Familiar Faces. The David Fincher Hierarchy

By now you've undoubtedly confirmed for yourself that Brad Pitt is not in David Fincher's The Social Network... Unless you count that "Tyler Durden" Facebook profile on a computer screen in Jesse Eisenberg's room (blink and you'll miss it but I did catch it the second time through).

A Fincher sandwich. Brangelina brung the bread.

If you foolishly expected Brad to pop up for a cameo, you're forgiven on account of your totally understandable great love of David Fincher movies, in which Brad often stars (Se7en, Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). They're friends in real life and only one year apart in age. But for now, no new movie collaborations are on the docket. 

<--- Fincher winning an MTV Award for Se7en (1995). It wasn't the first time MTV honored him but more on that later.

Beyond the obvious and uncurious case of Brad Pitt, does the popular director even favor repeat actors?  He's not visibly a creature of habit like Woody Allen, previously featured in this new series, but he does reuse actors, like favorite daubs of paint on his auteurial palette. Let's investigate!

The David Fincher Acting Hierarchy
(Quantitatively Speaking)

4 Films.
There's a three way tie for the top honor, each beating Brad Pitt by one film, albeit with much smaller roles than Brad's movie star status would allow.

• Richmond Arquette. Yes, that's the least famous member of the Arquette clan (brother to Alexis, David, Rosanna & Patricia). Fincher always gives him tiny roles but some are key: he makes the dread box delivery at the end of Se7en, makes the first two kills in Zodiac and also appears in Fight Club and Benjamin Button.
• Bob Stephenson, who you might reconize as a series regular from TV's Jericho or The Forgotten, is part of the SWAT team in Se7en, a security officer in Fight Club and a killer in both The Game and Zodiac.
• Christopher John Fields stretches the furthest back with the director, all the way to Fincher's debut feature Alien³ (1992) where he played "Rains" one of the first victims of the acid-blooded beastie. Poor guy. He also appears in The Game as Detective Boyle, Fight Club's dry cleaning man and he's a copy editor in Zodiac.

3 Films.
A man that needs no introduction.

• Brad Pitt delivered his two best performances,  Se7en (1995) and Fight Club (1999), under the director's guidance. Their third union for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), though a substantial hit, didn't deliver in the same way. It's one of Pitt's duller performances, Oscar nomination be damned, and entire scenes are stolen from him by the make up f/x and the supporting actors.

2 Films.
The Fincher filmography is, we hope, just barely starting its second act. He's currently making his 9th feature (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and several people have now appeared in two. It's possible some of the smaller character actors will show up in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo but we won't know they're there till the credits confirm their existence. We'll take the two-fers in semi-random order...

• Holt McCallany is the tattooed prisoner who tries to rape Ripley in Alien³ (clearly he had never seen Alien or Aliens) and he's also one of Tyler Durden's disciples/bruisers in Fight Club.
• Jared Leto Remember that Fight Club line "I felt like destroying something beautiful?" used in connection with the destruction of Jared Leto's dreamy face? Leto and Fincher both obviously took that to heart in subsequent projects, too like Panic Room. (What a strange career Leto has had since the teen heartthrob days.) And think of the visual beating Brad Pitt takes in every Fincher film! Fincher definitely wants to destroy his beauty.
  
• Elias Koteas is one of dozens of cops caught up in the Zodiac case and he's also in Button.
• Rooney Mara is onscreen now in The Social Network and so good in it, too. Like "Mark Zuckerberg" we'll be refreshing our screens until she returns in Fincher's version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

• Paul Schulze, is probably best known as Nurse Jackie's pharmacist / lover. He appears in both Panic Room and Zodiac (with hair!)
• Charles S Dutton is the prison colony's spiritual leader in Alien³ and a cop in Se7en
• Andrew Kevin Walker is the screenwriter of Se7en but he also acts in the film (he plays "Sloth" ... shudder one of the dead bodies). He's also in Panic Room as "Sleepy Neighbor". Hee.
• Michael Massee who'd you recognize as a regular on one season of television's 24 or FlashForward appears in The Game as an EMT and in the massage parlor in Se7en. I think he's also in Madonna's "Bad Girl" video, directed by Fincher but I'm not positive on this. (But that'd make him a 2+)
• John Getz is Zuckerberg's lawyer in The Social Network and Templeton Peck in Zodiac. Poor man is always shot sitting behind a desk. Does he have legs?
• John Casini is one of the cops in Se7en and a "man in airport" in The Game.

