glowell wrote:
I also read earlier in this thread a Mr. Webber/Jolie ref. What you said here made me realize I have assumed all along it is her politics coupled with her embodiment of what my wife refers to as the 'image culture' -- which I understand from that, to be the exact opposite of Mr. Webber's description of Honor's personality.
A.J. doesn't really have any 'presence', for me anyway. A 'Gwendoline Christie' (Brienne on Game of Thrones) was brought up not long ago. I don't believe she looks like my picture of Honor, but she has all the presence that A.J. lacks. It's not just her size, as the young woman who plays Arya Stark in the same series, Masie Williams, also has no problem keeping a scene centered on her, and she is a quite a bit shorter.
To fit this book into even a season-long series, is going to take some real strong character actors, as it is their personalities which replace so many lines and scenes which would otherwise have to be used to 'build' them.
I'd feel more comfortable if Peter Weir were directing, David Peoples doing the screenplay, and casting by Nina Gold or Fiona Weir, but only because I'm more familiar with their examples. ...They all seem to me, to know how to recognize and use, a character actor, and how important they are to the story. (Thinking of all that went wrong with the Enders Game movie, most of which due screenplay and casting)
Sorry, don't know a way to say it short.
Take it easy.
For various reasons, I hadn’t noticed or been part of this thread earlier. However, I’d like to clarify something about my attitude towards Angelina Jolie.
My reasons for disliking Ms. Jolie really never had anything at all to do with her politics, or with Brad’s. It went back to the point in time at which Sharon and I were adopting our daughters from Cambodia. At that time — for reasons which I’ve discussed quite fully in the past and see no reason to fully recap at this time; trust me, what follows is the
short version — the Immigration And Naturalization Service and the US Department of State, between them, had seen fit to shut down all adoptions by Americans from Cambodia on the premise that Cambodians operating international adoption agencies were violating the Hague Convention on adoption and, in effect, obtaining children for adoption by American citizens illegally. This contention on INS’ part rested in large part on the hard work of our ambassador to Cambodia, who had been a State Department weanie specializing in our relations with Cambodia. During that time, two of his most important NGO sources happened to have been
Americans running adoption agencies in Cambodia. Those Americans had now come to him with the information that Cambodians were violating the Hague Convention, and he had pressed the Cambodian government to investigate. The Cambodians got back to him with the information that they had found no such violations. He decided — with absolutely no evidence, other than the allegations of his longtime friends — that the Cambodian government was, in fact, stonewalling. He also commissioned a report by three of the embassy staffers which — again, without offering any specific evidence — confirmed that there were major problems. On the basis of that information, he took it upon himself to refuse to issue visas to the American parents of over a dozen children who had already adopted those children under Cambodian law. He went so far as to tell them that while the children they wish to adopt had been illegally obtained — he had no information to that effect
at all about
any children, far less the ones whose visas he’d denied — they were not and would not ever be legally unadoptable by a US citizen. However, he happened to know a couple of adoption agencies in Cambodia run by reputable, upstanding, forthright
Americans, and he would allow the adopted parents to exchange the children whom they had had in their custody for several days now (and who they had been specifically working towards adopting in some cases for the better part of the year, not to mention the fact that there was that little matter of the Cambodian adoption) for splendid new children who had been legally obtained. After all, you could exchange lawn furniture if it turned out to be defective, couldn’t you? Where was the difference with something as unimportant as children?
They told him to pound sand, contacted their Representatives and Senators, and dug in to fight. To make this particular part of a long story short, all of them were allowed to bring their children home — eventually — but in order to save face (and it really wasn’t anything more than that) Immigration and Naturalization declared that they just
knew there was widespread Cambodian corruption — after all, third world country, and you know how corrupt
they are — and They Were Not Going to Stand for It. So they shut down all adoptions from Cambodia for over a year while they investigated. (For a contemporary news account of the experiences of the families involved in the ambassador's original actions, see Adoptions Gone Wrong in Cambodia - ABC News abcnews.go.com › 20/20.)
At the end of the investigation, they failed to substantiate a single case of Cambodian wrongdoing. They did determine that the two Americans who had called on their Good Friend the ambassador had been selling babies to Americans for several years and that at least two of the staffers the ambassador had assigned to his initial report had been illegally steering Americans to the American-owned orphanages, which might perhaps have explained the nature of their report. The orphanage operators drew jail time, as did two of the three staffers (if I remember correctly), while the ambassador — who in my opinion should’ve been in a cell with Bubba somewhere — was allowed to take early retirement. In the meantime, I brought my daughters home to their mother at the age of 15 months (after fighting with the federal government even with the aid of our own Representative and Senator for the entire ensuing time) rather than at the age of
one month, while several children died in Cambodia simply because adoptions which the INS later admitted had been “clean” had been frozen and they’d contracted diseases like dysentery.
