Monday, July 14, 2008

Team Jolie

I found myself immersed in an interesting conversation the other evening, while stuffing wedding invitations for my best friend. It's interesting the kind of chatter that comes about when you get a group of women together who don't know one another all that well.

It's foreign territory for me~ I rarely find myself socializing with more than one or two females- and when I do, those females are pretty much always my best friends- that is, of course, unless there is drinking involved.

It's once in a blue moon that it is a gathering of sober females and sober conversation... and the curious thing was that I don't believe the group of females I was sitting with individually do it often either- sober or not, I believe this group to have been a group that, like me, rarely finds themselves in groups of other women to chat.

Anyways, the conversation somehow come about to a "discussion" about Angelina Jolie versus Jennifer Aniston...a debate that I've noticed always divides certain kinds of women from one another: it's always particular kinds of chicks who are on "Team Aniston" and particular kinds of chicks who are on "Team Jolie." Although I love Jennifer Aniston on "Friends," I personally am an Angelina fan. Jennifer Aniston is OK, but I think she's plain and boring and one-dimensional as anything other than playing Rachel Green. She's a romantic comedy princess...and I'm not a romantic comedy kind of girl. YAWN.

Angelina is interesting and aggressive and edgy. She makes action movies and films that are more mysterious and exciting...thus, making her more mysterious and exciting and complicated. She's an action heroine. Jennifer Aniston could NEVER have pulled off sociopath Lisa in "Girl Interrupted." And that sums up why I prefer Angelina to Jennifer. I prefer eccentrics and outcasts over your run of the mill cookie cutters any day.

But I don't really see any celebrity as actual human beings or people. They are as fictitious to me as they characters they portray in movies or on TV. No one, besides their immediate spouses, friends, family and personal acquaintances, actually knows what kind of people celebrities really are...and it's hilarious when I hear people talk about them like they do.

My mother does this with Angelina Jolie. My brother and I call her "Team Jolie" because she just thinks she's the most interesting, beautiful, exotic, awesome celebrity in the world. She loves her philanthropic work and her choice to adopt children, among other things. She doesn't see her as the bitch that stole Brad Pitt from Jennifer Aniston, America's Sweetheart.

One of the "Team Anistons" at the wedding invitation stuffing gathering insisted that Jennifer Aniston is "such a sweetheart" and that Angelina Jolie is a home wrecker. Most of the other "Team Anistons" agreed whole heartedly. I always find this perspective to be amusing, because the chicks who always side with Aniston talk as if she is one of their girlfriends, and seem to take the entire Jennfier/Brad/Angelina thing so personally.

As if they spent nights consoling poor Jennifer during her split from Brad and personally have experienced her All-American "sweetness." How does anyone really know if Jennifer Aniston is the sweetheart that the media paints her to be? Maybe she's a huge pain in the ass bitch in real-life. Maybe she is so utterly lacking in personality that Brad got so incredibly bored with the mundane life he'd gotten himself into that he was about to lose his mind if he didn't find something more stimulating and fulfilling.

Strictly on the surface, he got a hell of a lot more interesting once he got together with Angelina, that's for sure. He went from glitzy pretty boy Hollywood cookie cutter with Aniston to globe trotting, philanthropic attempting-to-better-the-world with his fame father of internationally adopted children with Jolie. It looks to me like he want more in life than just walking the red carpet and playing Ken and Barbie.

Who knows. All I know is that it takes two to tango, two to make a relationship work or fail. And not only that, but who fucking cares? Angelina, Brad and Jennifer are all mythological creatures who exist on the silver screen. They aren't even real.

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