1(+) Film

• James Rebhorn appears in The Game but he's also in the Madonna video "Bad Girl". Just think. If his date with Madonna had gone well, maybe she wouldn't have gone home with that serial killer!? Fincher sure loves the serial killer trope. And "Bad Girl" sure is an interesting piece in understanding David Fincher; the "angel of death" is visualized as a film director.
• Trevor Wright appears in The Social Network but when he was a little kid he appeared in the Fincher directed Paula Abdul video "Forever Your Girl".

1 Film. Hundreds of people share this distinction but the two actresses we'd really like to see David Fincher reteam with are Helena Bonham-Carter who was so against-type revelatory in Fight Club and Nicole Kidman who was supposed to get locked up in that Panic Room but ended up just being a disembodied voice on a phone in the same film.

To come full circle from his music video days, wouldn't it be fun to see three actors Fincher used there in one of his feature films? Why not cast Christopher Walken (Madonna's "Bad Girl"), Elijah Wood (Paula Abdul's "Forever Your Girl" when he was only 8!) or the egregiously underused Lesley Ann Warren (Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun") in a future movie?

Finally... 
We must dedicate this list to the woman who introduced us to one of our favorite directors. David Fincher famously built his visual rep on a series of gargantuan Madonna music videos (Fincher won an MTV Video Award for "Express Yourself" though the big M did not) before escaping to feature films.

 Most people went to see Alien³ because it was the third in a franchise. I went to see it because I wanted to see if the man behind the frankly incredible images in Express Yourself, Oh Father, Vogue and Bad Girl had a feature career in him. He clearly did though most critics and audiences were not impressed. That movie needs a critical reevaluation because it was plain as day even then that he was already a cinematic wizard. My suspicion is that the shockingly nasty and merciless tone threw people off and he lost them in the opening shots by killing off Newt. It was always going to be roughly received, no matter how well made, coming after James Cameron's untoppable Aliens (only among the greatest action films ever made) but the tonal shift further chilled that inevitably cool response.

The second woman we reluctantly must dedicate this to is Paula Abdul since she's also a 4 time Fincher graduate. His videos for her aren't as good but he didn't have as much to work with, you know?

This series is about director's actor preferences but we'd like to note that Fincher, like most great auteurs reuses behind the scenes personell as well. Frequent collaborators include composer Howard Shore (3 films), editors James Haygood (3 films) and Angus Wall (4 films), cinematographer Jeff Cronenwerth (4 films), and production designer Donald Graham Burt (the past 4 films).

If you enjoyed this article, pass it on to your [ahem] Social Networks. Wink! Nudge!
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further reading? SEE THE NEW BLOG
also... "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" on Se7en
and Oscar discussions regarding The Social Network

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Modern Maestros: David Fincher

Robert here, continuing my series on important contemporary directors.  As Nathaniel has mentioned, the series is coming to an end.  This will be the third-to-last entry.  Enjoy!


Maestro: David Fincher
Known For: dark, suspenseful, psychological thrillers.
Influences: Hitchcock, all kinds of noir, Welles, Kubrick, Ridley Scott

Masterpieces: Seven
Disasters: Alien³
Better than you remember: some of his films like Fight Club or Benjamin Button get considerable hype blowback.  But looking at them as works of direction they're very very impressive.
Box Office: 127 million for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

"Tales of the strange and unusual" might be a fitting title to David Fincher's filmography.  But don't be mislead.  His "strange and unusual" isn't the same as other such directors'.  It's not the surrealism of Lynch or the benign fantastical of Burton or the sterile other-worldliness of Kubrick.  David Fincher's films are set right here in our reality, featuring characters who reflect you and I.  Only through the slow process of plot development do we (and they) realize that they're inhabiting a darker, stranger, often more sinister version of what they considered to be their world.  And it's how they face that, that primarily interests Fincher.  Not all of Fincher's films may have as obvious a revelation as, say, Fight Club.  But each character is forced to confront and understand the mysteries that have uprooted their lives.  It's a matter of psychology, a butting of the heads of the normal and abnormal, and Fincher wants to know which wins out.  To his credit, Fincher provides us with stories that lack such clear answers.  Killers are never found (or they are with mixed results), evil is vanquished too late, or the promise of answers (by, for example, a life lived backwards) is not fulfilled.  All dark endings necessary to enlighten the complexities of characters.

