If there's one thing that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie enjoy doing more than starring in films that are never quite as good as you expect – and annoying Jennifer Aniston – it's getting to lord it about in dusty hot countries.
Just a few months after Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie got back from their epic journey to have a nativity-style birth in Namibia, they've got back on a plane and zoomed over to India. This time, though, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have got a genuine reason for getting foreign paparazzi all in a tizzy – Angelina Jolie is making a film there. Needless to say, she'd have preferred it if the film could have been shot in Pakistan, because she generally thinks it sucks a bit less there than in India.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have become enormously well-travelled since they fell in love after meeting on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith, and it's all because they want to save the world. Or destroy it with loads of carbon from aeroplane emissions, one or the other. Anyway, our point is that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been everywhere together. They lived in England for a while, then they moved to France – only for Brad Pitt to throw a strop at how cabbagey Paris smells – and they've been to all manner of dinosaur museums together.
Most famously, though, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie decided to go to Namibia where they could get photographers arrested more easily and act like colonial overlords as much as they wanted. Oh yeah, and give birth to Shiloh Nouvel too. But Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie left Namibia in a state of cooking meat a few months ago, and now they're trying the same crap in the city of Pune in India too. The story goes that Angelina Jolie is filming her Daniel Pearl movie A Mighty Heart in India, and Brad Pitt's company is producing it, so that's why he's there – although if you only listened to Angelina Jolie's statement, you'd have thought that they went to Pune to bless it with an endless stream of clean running water and to cure the city's sick and disabled with their hands, Chris De Burgh-style:
"We deeply appreciate the warm welcome we have received from the people of Pune, India, where we are filming A Mighty Heart. We are excited to have this chance for our children to learn about India's wonderful culture and history."
Yeah, good for Shiloh Nouvel – she's going to know way more about Indian culture than all the other five-month-old babies she encounters, the lucky cow. And anyway, if Angelina Jolie had her way, they wouldn't even be in Pune, India; since A Mighty Heart is set in Pakistan, that's where she wanted to go. But it wasn't to be:
"I had hoped to make this film in Pakistan, but after discussions with Pakistani officials it became clear that they would be more comfortable for us to film in India. I am disappointed that we could not shoot the film in Pakistan, a country that I love and have visited three times. We look forward to visiting Pakistan soon. A Mighty Heart is a film about cross-cultural understanding and the values that people of all faiths share. This is not a film about terrorism or conflict, it is a story of people of all faiths working together to find the truth."
A Mighty Heart is just one of the lofty, ambitious, message-teaching movies that Angelina Jolie has lined up. As well as A Mighty Heart's message of faiths achieving more when they put their differences aside, Angelina Jolie is also making Atlas Shrugged, based on a ludicrously dense philosophical manifesto. And then there's Kung Fu Panda, which will teach audiences never to try and do karate on bears, especially if they sound a bit like Jack Black – a lesson we could all do well to remember.
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[story by Stuart Heritage]