when we were really trying and nothing seemed to work, I watched the TV version of Madonna’s “Confessions” show and, chalk it up to my state of mind, I started bawling at the part where she sang “Live to Tell.” There was a reason. The screens behind her projected haunting pictures of children overlaid with a counter that ran from 0 to 12 million, the number of orphans created by HIV/AIDS in Africa alone.
Only Madonna can be so affecting and so pompous at the same time. She was lowered down from a crucifix during that same show, a bit that was removed by censors when the concert was televised.
Nobody else is watchable enough to make me tolerate crowds and nosebleed seats. The only time I’ve seen her was the “Blonde Ambition” show, the one with the cone bras, when the police in Toronto threatened to arrest her. That was 18 years ago, the SkyDome — boy do I feel ancient. I think I’ve been to about 5 concerts since.
“What are you going to wear?” Dino asked me, trying to get me excited for a night out.
“Oh I don’t know, my post-maternity jeans or my post-maternity sweatpants.”
Then I nearly ruined it all by fretting nervously about how much the tickets cost him. (I can safely assume it’s not forty bucks anymore.)
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “How many times do we do something like this? Not even once a year.”
“But you… I… I’m on mat leave! We can’t…”
He already had an argument ready; he knows me so well. “Look,” he said, patiently calculating for me how much it might, at most, cost divided monthly, based on the fact that this would be our grand gesture for a long, long time to come.
And it sounded ok, though I made him promise not to get me a birthday present. “Promise me!” I hounded him.
“Oh, alright.” The poor guy.
That same day Dino gave me the tickets, Madonna and Guy Ritchie announced they’re getting divorced. I felt sad about this, to be honest. I’m guessing that, despite her evident pride in herself (I’m trying to avoid calling her egotistical because I think women should be allowed to have an ego now and then), she was just a girl who tried her best to make him happy. Despite reports to the contrary, I come to this conclusion based on the scant evidence from the film I’m Going to Tell You a Secret, where you see Madonna behaving like a lovesick teenager. She wanted to lap up his world. She took on the British accent. She hung out at Guy’s pub and drank beer, though that’s not her thing, while he seemed more interested in getting sloshed with his mates.
The other night, onstage in Boston, Madonna inferred that Guy is “emotionally retarded” during an intro to a song. And, yeah, I’m sure that he found her ego a little tough to buoy up, too.
Now there’ll be months of reporters covering their divorce details, a pain few can endure publically, even Madonna, while the tabloids pretend to care about “What will happen to the kids?”
So I’m going to the Madonna show tomorrow night.
I have told myself to live a little and appreciate this gift from the person who takes such good care of my sanity. My husband even offered to babysit so that I can take my sister with me. But there’s only one person I’d want to be there. I’m taking him (though he’d rather see Rush).
“Whatever makes you happy,” he said.
Couldn’t you just die?
Oct
11
I’m all about magazine covers these last few days. Call it an occupational obsession. And this one comes fully loaded with all sorts of things to say about my favourite topic, motherhood.
Brad Pitt took photographs of his partner, Angelina Jolie, while she was breastfeeding, the results of which appear on the cover and inside pages of the upcoming edition of W magazine.
Before the ink was dry on the press release for this issue, breast-feeding groups spoke to the media claiming victory. One psychotherapist has even said, “If someone as popular, beautiful and together as Angelina is breast-feeding her children, it inspires other women to do so themselves.”
I don’t need to tell you what’s wrong with that sentence.
But okay, I will: We need to go back to a life that existed before movie stars “inspired” everything from what handbag we have to covet to what child-rearing choice we make. Besides, I’m sure Angelina Jolie would rather live her life without the burden of role-modelhood.
And besides that, her other kids seem to live on Cheetos!
And besides all that, who knows how “together” she is anyway?
In the article for the November W, Jolie speaks of introducing her son Maddox, who is 7, to her love of knives. She got her first one at age 11 and now he has one, too (specially dulled, she points out). Jolie claims it’s very important that “he learns about the dangers and benefits of daggers.”
Oh, and… “We also talk about Samurais,” she says, “and the idea about defending someone as good.”