Since Fincher is primarily interested in his characters his often-noted stylish direction takes on expressionist flourishes meant to place us, the viewer, into the swirling minds of our heroes.  His low angles, dark lighting, wide shots and flashy editing are occasionally dismissed as needlessly excessive.  But they add to his reality, but taking the setting of our world and creating the unreality felt by his characters.  Fincher makes mood pieces that mimic the moods of his subjects.

Fincher has noted what he considers two distinct types of filmaking.  The cold technical Kubrick style and the personal sentimental Spielberg style.  While he may not have the resume to compete with those men quite yet, Fincher's own style is an interesting marriage of the two.  Like Kubrick his interest in his characters more of the clinical variety.  He cares not for developing warm and fuzzy sympathies.  Yet it is essential to his work that the audience becomes the character.  In this way he is very Spielbergian.  We must empathize, and inhabit the character.  We must know them emotionally or the cold clinical reality will be utterly pointless.

It's been much written that The Social Network is a serious departure for Fincher.  I've not had the fortune of seeing that film quite yet, but I think that assessment is most likely true and false.  The film still presents a unique psychological case study and a character faced with a redefined reality.  It still features dueling psyches and ambiguous resolutions I'm guessing [Editor's note: Your guess is right on the money].  Yet it is tied so distinctly to our modern world, it's hard to see how the encompassing darkness of Fincher will present itself.  Fincher has said that he was attracted to the project because it was a departure and it seems to be winning him the best notices of his career.  It's a career that's going strong and will hit next with a film that shouldn't be too much of a departure for Fincher (although remakes are new territory): The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  Fincher fans will be anticipating how this exciting filmmaker stretches himself into new strange and unusual realities for years to come.
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Link Pit(t)

I'll be spending most of the weekend at the movies (I hope). Posting may be light unless I am unusually speedy in the digestion of these big movie meals... which would be a first. I wish there were four of me every December (one to enjoy the holidays, one to earn money, one to see all the movies I missed and all the movies Hollywood withheld simultaneously and one to write about all of that.) Herewith some links to keep you buzzy.

Ed Norton and Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in Fight Club (1999)

Nerve "Class of 99" This is a neat angle: How did the breakout directors of 1999 fare in the cinematic decade that followed?
Indiewire Oscar's potential Live Action Short nominees
Final Girl Have you seen this series, inspired by my own (20:07). Fun for horror fans though most of it is lost on me, I'll admit. Still I have an affinity for stopping movies at odd places so I like to look at it anyway.
Low Resolution Sandra Bullock: Human Being of the Year

DListed Brad & Angie, sculpturally speaking
New Yorker David Denby's top ten list, with an Inglourious Basterds takedown preface. I love what he says about Up in the Air and you've heard me say virtually the same thing about The Last Station (only I called "without a trace of stiffness" 'unfussy' instead)
In Contention Morgan Freeman IS Nelson Mandela. My god, here we go aga...zzzzzz. When will people finally get tired of each new biopic performance being deemed 'not an impersonation but an incarnation'. Someone says it about someone every damn year.
popbytes "the color of crazy: Brittany Murphy"
A Socialite's Life the Nine premiere in London -- I keep missing pretty things because my schedule is merciless
Movie|Line How big will the numbers for It's Complicated be? Is there no stopping Meryl's box office muscle?

Happy Inauguration Day!

I was so giddy last night that I spent hours goofing on Obamicon.Me creating these.

