Connect with us

Entertainment

Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt finally settle divorce after 8 years in court. Why so long?

Published

on

Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt finally settle divorce after 8 years in court. Why so long?

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have finally reached a divorce settlement more than eight years after announcing the end of their two-year marriage back in 2016.

The fellow Oscar winners and former Hollywood power couple, who were together for 12 years before their split, signed off on a default declaration filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Monday. The document said they have entered into a written agreement on their marital and property rights, according to records obtained Tuesday by The Times, and that they gave up the right to any future spousal financial support. A judge still needs to sign off on the agreement.

The high-profile split — among the longest and most contentious splits in Hollywood history — has been years in the making and four times as long as their marriage.

“More than eight years ago, Angelina filed for divorce from Mr. Pitt. She and the children left all of the properties they had shared with Mr. Pitt, and since that time she has focused on finding peace and healing for their family,” her attorney James Simon said Tuesday in a statement to The Times.

“This is just one part of a long ongoing process that started eight years ago. Frankly, Angelina is exhausted, but she is relieved this one part is over,” said Simon, of Hersh Mannis LLP.

Advertisement

People first reported on the split late Monday.

Representatives for Pitt did not immediately respond Tuesday to The Times’ request for comment.

Jolie, who is currently in the Oscar running for the Maria Callas biopic “Maria,” does not speak ill of her ex privately or publicly and she’s “been trying hard to be light after a dark time,” a person close to Jolie who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter told The Times.

“The kids have grown up seeing that some people have so much power and privilege that their voices don’t matter,” the person said. “Their pain doesn’t count. They have wanted her to speak up for herself, to defend herself over these years but she reminds them to focus on changing laws over telling public stories.”

Jolie, 49, and Pitt, 61, used a private judge — an increasingly common practice among estranged celebrity couples — to settle the divorce. That strategy has allowed them to keep the details of their split out of the public eye, for the most part. No official court action in their case has occurred since last February.

Advertisement

Jolie and the “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” Oscar winner met while working on the 2005 action film “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” when Pitt was still married to “Friends” star Jennifer Aniston and after Jolie had already adopted two children. The pair welcomed their first child together, daughter Shiloh, in Namibia in 2006. A few years and a few more kids later, the pair decided to get married at the behest of their six children. The two legally wed Aug. 14, 2014, after a two-year engagement and celebrated the marriage on Aug. 23 of that year with a nondenominational ceremony held at their chateau and winery in Provence.

Then the “Girl, Interrupted” Oscar winner abruptly filed for divorce from Pitt on Sept. 19, 2016, days after they allegedly had a physical altercation on a private plane flight home from Europe. Several of the actors’ children were also allegedly involved in the incident, according to an FBI report. After investigations, Pitt was not charged by authorities.

Jolie cited irreconcilable differences in her petition for dissolution and listed the date of separation as Sept. 15, 2016. She requested sole physical custody and joint legal custody of their six children but indicated she was willing to give her husband visitation rights.

Since that filing, four of their children have become adults, negating the need for a custody agreement for them. The former couple still share two minor children, 16-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne. In August, daughter Shiloh, who submitted a petition to remove her father’s surname from hers in May, filed a decree asking the court to officially recognize the change. She is now legally known as Shiloh Nouvel Jolie instead of by her birth name, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt.

The strained divorce negotiations and fiery counterclaims played out for months until the pair released a joint statement in 2017 saying that they had agreed to handle the divorce privately and would use a private judge to settle the matter. They had the divorce bifurcated, separating the marriage itself from other contentious issues in the split such as child custody and splitting of assets, and were declared legally single in 2019.

Advertisement

However, in 2019 Jolie filed to have an earlier private judge, John W. Ouderkirk, removed from the case after Ouderkirk reached a decision that included equal custody of their children. Jolie alleged that he had an unreported conflict of interest, arguing that he was too late and not forthcoming enough about other cases he was hired for involving Pitt’s attorney Anne C. Kiley. An appeals court upheld the decision to disqualify him from the case in 2020, resulting in the removal of that judge and the couple starting the proceedings over.

