“I’d rather be thin than famous.” — Kerouac.
Aniston plays a young and super-skilled Daily News reporter who, in missing a court date thanks to her dogged investigation of a fishy suicide, runs afoul of her bounty-hunter ex-husband Butler, a former cop now “kicked off the force” for reasons we are not permitted to know. He throws her in the trunk—Atlantic City montage (?!?)—craps montage—she tases him. The Spirit of Continuity herself charges their phones.
The comedy of remarriage, as what catharsis would you feel if it was announced in the gossip columns tomorrow that she’d somehow won him back? Aniston the Greek and her Pitt-Achilles, for whom Leonidas-Butler is but a momentary, puffy substitution. The amateur architect who once threatened to build her dreams is now, of course, lapdog to the peripatetic-ascetic Jolie. Jolie Medusa? And Aniston Niobe, pilates-hard as a stone, and weeping? But her children lost are children never had, and indeed, Jolie seems to steal (“adopt”) their very souls from the earth. I can’t tell how to experience the sex these sex symbols symbolize. If Warhol were here, he’d know what to do.
We love Hepburn’s shameless pursuit of Grant in Bringing Up Baby. Whereas Colbert, in It Happened One Night, is debased on the pretext of a moral education. Gable strips to the waist, hangs the blanket between them—a movie screen, duh—as if to call their separateness ontological. But Grant dons a silken robe and whoa, hold the phone. He and Hepburn huddle together before the screen on which the feared, sought, forever-Other leopard is projected. Let the wide, wild world have the screen, don’t you see? If you’re a good tv actress, be that.
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