Enjoy...






images from Fight Club (1999), Doubt (2008), Alfred Hitchcock, Romeo + Juliet (1996), The Hours (2002), Scarlett Johansson and Isaac Mizrahi, Far From Heaven (2002) and Hilary Swank's second Oscar win.

return to the main blog for the latest posts
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Now Playing: Charlize Never Backs Down From Funny Games

What are you seeing this weekend?

L I M I T E D

Flash Point Well, that's one way to sell a foreign actioner. A trailer with absolutely no story or even words. None. Only fighting.
Funny Games The great Michael Haneke remakes his own audience punisher. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth sub for Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe as the tortured spouses.
Sleepwalking (I'll be reviewing this for Pajiba next week so watch for that). Charlize Theron plays a neglectful mom. Anna Sophia Robb deals with her abandonment. Charlize was on David Letterman promoting this the other night and she was looking fine. ("duh", says everyone) But now that she's established herself as a serious actress, I would love it if she took a really glamorous role again soon. Use the beauty!

Charlize on Letterman, as Paul & David drooled: "I love it. Boys fighting over me!"

W I D E
Doomsday This looks atrocious. But then... The Descent was quite good and its the same director. So maybe it's only pretending to be utter crap hack moviemaking?
Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who I've been trying to understand my aversion to Seuss movies and I think it has a lot to do with the simplicity of line artwork w/ flat color versus over art directed multi billion dollar sets and, in this case, traditional CG three dimensional animation. That's my best guess. I just don't respond well... though I love the books.
Never Back Down When I wasn't really watching the tv commercials for this I thought it was Fight Club only younger...Baby Fight Club without politics, great acting, 12 step meetings with Helena Bonham-Carter and challenging psychologies. But now, watching the complete trailer, NBD looks more like Karate Kid only older. Djimon Hounsou stands in for Mr Miyagi in the 'exotic mentor' role. You know how struggling white boys always need one. Never Back Down is obviously aiming for Fight Club's overt beefcake, though.


But fight movies crack me up when they cast lookers (Sean Faris & Cam Gigandet here) because how long would these pretty boy faces last with this lifestyle? How long before these mugs look like Jared Leto's in Fight Club?

The Beautiful Decay of Helena Bonham-Carter

It's the premiere of the 4th Season of "Hump Day Hottie" -Every Wednesday @ the Experience

So I was listening to Radio Allegro's very rowdy very funny and very long movie special and not too far into that queer beast, there was what sounded like an unplanned but communal dissing of Helena Bonham-Carter's star turn in Sweeney Todd. Typical of my gemini nature I found myself wanting to both join in and defend her. For you see, I also have issues with the performance but I have deep love for "Miss Lucy Honeychurch" in all phases of her career.

Mrs. Lovett, one of the musical theater's unquestionably great roles, is more flexible than Sweeney Todd's new naysayers will have you believe. I've only seen three incarnations but in just those three she's been played with the emphasis on outre comic lunacy (Angela Lansbury), a vampy desperation (Patti Lupone) and now she's like a practical reserved vampire (Helena). Whether the new approach works is a matter up to individual interpretation, of course. But rather than debate the merits of the performance here I want to focus on the woman in all her glory.

To quote her suitor in A Room With a View, the film which brought her international fame at the sparkling age of 19 "Beauuuuutttyyyyy"


She's been one of the screen's most striking women ever since. Consider that round impossibly delicate face, the huge haunting brown orbs we'll call eyes and, as Tim Burton and his cameramen are proud to point out, an ample and inviting bosom.

Helena was also the star attraction in not one but two of the greatest sex scenes of the past decade of film (Wings of the Dove and Fight Club) and yet filmmakers, even her real life love Tim Burton, don't often seem to capitalize on her eroticism. At least not in pleasurable ways. It's both fascinating and disturbing to me that so many of her films have taken care to either dismantle or desecrate the beauty. She meets a gruesome uglifying ending in more than one of her features: Frankenstein and Sweeney Todd are birds of a feather in this sick way and both were directed by men she was sleeping with. Hmmm....