Now, what, you may ask, does all this have to do with Angelina Jolie? Well, in the midst of all this she visited Cambodia as a UN ambassador on adoption. She did not make any use of her position to . . . illuminate, shall we say, the situation vis-à-vis American adoptions from Cambodia or why — or for how long — they had been frozen. She did, however, meet a young boy who she decided to adopt. And while everyone
else’s adoptions were frozen, she and her then husband Billy Bob Thornton arranged to adopt him. They went through an adoption lawyer of somewhat questionable reputation in Hawaii, to whom they paid an exorbitant fee (somewhere around nine or ten times the amount Sharon and I paid to adopt
two), completed their home study and clearance in something like two weeks, and had the child delivered to her in Africa like takeout, all with the assurance of Immigration and Naturalization that they had shown her absolutely no preferential treatment, that they’d cut no corners, and that they were absolutely certain this adoption was on the up and up.
Some months later, the adoption attorney in Hawaii and her twin sister on the West Coast (Oregon or Washington state; I can’t remember which) were allowed to plead guilty to money laundering charges rather than being prosecuted for visa fraud (i.e., baby selling), and it turned out — surprise, surprise — that the Jolie/Thornton adoption was one of the ones on the list, although the INS concluded that neither she nor Billy Bob had been active and knowing partners to any of the fraud. Oh, and by the way, the attorney in Hawaii was — illegally — a silent partner in the orphanage in question.
I was . . . moderately ticked with Ms. Jolie over this minor inconvenience in my own life, my wife’s life, and the lives of the two or three hundred other Americans whose adoptions were on hold while hers sailed through under what everyone involved knew at the time were . . . dubious circumstances.
I’m still ticked over it. But,
on the other hand . . .My politics and hers and Brad Pitts’ politics are not exactly in harmony, as someone else has already observed on this thread. However, I am absolutely convinced of the sincerity with which they hold their views, and I am not aware of any instances in which they have unfairly or unethically attacked anyone else for his or her differing views. They are active in charity and humanitarian organizations, and they are not the sort of celebrity activists who are careful to hand out press releases before they depart for Africa to lend their efforts to combating AIDS. I think it was Dennis Miller, speaking of Brad Pitt, who said that Pitt, who had visited the same single black HIV-positive woman in Africa several times over the space of years, might not believe in God, but that the woman he visited, and cared for, and helped
did believe in God every time she saw Brad come through her door. I have also observed the number of children the two of them have adopted and their own biological children, the way they invest not simply their money but themselves in those children’s lives, and the way they have worked incredibly hard to be sure that at least one parent is present in those kids’ lives at all times, despite the demands of their professional schedules.
Do I think that her and Billy Bob’s actions in 2001 were justified or fair? No. Do I continue to resent the preferential treatment their adoption received while other adoptive parents’ children were sick or even dying in Cambodian orphanages and the INS had blocked all adoptions? Yes, I do. Do I think that since that time she has been a force for good, and happiness, and health, and education of half a dozen children? Damn straight I do. Do I agree with her politics? No, but I do agree with the
reasons for the political views she holds; I simply disagree with her on what the most effective way of accomplishing the ends I think we both desire might be. Do I think she and Brad both put their money, their time, and their hearts into the political views they hold? Yes, I do.
And that, people, is what really matters. Every single human being on the face of this planet makes mistakes. We do things without thinking, we move in straight lines towards our own goals and objectives without even seeing sometimes the other people who get left behind or trampled on, and sometimes we do even the right things for the wrong reasons. My own belief structure tells me that the only human being for whom that was not true got Himself nailed to a cross roughly 2000 years ago, and He wouldn’t really approve of my continuing to cherish what amounted to a virtual hatred for Angelina Jolie after twelve years. That’s probably why He hammered to me on the head until I realized the things I’ve explained in the two preceding paragraphs.
So, would I object — today — to Angelina Jolie’s involvement in an Honorverse movie project? No, I would not, unless she was being considered for a role for which she was unsuited for
professional or artistic reasons. Human beings don’t really need to be in complete political and philosophical accord with one another to appreciate one another’s good qualities, good hearts, good intentions, and willingness to fight hard for the things in which they believe. Decent people can disagree with one another deeply and sincerely without ceasing to be decent people. It’s even possible to simply be
wrong without being evil, manipulative, selfish, or pointy-headed, ivory tower intellectuals. We forget that too often, and I sometimes think the evolution of my perception of Angelina Jolie was God’s way of rapping me over the head with a big enough clue stick so that I’d remember that.
and, Mangy Fur the Smart Alick Spacecat.