The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button opens in a fortnight, and Brad Pitt knows that he’s got to dig as deep as he can to make his highbrow arthouse movie that’s based on an 86-year-old short story seen by as many people as possible. So here’s what he’s come up with.

You know Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt’s longterm partner and the mother of his children both biological and adopted? Brad Pitt says he likes her. We know.

Promoting a movie is a tricky balancing act. Use it an excuse to constantly bleat about how difficult your jetset millionaire life is and you’ll only succeed in making people want to push you off buildings, as Jennifer Aniston still hasn’t worked out.

But do too little promotion and everyone will think you hate the movie you’ve just made. So what’s the alternative? Well, you could always do what Brad Pitt does – which involves doing about a billion interviews and being so dull in every single one of them that people feel lucky just to escape with their lives afterwards.

So far, Brad Pitt’s promotional tactic for The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button seems to involve stating the obvious to anyone who’ll listen. One minute Brad will point out that his children all have stupid names, and next that he’s not especially keen on paparazzi.

But before Brad drops the two giant bombshells that will form the dramatic climax of his campaign – announcing the results of his bear defecation location survey and revealing the long-kept secret of the Pope’s religion – first he’s got to tell everyone what he thinks of Angelina Jolie.

And get this – Brad Pitt is actually quite fond of the beautiful humanitarian mother of his three children who he’s constantly inseparable with. We can’t say we saw that one coming. Brad Pitt told Rolling Stone:

“Angie and I do not fight anymore. What occurred to me on this film, and also with the passing of her mother, is that there’s going to come a time when I’m not going to get to be with this person anymore. I’m not going to get to be with my children anymore. Or friends, people I love and respect. And so, if we have a flare-up, it evaporates now.”

Whether Brad Pitt meant that, or whether Angelina Jolie had him at knifepoint at the time, doesn’t really matter. Nor does the fact that Brad Pitt keeps filling his interviews by droning on about stuff we already know anyway.

The important thing here is that Jennifer Aniston’s on the cover of GQ without any clothes on this month, and if Brad Pitt didn’t go to the nearest magazine and immediately tell everyone how much he loved Angelina Jolie then his testicles would be torn off and used as earrings at the first opportunity. We assume.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

Well, you’ll never guess what he thinks of them.

In an interview with The Today Show, Brad Pitt has announced that he hates the paparazzi, but he loves his family. Steady on there, Brad – much more of this controversial ‘good things are good and bad things are bad’ talk and there’s a decent chance that you’ll end up literally melting our mind. What? You like your family? That’s literally crazy. Video after the jump.

We’re starting to think that Brad Pitt is a lost cause. The poor man just doesn’t know how to promote a movie. Later this month, Brad’s new film The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is released, and it looks like it could be one of the best films of the year. Or at least it would be if Brad Pitt could sell the ruddy thing convincingly.

Now, if Angelina Jolie was the star of Benjamin Button it’d be a different story. She’d be rolling out stories of how many weapons her children have and how much she hates Jennifer Aniston and seeing how many babies she could clip onto each tit and the end result would be, well, nobody would watch the movie because it’d be an Angelina Jolie movie and nobody’s that mental, but at least there would be loads of headlines about her. Sometimes that’s enough.

But Brad Pitt? His promotion of Benjamin Button is just wildly dull. It started badly – with a dreary anecdote about his kids – and now it’s inexplicably managed to get worse. Brad Pitt has been interviewed by The Today Show, and the two main thrusts of the outcome are that a) Brad Pitt loves his kids and b) Brad Pitt doesn’t love the paparazzi. First the quotes and then the video:

“I’m really proud of this family. I look at my sons and my daughters – one is from Vietnam, one is from Cambodia, one is from Ethiopia and here are these kids who were born in Namibia and in France, and they’re brothers and sisters… Truly, I feel rich being around them. Each one of them offers so much to the mix.”

“Let me be very blunt, I hate them. I hate these people. I don’t understand how they do that for a living. We have to make a distinction between people who photograph celebrities at events and people who climb over walls wearing camouflage… calling out your kids’ names as you try to take them to school so they’ll look that way. I have no respect for these people. There should be laws against it.”

Really Brad Pitt? You hate the paparazzi? We would have never guessed – all this time we thought you were ordering your security to hug them when they got too close. Hug them hard. By the neck.

Anyway, we can sort of see Brad Pitt’s point here – his family does deserve a base amount of privacy from time to time, if only because it’d keep them out of the poxy magazines once in a while – but come on, you’re promoting a film here! Can’t you dredge up some kind of huge inappropriately personal aspect of your life and endlessly drone on about that instead?

Jesus, it’s almost like Brad Pitt wants his potentially Oscar-winning movie to be judged on its merits or something. That’s literally disgusting.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

ADVERT

Because if they don’t, there’s quite a big chance that something weird will happen. Something like the events of Monday night, in fact, when – at a preview of his new film The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button – Brad Pitt was grabbed and shoved around by a security guard who mistook him for a photographer.

Although manhandling the star you’ve been hired to protect at his own movie preview in a venue covered with several giant posters of his face might seem like the mother of all etiquette violations, we can’t really blame the security guard here. After all, Brad Pitt had grown a moustache for the preview, and therefore the guard probably thought he was being bumrushed by Private Walker out of Dad’s Army.

Brad Pitt’s security guards are famous for their hands-on approach of protecting their employer. it doesn’t matter where in the world he is, if anyone tries to get too close to Brad Pitt chances are they’ll end up beaten up or choked by a couple of men who look like King Kong with alopecia.

That’s OK, though, because – with the exception of a couple of unfortunate Indians – most of the people on the receiving end of a beating from Brad Pitt’s guards have been paparazzi or reporters and, as we all know, those people are literally worse than murderers.

But when Brad Pitt’s guards start beating up Brad Pitt? In front of the paparazzi? Yeah, that’s not so clever. So it’s a shame that that’s exactly what happened at a screening of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button in Los Angeles on Monday night.

According to reports, Brad Pitt was grabbed, pushed and spun around by a security guard in plain clothes as he tried to enter his own screening. But it’s sort of OK, because Brad Pitt has managed to blame the paparazzi for it, which is good because they’re all literally made of slime and hate humanity. Brad told People:

“Though they were exceptionally more aggressive than usual,” Pitt describes the paparazzi to PEOPLE, “breaking through a security barrier and into a private holding area, ultimately [it was] just another day in the life…”

It hasn’t been a good week for Brad Pitt all in all. First his ex-wife decides to start ragging on his new girlfriend in public and now this? It’s almost as if there’s a conspiracy out against him at the moment.

Of course, there isn’t. The guard just thought he was doing his job by grabbing Brad Pitt, and that’s all there is to it. Unless the bodyguards of the world have all decided to rise up and revolt against their masters Terminator-style, that is. Which, you know, they should.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!