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On Jennifer Aniston

Jennifer Aniston often makes movies that aren’t very good. “Just Go with It,” “Wanderlust,” “Office Christmas Party”--These are all movies I’ve paid full price to see in theaters, and I remember very little about them. But I like and admire Jennifer Aniston. That’s for a few reasons.

(1) She turned her “Friends” stint into a major film career--far surpassing the success of all of her “Friends” costars. If you took the other five and made a big ball out of their post-“Friends” careers, it would not match the bright, blazing sun that is Aniston.

(2) She resists her “type,” as much as she can. She hasn’t always stuck to mediocre comedies. She made “Cake,” “The Good Girl,” and “Friends with Money,” and I imagine she had to fight pretty hard to create each one of those movies. How many other “Friends” figures are working with Nicole Holofcener and Mike White?

(3) She’s genuinely amusing. People forget this. My favorite role of hers is in “Horrible Bosses,” where she’s a sociopathic dentist and sexual predator. I’ll include the clip below. Watch how much fun she has. “Give me that dong, Dale.” “I want you to fuck my slutty little mouth.” She drugs Dale’s wife, then proposes having sex on the inert body of the wife: “Let’s use her like a bed!” When Dale suggests that Jennifer’s simulating sex with a drugged body amounts to rape, she says, “Listen, Jodie Foster: Your dick wasn’t even hard.” And then there are all kinds of grace notes in her performance. When she hears the word “rape,” she says in a calculated, distracted way, “What?” She seems to re-create the sex acts, behind her eyes, in her memory, as Dale listens in horror. She adopts a sexy-baby voice to speak to a knocked-out patient’s flaccid penis. She says, through clenched teeth, “You like that, Dale? You like that?” Is this, like, on a Charlie Chaplin level? No. But it’s delightful. It also reminds me of another performance, and performer, I love: the lead role (authored by Cameron Diaz) in “Bad Teacher.” There’s something delicious in seeing Diaz--sometimes shunted into passive roles, like Aniston--seizing the reins and inhabiting the skin of a crazed villainess. Saying things like: “The new history teacher? I wanna sit on his face.” And, while placing bills in a “Surgery” piggie bank: “If I got a new pair of boobs, he’d be all over me!"

(4) Aniston takes big, public risks. She wanted Brad Pitt, and she went after him. Then she weathered the fall-out of the divorce. And tried dating John Mayer. And tried dating, and marrying, Justin Theroux. Part of me wants to write to her and say: These starry unions don’t often last. Unless you’re Joanne Woodward/Paul Newman. Or Annette Bening/Warren Beatty. Or Jay-Z/Beyonce. (And I have doubts about the future of that last pairing.) But, as I write, I realize Ms. Aniston probably knows this. Part of me thinks, knowing the major potential for (inevitability of) disaster, she just goes ahead and dives in anyway. To me, that’s ballsy and inspiring. Laugh at me if you must. (P.S. I’m disappointed about the Theroux/Aniston divorce, because I think Theroux makes interesting choices, as well. “The Leftovers.” And then the odd writing career on the side--“Zoolander 2,” “Iron Man 2.” This is also someone who has been crafty and smart and who has found a way to survive in Hollywood.)

(5) Aniston writes. She did that “Huffington Post” piece. Two things struck me in that story. One: “I don’t give energy to the business of lies.” (Marion Cotillard has said something similar.) In my own life, I give a great, great deal of energy to the business of lies. I care quite a bit what shit-heads think, because I do not have a thick skin or a particularly refined sense of purpose in the world. (Maybe this is why I am not a major movie star.) Two: “I used to think of tabloids as comic books, a glossy distraction for people in need.” I just imagine--if there were false stories about me on newsstands, about my gut, or my public breakup--I would not have the ability to “contextualize" in the way Aniston does. Again, perhaps this explains my current inability to jumpstart my Hollywood career.

Food for thought. To me, Ms. Aniston is a sort of superhero. I look forward to the next--the third? or fourth?--act in her diverting career.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=297FqB4xBrQ

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