In 2022, more details about the family’s 2016 private plane confrontation emerged in a lawsuit that Jolie filed against the FBI. The alleged incident was also brought up during Jolie and Pitt’s protracted battle over Chateau Miraval, their winemaking estate and family home in the south of France that also served as the site of their 2014 wedding celebration.

Pitt’s legal team claimed that Jolie “vindictively” sold her stake in the winery without his agreement and alleged that she “sought to inflict harm on Pitt,” subsequently revealing more details about the unraveling of their relationship. Jolie’s attorney in that lawsuit has since accused Pitt of “unrelenting efforts to control and financially drain” Jolie, as well as “attempting to hide his history of abuse, control, and coverup.” Pitt’s team has denied those allegations.

This is the second divorce for Pitt and the third for Jolie, who is the daughter of actor Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand, who died in 2007 after battling breast and ovarian cancer and whose health struggle prompted Jolie to get a preventative double mastectomy in 2013. Jolie was previously wed to English actor Johnny Lee Miller from 1996 to 2000 and to “Landman” actor Billy Bob Thornton from 2000 to 2003.

Pitt was married to Aniston from 2000 to 2005.

Advertisement

Times staff writer Christie D’Zurilla and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Movie Reviews

‘Baby John’ Review: Varun Dhawan in a Flashy, Twisty, Exhaustingly Extravagant Hindi Actioner

Published

on

‘Baby John’ Review: Varun Dhawan in a Flashy, Twisty, Exhaustingly Extravagant Hindi Actioner

At one point in Baby John, a little girl named Khushi (Zara Zyanna) hides under a bed, screaming with fear. Outside, bad guys are pulverizing her caretakers. She can hear the mayhem and anticipate that bad things are coming her way. 

The scene made me wonder why her father, the titular Baby John (Varun Dhawan), hadn’t trained her the way that Honey instructs her young daughter Nadia in Citadel: Honey Bunny, also starring Dhawan as Nadia’s father. Nadia is such a pro at dealing with murderous attacks that when one takes place, Honey just tucks her into a trunk, puts headphones on her ears and tells her to listen to the song and not come out. 

Baby John

The Bottom Line

Relentless and joyless.

Advertisement

Release date: Wednesday, Dec. 25
Cast: Varun Dhawan, Keerthy Suresh, Jackie Shroff, Wamiqa Gabbi, Rajpal Yadav
Director: Kalees
Screenwriters: Kalees, Atlee, Sumit Arora

2 hours 44 minutes

Incidentally, both Nadia and Khushi belong to a club particular within Indian cinema — that of overtly precocious kids who speak like adults. (I think of the cancer-stricken Sexy from Cheeni Kum as the president of this club.) While it’s meant to be endearing and cute, it often comes off as annoying and manipulative.

All of this is to say that Baby John is the sort of film that pummels you with star power (including a Salman Khan cameo), extravagant visuals, ear-bleeding sound, fantastically gaudy songs and a story that twists and turns with flashbacks, double identities and assorted villains, but despite all that flash fails to hold you. At 161 minutes, it gives you plenty of headspace to wander down rabbit holes and make random associations — like that between Khushi and Nadia.  

Advertisement

This was not the case with the source material. Atlee’s 2016 blockbuster Theri was named after the Tamil word for “sparkle,” and it had plenty of it. The director’s signature combination of action, emotion and social commentary worked seamlessly. Leading man Vijay, playing DCP A. Vijay Kumar and his nonviolent alter ego Joseph Kuruvilla, was very much the slick superhero who walks in and out of frame in slow motion, but he could also cry and be tender. In Baby John, Atlee (who serves as producer along with his wife, Priya Atlee) infuses his narrative with steroids. The Hindi remake is bigger and louder, but not necessarily better.

