Festival Season Angelina

As mentioned in the previous post about Jennifer Lopez, the Toronto International Film Festival announced its lineup this year and it looks very strong. This is the bounce-back that TIFF and other high profile fall festivals needed after last year because the strike grounded a lot of talent participation. Remember we kept talking about waivers and interim agreements? That’s not an issue now and what TIFF revealed today is big on big names. 

We’ve already talked about JLo but there are also tributes and presentations featuring Cate Blanchett, Lupita Nyong’o, Amy Adams, Florence Pugh, Andrew Garfield, Barry Keoghan, Naomi Watts, Constance Wu, Pedro Pascal… so many, and we can talk more about this closer to festival time…but one of the most high profile artists who will be coming to Toronto is Angelina Jolie, the director. 

Her film, Without Blood, starring Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir will world premiere at TIFF. And if you’re a filmmaker and your film is world premiering, of course it’s on your schedule. So we are expecting Angelina here… shortly after she goes to Venice? 

Venice is announcing their lineup tomorrow and for weeks it’s been predicted that Pablo Larraín’s Maria will be included. Angelina is playing Maria Callas, and while we are still a couple of months from award season truly taking shape, experts have put on her watch for a possible nominated performance in this role. That could change, of course, if and when the film premieres in Venice, depending on the reaction. 

But for Angelina, the bigger point here (should Maria be part of Venice’s announcement tomorrow) is that she’ll have a pretty significant presence at two major film festivals that set the table for the industry in the coming months, as an actor and also a director. After a few years of keeping it low-key, this is about as loud as it’s been where Angelina’s concerned in a while. 

Most of the noise, of course, around Angelina lately has been about her personal life, and particularly this weekend with the news of Shiloh’s name change and filing a notice about it, as required by law, in the Los Angeles Times. Shiloh’s lawyer also released a statement urging the media to report on the situation accurately and pay closer attention to their choice of words which is interesting because HIS words are raising eyebrows. 

“The media should be more careful in their reporting,” Levine said, “especially when covering a young adult who has made an independent and significant decision following painful events, and is merely following legal process.”

If there’s anyone who understands the power of words, it’s a lawyer. And lawyers are not supposed to act outside the wishes of their clients. The client here is Shiloh and Shiloh evidently signed off on having the lawyer clarify the reason for the newspaper notice. So we’ll leave it at that because, well, it can’t be any clearer. Shiloh as an adult is making decisions about Shiloh’s identity, and how Shiloh wants to be known in the world. 

Shiloh and siblings have often supporting their mother at her big events. Will we see all of them in Venice and Toronto together? 

Here's Angelina out for sushi with son Pax last week in LA.