As a mother, Angelina Jolie knows what’s important for a child – a gormless name and a forced appreciation of her films, mainly.
Well, OK, not all of her films. Not yet, anyway – although we do hear that Angelina Jolie plans to use her love scene with Antonio Banderas from Original Sin as a sexually-confusing substitute for her childrens’ birds and bees talk – just Kung Fu Panda.
To promote the DVD release of Kung Fu Panda, Angelina Jolie has once again decided to mine the limitless marketing resource that is her children, telling anyone who’ll listen that they just love the movie. Luckily for Angelina Jolie, she didn’t try this trick with A Mighty Heart – apparently Pax Thien found it ‘ponderous’, with Shiloh Nouvel dubbing it ‘transparent award-bait at best’.
It must be brilliant being one of Angelina Jolie’s children. You’re rich, you see the world, your name is one of the top-scoring words on Boggle and, since you’re almost certainly not biologically related to her, it’s impossible to rule out the chance of Angelina Jolie going a bit Woody Allen once you hit puberty. Who could ask for more?
And being surrounded by children is equally beneficial to Angelina Jolie, because now she doesn’t even have to think when it comes to promoting a movie. Look at Changeling – if Angelina Jolie couldn’t give her kids knives or breastfeed them from the front of a magazine or blame them for her inevitable marriage to Brad Pitt, what would her promotion of Changeling consist of? A brief speech at an awards show. Rubbish.
And it’s not just Changeling that’s feeling the benefit of Angelina Jolie endlessly blabbing about her children. Angelina’s decided to adaptation of this tactic to push the DVD release of Kung Fu Panda as well.
Tragically, it’s working. When we heard that Kung Fu Panda was being released on DVD, we thought “Pah, we’re not going to pay any attention to this – it seems like another generic animal-based animated movie starring a bunch of moviestars cynically trying to appeal to the young.” But then Angelina Jolie told this to People:
“I think it’s a great film, and it’s brought a lot of joy to children – and to my children, absolutely. My kids love it. They’re very very proud, they’ve got mom [Tigress] dolls.”
And that changed everything. “What’s that?” we thought. “Kung Fu Panda is bright and colourful enough to distract some toddlers from crying and crapping themselves for up to an hour at a time? Why it must be a MASTERPIECE!” After all, if Kung Fu Panda is good enough for the flick knife-wielding adopted Cambodian infant son of two jet-set millionaires, it’s bound to be good enough for us. Right?
Maybe we’re being too harsh here. Maybe Angelina Jolie was just recounting a personal anecdote because she’s a proud mother and we shouldn’t read anything more into it than that. Besides, as dull as it is, listening to Angelina Jolie prattle on witlessly about her kids for the millionth time this year is nowhere near as irritating as the alternative method for promoting Kung Fu Panda – a repeat of this soul-destroying abomination…
Kate says
Yes, what has the world come to – a mother talking constantly about her children, who does she think she is???
She needs to either pretend she doesn’t understand the question when reporters ask about her kids or just say “Fine, thank you”, in which case she would probably be accused of hating her bio kids, but that’s better than forcing another hecklersray “writer” to spend considerable amount of their precious time expressing their displeasure of hearing about the Jolie-Pitt children. We wouldn’t want that now, would we?
Sarah says
There’s nothing more irritating than the co-worker who constantly talks about their children, always has pictures of them to show you (wow, take a look at the eyebrows on that one!), and can no longer communicate like an adult because they’ve completely childproofed their lives. I don’t show you pictures of my cats because they’re boring. So are your children.