During the promotional campaign for Baby John, we were told to remember that it would be a “Christ-Mass release” — meaning that this would be a mass commercial entertainer, or what director Prashanth Neel refers to as “anti-gravity cinema,” in which coherence, logic and the rules of physics do not apply. What is necessary is delivering what Atlee calls a “stadium moment,” that sense of collective euphoria in a theater. This is a difficult and delicate art of which Atlee is an expert; just recall Captain Vikram Rathore’s entry in Jawan.

Writer-director Kalees isn’t able to deliver these cinematic highs with the same panache, mostly because he strains too hard to create them. Each beat is underlined by music or dialogue, and exaggeration is the default mode. So Dhawan, who has delivered in features as diverse as Dishoom and October, gets multiple moments with the full hero treatment: slow motion, low angles, shades that are removed or thrown on to emphasize swag, action sequences in which he flies and kills without breaking a sweat. But in all of this, the filmmakers forget to make Satya/John distinctive or memorable.

The movie treats the cop avatar with reverence and valorizes police brutality. Satya goes on a murdering spree, torturing and castrating and burning a man alive, but his actions are presented as justified because the men he murders do terrible things — mostly to women, who serve as disposable fodder for violence. Female characters are shot, punched, raped, burnt, trafficked. At various points, young girls are smuggled in containers and even in animal carcasses. All of which only makes the hero look more heroic. In one scene, he is referred to as desh ki ladkiyon ka rakhwala, or protector of Indian women.

Kalees also insists on making the villain larger than life. In Theri, Mahendran gave an effective performance as a corrupt minister who destroys Vijay’s life. He was evil without any additional flourishes. Here, Jackie Shroff has a ball playing Babbar Sher, whose signature move is lounging in a traditional Kerala easy chair which he likes so much that he even carries it to a shipping dock for the climactic showdown. But although Shroff brings a compelling menace, I lost track beyond a certain point of Babbar’s many nefarious activities, and how often and why he is in jail. 

Advertisement

(As an aside, can filmmakers find other locations for action? This year, we’ve seen shipping docks as backdrop now in Devara: Part 1, Pushpa 2: The Rule, Singham Again and Yudhra.)

More than anything, Baby John is a showcase for Dhawan, who gets to be the quintessential masala hero. He gets to romance, to be a doting father and a loving son, to do some seriously aerobic dancing and, of course, to fight. At one point, he does a somersault on top of a horse. Appearing in nearly in every frame, he goes at it with a ferocious sincerity. Dhawan’s father, David Dhawan, was a master of masala entertainers, and there is some pleasure in watching the son act his mass-loving heart out. But little sticks because the knotty plot switches from romance to action to abducted girls to flashback so abruptly that it gives you whiplash and glazed eyes.  

The two leading ladies — Keerthy Suresh, who makes her Hindi debut, and Wamiqa Gabbi, who makes her mass film debut — don’t get enough to do. Both are fine actors but to see their talent, you’ll have to look elsewhere. I recommend the Telugu picture Mahanati for Suresh and the series Jubilee for Gabbi. 

Baby John is relentless and joyless. Christmas needed better mass. 

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Entertainment

MrBeast Jimmy Donaldson gets engaged to influencer Thea Booysen

Published

on

MrBeast Jimmy Donaldson gets engaged to influencer Thea Booysen

Today I’m going to … get engaged: YouTube star MrBeast is engaged to fellow influencer Thea Booysen, a.k.a. the future MrsBeast.

The “Beast Games” host, 26, who is the most-subscribed-to YouTuber, proposed to his girlfriend of two years on Christmas Day and revealed on New Year’s Day that they were affianced.

“Ya boy did a thing,” he wrote Wednesday on Instagram, sharing a photo of himself down on one knee presenting an engagement ring to Booysen in their living room. The online content creator, whose YouTube channel boasts more than 341 million subscribers, shared additional photos of the proposal, which included the couple wearing matching MrBeast holiday sweaters and family members looking on.

Booysen, 27, also posted about the engagement, sharing a post-proposal video clip and showing off her new ring — a round-cut diamond on a rose gold band with additional diamonds on each side.