Grafting death and decay onto her doll like prettiness have made her into something of a goth icon (Fight Club and the relationship with Tim Burton didn't hurt) but that came as a surprise to this early adopter. Who among us that fell in love with her royal prettiness in Lady Jane or her ornery loveliness in A Room With a View, knew that the darkness would eventually engulf her?

This is now the Helena movie equation...

...is it not?

related: Last season on Hump Day Hottie and my Sweeney Todd Review
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Naked Gold Man: Fear of 1999 Redux

He's 13 1/2 inches tall. He wears only a sword. He's shiny. Everybody wants him. A new weekly Sunday series --my attempt to keep Oscar discussion corraled in the weekends until we're truly in the season.

Previously: The Supporting Actress Stock Shortage

I’ve never met an Oscar devotee who didn’t have pet peeves about or outright disdain for some element of the whole circus they stay enthralled by. With the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and their external “fans” for lack of a better word -- it’s not really the right word – Oscar season, night, nominations, wins inevitably lead to a love/hate relationship. Dedicated long term viewers develop pet years where they feel especially grateful to the Academy for surprisingly good decisions, a particularly satisfying nomination that wasn’t a foregone conclusion or indelible moments within the actual ceremony but, flip side now, they’ll also have the bizarro version of all of those things: decisions that continue to rattle one’s psycho with their boneheadedness. Certain years haunt like clingy unwelcome poltergeists, always threatening to wreak havoc in the repeating, tossing good films to the side violently and sliding mediocrities into the center and forefront. 1999 is just such a year for me. I always fear that its specter will return. Will 2007 go there?

I’ll be more specific. There’s a solid block of cinephiles and critics who praised 1999 to the heavens at the time for its wide array of “masterpieces”. I was less enthusiastic about the year as a whole having reservations about many of the hosanna’d but there was no denying that the films people became wildly enthusiastic about were worth discussing and contemplating, even if you fell on the negative or reserved praise side of the divide. What a vivid array of films the Academy could choose from: Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut, The Iron Giant, Run Lola Run, All About My Mother, Being John Malkovich, Election, Three Kings, American Beauty, Magnolia, The Insider, The Straight Story, Topsy Turvy, Boys Don’t Cry, The Blair Witch Project to name a dozen or so of the year’s most loved/argued about pictures, an all you can eat buffet of real cinema. The Oscars saved room for fast food.

Read the Rest... I fear for No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood
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Hump Day Hottie: Brad Pitt

It's now been 15 years since Brad Pitt tipped his cowboy hat in Thelma & Louise and won the heart of Geena Davis and moviegoers the world over. If you thought him just a pretty boy at the time his two decade golden reign o'er the hearts of moviegoers will seem like a shocking turn of events. If, like me, you saw his talent and not just his abs in that 90s classic... you're saying "told ya so." Most cinematic pretty boys don't last for decades but I always knew that Pitt was a Redford and not an Atkins.

That said, I have been a bad fan this month. I haven't seen Babel yet. The reasons are three.

1. I am not crazy about the interlocking gruesome accidents motif of the director. Amores Perros I admired but couldn't really love. 21 Grams I outright hated --more pretentious miserabilism I have never seen.
2. Time permitted only one movie last weekend and Volver was way ahead of the pack.
   
3. All the talk of "Brad's Best Film Performance!" isn't a particularly enticing draw because, you see, I think he's great much of the time and I recognize that many others have willfully remained blind to his talents.... or blinded by his other, um, assetts. And have therefore not been paying close enough attention to determine whether or not anything is his best work. For my money, Babel unseen --I'll get to it this weekend, his best work is found in Fight Club and Se7en.
   
   

In addition to his underappreciated acting skills, Brad skills at mimicry go mostly unnoticed as well. Watch the endless ways in which he becomes the woman he's dating whilst somehow never courting doubt about his sexuality... unlike, say, every other male star in existence. Brad rose to simultaneous fame with his then girlfriend Juliette Lewis in 1991. While he was giving Geena Davis the ride of her life in Thelma & Louise, Juliette was sucking Robert DeNiro's thumb in the nasty and brutal Cape Fear. The couple was an instant hit, both onscreen and off with magazine covers, tabloid coverage, and Oscar appearances. They worked the rebellious Young Hollywood gritty indie angle together. Shortly after their breakup (93/94ish), Lewis stayed edgy but Pitt went truly Hollywood, moving on to an engagement with Gwyneth Paltrow and clean glamour, with matching white blonde bangs! Next came marriage and that golden California crunchy period with Jennifer Aniston. Since then Brad has morphed into a world traveller / philanthropist with the inimitable Angelina Jolie. I should probably mention that Brad no longer mimics his girls look since he's got a son to play matching hairstyles with.

