Biographical Dictionary of Film No 41: Angelina Jolie

I know, you have been thinking that the only things that interest Angelina Jolie are adopting stray children, having more from her own loins, getting tattoos and getting herself in the papers and working out so that her loins are worthy of a young lioness. Well, excuse me! In this very year in which Iraq, economic meltdown, meltdown meltdown, the Chinese Olympics and the American election are stepping on each other to get in line, you know that the true focus of need-to-know public readiness is going to be the names and early tattoos of Angelina’s twins (due in August).

Not that She Who Must Have Attention Paid is slacking off. This same year, she is the voice of Tigress in Kung Fu Panda, she is the abused lead in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling. And then there’s Wanted. In the language of its own hype: “Wanted tells the tale of one apathetic nobody’s transformation into an unparalleled enforcer of justice. In 2008, we’re introduced to a hero for a new generation: 25-year-old employed slacker Wesley Gibson. Wes is the most disaffected, cube-dwelling, clock-punching drone this planet has ever known. His boss chews him out hourly, his girlfriend ignores him routinely, and his life plods on in interminable boredom and routine. Everyone knows this disengaged slacker will amount to absolutely nothing, and so does he, until he meets the sexy, foxy woman named Fox, and then everything changes … ”

Look - she has just turned 33. Her days of boredom and stiff joints will come, and she may have a score of assorted waifs to look after by then. She may end up The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. For the moment, Angelina Jolie is just having fun in a society that she has every reason to regard as stupid and fit to be destroyed. She is still the winner of titles like “the woman most Americans would like to be with in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve”. She can still stand so that the back of her large and enormously-potent-IQ head and the tip of her pouting lips are in different time zones. She still does nonsense with a straight face; she still does straightness with a nonsensical smile. She can still with the same earnestness promote Olympias in Alexander and Mariane in A Mighty Heart. She can still turn pitch-dark eyes, pools of sincerity to the world and ask for these things to “matter”.

She is shameless and she is She.

And if you have been a very naughty boy in such matters as doubting her and laughing behind her back, be assured the tattoos on her back have eyes and orifices - they can see and they will eat you up. And she remains unrivalled in the precious group of phenomena who realised they had nothing do with acting or stardom; her thing is pure and simple sweet crude, $145-a-barrel celebrity.

And why not? Somebody had to do it.

Yes, she won an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted, she was good and scary, even if somehow in that fancy asylum she got two hours in makeup every day. And never forget that she was Grendel’s Mother in Beowulf - Grendel has never forgotten. Just ask yourself how a feeble slacker like that Brad Pitt keeps tottering along in her wake, wondering whether he was actually in those fabled loins or just breathing on the hot coals of publicity. She is deranged, but so are we all, and you know that the next famine/disaster/atrocity/tsunami cooked up by this cockamamie world, she’ll be there, barefoot, scorched by heat and blast, but still somehow made-up, and those pitch-black eyes will look into our camera with the begging question: “Hi, Mom! Coming to Disneyland?”

Who knows, the world may last long enough for her to play Dagny Taggart in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, or the mother of apocalypse in some ultimate explosion movie where - finally - her lips are seen floating away in the darkened sky like a Man Ray mouth, the mouth most Americans would like to kiss as the big one goes off.

And the twins are due in August … All rights in eternal epics of good twin/bad twin/desperate-mother-striving-to-make-peace are taken and will open 2010 in a theme park near you.