“Jimmy ❤️💍” she captioned the clip, referring to her fiancé’s birth name, James “Jimmy” Donaldson.

Advertisement

In an interview with People, the couple said Booysen’s family flew to North Carolina from South Africa to celebrate Christmas with them. Donaldson said he wanted to include Booysen’s family in the “momentous occasion” because she’s very close to them.

“We were opening presents, and then for the very last present he asked me to close my eyes because it was a surprise,” Booysen said.

Donaldson said that he intentionally dropped a large box to make noise before presenting Booysen with the real gift with the ring inside.

“And then I went down on a knee and proposed,” he said. After Booysen opened her eyes, she “of course said yes” and was “extremely excited,” she told People.

Donaldson, best known for his viral challenges, affinity for blowing things up and elaborate and exorbitantly priced stunts, flouted expectations with the intimate proposal.

Advertisement

“My friends thought I would want to propose in a very public way, like some sort of spectacle at the Super Bowl or somewhere else really big like that, but I knew that I wanted it to be the opposite, to be really private and intimate,” he said.

Likewise, the popular public figure is planning to make their wedding a private affair.

“I don’t take much vacation because of how hard I work, so I definitely want to make sure that the wedding will be a time to celebrate with her and spend time with friends and family who we really enjoy being with. It will be the ultimate way to take some time away and enjoy things,” he said.

Booysen, who said that getting married at this point is “just a formality,” suggested having their nuptials on an island “far away from just about everybody.”

“We’re not going to try and have a big, extravagant wedding. It’s going to be nice, but it’s certainly going to be intimate [with] close family and friends,” she said.

Advertisement

Donaldson and Booysen met in 2022 while MrBeast was visiting South Africa. The two had dinner with a mutual friend and she was disarmed by the YouTuber’s down-to-earth nature and intelligence. They “vibed instantly,” he told People.

They made their red-carpet debut at the Kids’ Choice Awards in April 2022. Although Donaldson planned to propose in 2023, the couple opted to wait until Booysen — who has a bachelor’s degree in law — completed her master’s program. Booysen posted in November about fulfilling her dream and graduating with a master’s degree in human cognitive neuropsychology from the University of Edinburgh.

The couple’s engagement, which comes weeks after the premiere of Donaldson’s much-maligned Prime Video reality series “Beast Games,” capped an eventful but controversial year for the high-earning content creator. Donaldson last year was blasted for using “inappropriate language” in his early videos and faced scrutiny over his channel’s philanthropic efforts, the Associated Press reported. The YouTuber also was criticized over the workplace culture on his show and hit with allegations of dangerous on-set conditions, which he has denied.

In September, “Beast Games” contestants sued his production company and Amazon for sexual harassment, failure to pay minimum wages and negligent infliction of emotional distress, among other allegations.

In late December, Rolling Stone reported that Donaldson, along with singers Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Hudson and celebrity chef Guy Fieri, were among the celebrities with whom the Pentagon entered production deals to boost the military’s image with Gen Z.

Advertisement

Continue Reading

Movie Reviews

Movie review: ‘Mufasa: The Lion King’

Published

on

Movie review: ‘Mufasa: The Lion King’
Mufasa

Bob GarverContributorLike many critics, I despised the 2019 CGI version of “The Lion King.” The new animation was ugly and the rehashing of the story from the 1994 classic without many changes made the whole thing seem unnecessary. But unlike many critics, I’m not ready to throw prequel “Mufasa: The Lion King” away just because of the sins of its predecessor. I’m not saying that it’s not still inextricably tied to the 2019 film, especially with its still-terrible CGI animation, but the story and characters can do some roaming on their own that makes for a breath of fresh air.The film opens with Simba (Donald Glover) and Nala (Beyoncé Knowles-Carter) going away on some adult lion business and leaving their cub Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter) in the care of comic relief me

Previous articleSoboba toys bring joy to the community
Next articleFallbrook Propane Gas Company seeks artists for the Inaugural ‘BEST OF SHOW” Art Competition

Continue Reading

Trending