All of this is a long way of saying that Brad Pitt is a great celebrity and certainly the best possible example of a living breathing metrosexual (however tired/overused the description is). In fact, now that I think of it, he's clearly an actressexual, too --like Warren Beatty only more easily domesticated.

But, I'm celebrating Brad mostly because of the onscreen factor --he also rules the celluloid world. One of my favorite quotes about the man comes from an issue of Vanity Fair devoted to him some years back:

The way the camera toured the perky hillocks of Brigitte Bardot's backside in Contempt, it now strokes Brad Pitt's face.

May that omnisexual camera stroke him until he dies. And he may die of very old age with a career as rich and fondly remembered as the Redfords, Lancasters, and Newmans before him.


Mmmmmm, Brad. Thank you for being such a giver. Female stars do it all the time of course, this parading of their sex appeal. It's something of a requirement for their stardom. But for male stars consider: How many big ones, other than Pitt, undress for major magazines regularly? Now contrast that with the number of female stars. Pretty staggering, right? But not for Brad any insecurity or fears about being ogled. Whether he's lying prone, ass out (nsfw) for famed photographers or just flaunting his autoerotic star quality in any number of photoshoots, he lets it all hang out. He didn't authorize those infamous Playgirl shots (obviously, NSFW) but they're not a big leap from his usual and casual exhibition of his own famed physique.

Previously in Pitt Postings:
Brad in Blue That VF Cover * Vampire Blog-a-Thon Brad's orgasmic vamp conversion * Fives a Crowd Brangelina in wax * Melissa Wants Angelina Brad's girls in music videos * Zombie fever Pitt & Clooney's horror project * A History of... Angelina Jolie * Brad #25 Top Actors of Aughts *

Previous Hump Day Hotties:
Qi Shu & Chen Chang 3 times is not enough * Jamie Dornan & Asia Argento burning up Versailles * James McAvoy randy king of Scotland * Naomie Harris pretty chameleon * Hot on TV from "Agent Cooper" to "Faith" * Channing Tatum steppin' up and out * Hugh Jackman dancer, mutant, god * Uma Thurman 18 years of hotness. * Cheyenne Jackson Broadway to Hollywood * Season One of HDH Gyllenhaal, Li, Bernal, etc...

Tags: Brad Pitt, movies, Angelina Jolie, film, metrosexual, hunk, Babel, cinema, Jennifer Aniston, Maddox, celebrities, Brangelina, gossip,

Hump Day Hottie: Brad Pitt

It's now been 15 years since Brad Pitt tipped his cowboy hat in Thelma & Louise and won the heart of Geena Davis and moviegoers the world over. If you thought him just a pretty boy at the time his two decade golden reign o'er the hearts of moviegoers will seem like a shocking turn of events. If, like me, you saw his talent and not just his abs in that 90s classic... you're saying "told ya so." Most cinematic pretty boys don't last for decades but I always knew that Pitt was a Redford and not an Atkins.

That said, I have been a bad fan this month. I haven't seen Babel yet. The reasons are three.

1. I am not crazy about the interlocking gruesome accidents motif of the director. Amores Perros I admired but couldn't really love. 21 Grams I outright hated --more pretentious miserabilism I have never seen.
2. Time permitted only one movie last weekend and Volver was way ahead of the pack.
   
3. All the talk of "Brad's Best Film Performance!" isn't a particularly enticing draw because, you see, I think he's great much of the time and I recognize that many others have willfully remained blind to his talents.... or blinded by his other, um, assetts. And have therefore not been paying close enough attention to determine whether or not anything is his best work. For my money, Babel unseen --I'll get to it this weekend, his best work is found in Fight Club and Se7en.
   
