The Good Bad Girl

Bad Girl, Bad Girl,
What’cha gonna do?
What’cha gonna do
When they come for you?

Why, if you’re Angelina Jolie, you snap your fingers and make ‘em do tricks. Roll over. Play dead. Beg.

Aw, isn’t Brad cute? Tee hee hee.

On Alexander, Oliver Stone’s Achilles heel of an epic, there were rumors that a boozy Colin Farrell opened up his toga and repeatedly exposed himself to the women on the set. Some of the guys thought it was funny. I suppose some of the other guys didn’t think so, but they didn’t say anything. As you know, Angelina played Olympias in the film. No, she wasn’t good. Then again, neither was anybody else.

Anyway, Colin decided to share his dumb parlor trick with Angelina. To his surprise, she didn’t get angry, upset, or embarrassed. Instead, Angelina grinned at the Irish one-dick pony, grabbed not-quite-a-handful of Colin, and squeezed. Hard. Ouch. The other guys cringed. The women didn’t say anything, but they thought it was funny.

That’s what Bad Girls do. Independent, smart, tough-minded women who don’t start trouble but know how to finish it. Ida Lupino, Louise Brooks, Christina Ricci, Debra Winger, Barbara Stanwyck, Denise Crosby, Sharon Stone, Bette Davis, Frances Farmer, Glenda Jackson are in the club. Angelina has a key. Most of the time, they’re better than their movies.

Angelina’s career has been the usual seesaw. Sometimes she’s eye candy on a silver plate, as in the (ugh) ridiculous Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow or forgotten in The Good Shepherd. A Mighty Heart, the biopic about the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, was criminally underrated. The studio's decision to dump it in the middle of the popcorn blockbusters Spider-Man, Pirates, and Shrek was idiotic. (Please see it on DVD, all right?) But, as poor Wynona (“Hey! That was supposed to be my Oscar!”) Ryder found out too late in Girl, Interrupted, Angelina is an excellent actress when given the opportunity. Her three Golden Globe awards next to the two Screen Actors Guild awards, tell you that other people think so too.

Even better, Angelina is one of those celebrities that gets it. The money Lindsay Lohan spent for a limousine to get sick in would have bought a lot of schoolbooks. If you got a few extra bucks to give, why not? Angelina gets it. After a visit to Sierra Leone in 2001, she understood “how completely naive I was to think I had a difficult life. It was as if someone slapped me across the face and said, ‘Oh, my God, you silly young woman from California, do you have any idea how difficult the world really is for so many people?’ I got out of myself pretty quickly.” Angelina is a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency. Paris Hilton probably thinks the UN is a nightclub.

Does Angelina say dumb things from time to time? Oh yeah. I bet she belches, farts, and picks her nose, too. And I’m sure that there’s a couple of bad films in the future with her name on them waiting to be sold for half price at Blockbuster as well. Hey, she’s not St. Angelina, y’know? But I give Angelina credit for trying, as Gandhi said, “to be the change you want to see in the world.” Maybe she’s a rich white woman living in a bubble, but it’s not a mirror.

Angelina is a Bad Girl who gets it. Good.