   

In addition to his underappreciated acting skills, Brad skills at mimicry go mostly unnoticed as well. Watch the endless ways in which he becomes the woman he's dating whilst somehow never courting doubt about his sexuality... unlike, say, every other male star in existence. Brad rose to simultaneous fame with his then girlfriend Juliette Lewis in 1991. While he was giving Geena Davis the ride of her life in Thelma & Louise, Juliette was sucking Robert DeNiro's thumb in the nasty and brutal Cape Fear. The couple was an instant hit, both onscreen and off with magazine covers, tabloid coverage, and Oscar appearances. They worked the rebellious Young Hollywood gritty indie angle together. Shortly after their breakup (93/94ish), Lewis stayed edgy but Pitt went truly Hollywood, moving on to an engagement with Gwyneth Paltrow and clean glamour, with matching white blonde bangs! Next came marriage and that golden California crunchy period with Jennifer Aniston. Since then Brad has morphed into a world traveller / philanthropist with the inimitable Angelina Jolie. I should probably mention that Brad no longer mimics his girls look since he's got a son to play matching hairstyles with.

All of this is a long way of saying that Brad Pitt is a great celebrity and certainly the best possible example of a living breathing metrosexual (however tired/overused the description is). In fact, now that I think of it, he's clearly an actressexual, too --like Warren Beatty only more easily domesticated.

But, I'm celebrating Brad mostly because of the onscreen factor --he also rules the celluloid world. One of my favorite quotes about the man comes from an issue of Vanity Fair devoted to him some years back:

The way the camera toured the perky hillocks of Brigitte Bardot's backside in Contempt, it now strokes Brad Pitt's face.

May that omnisexual camera stroke him until he dies. And he may die of very old age with a career as rich and fondly remembered as the Redfords, Lancasters, and Newmans before him.


Mmmmmm, Brad. Thank you for being such a giver. Female stars do it all the time of course, this parading of their sex appeal. It's something of a requirement for their stardom. But for male stars consider: How many big ones, other than Pitt, undress for major magazines regularly? Now contrast that with the number of female stars. Pretty staggering, right? But not for Brad any insecurity or fears about being ogled. Whether he's lying prone, ass out (nsfw) for famed photographers or just flaunting his autoerotic star quality in any number of photoshoots, he lets it all hang out. He didn't authorize those infamous Playgirl shots (obviously, NSFW) but they're not a big leap from his usual and casual exhibition of his own famed physique.

Previously in Pitt Postings:
Brad in Blue That VF Cover * Vampire Blog-a-Thon Brad's orgasmic vamp conversion * Fives a Crowd Brangelina in wax * Melissa Wants Angelina Brad's girls in music videos * Zombie fever Pitt & Clooney's horror project * A History of... Angelina Jolie * Brad #25 Top Actors of Aughts *

Previous Hump Day Hotties:
Qi Shu & Chen Chang 3 times is not enough * Jamie Dornan & Asia Argento burning up Versailles * James McAvoy randy king of Scotland * Naomie Harris pretty chameleon * Hot on TV from "Agent Cooper" to "Faith" * Channing Tatum steppin' up and out * Hugh Jackman dancer, mutant, god * Uma Thurman 18 years of hotness. * Cheyenne Jackson Broadway to Hollywood * Season One of HDH Gyllenhaal, Li, Bernal, etc...

Tags: Brad Pitt, movies, Angelina Jolie, film, metrosexual, hunk, Babel, cinema, Jennifer Aniston, Maddox, celebrities, Brangelina, gossip,

Josh Hartnett's Tragic Audition For Fight Club

But he can't talk about it... (that's the first rule)


From the looks of things Lucy Liu definitely wants to talk about it.

[Actually this image is from the upcoming Lucky Number Slevin --thanks Billy.]

Josh Hartnett's Tragic Audition For Fight Club

But he can't talk about it... (that's the first rule)


From the looks of things Lucy Liu definitely wants to talk about it.

[Actually this image is from the upcoming Lucky Number Slevin --thanks Billy.]