I like Gwyneth. I liked Shakespeare in Love. I agree with Penfeather. (Post # 64)
Some years back, Lynn Sherr hosted a Nature episode titled “Tall Blondes”. I was quite disappointed to discover that Gwyneth did not make the cut. And now she has won People’s “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” competition. You gotta know that’s some heller competition. So take that Lynn.
I think that given her upbringing, she is literally doing the best that she can. It’s really difficult connecting with people in the best of circumstances. God knows, I know.
Also, Feynman married a Gweneth. Close enough for me.
But her schedule isn’t more difficult than most working mothers. Many of us routinely endure days that begin at 6:30 in the morning and don’t end until the kids are in bed at eight or nine. And we sure as hell don’t have a fucking army of servants to help out with kids who are in grade school already. I loved SiL but geez how I wish this stupid, smug, useless, obnoxious woman would shut up and go away. Working motherhood’s hard enough without having to listen to a creep like Paltrow sanctimoniously pontificating about our lives and how we peons suck at them.
One bit of trivia I discovered recently is that Gwyneth was in a movie before she was born. Her mom (Blythe Danner) was pregnant with her while filming her scenes in 1776.
ETA: I remember Tall Blondes. There was also a conspicuous lack of Lara Spencer.
Agreed. Even if the time she spends filming is more difficult (and I doubt that—see army of servants previously referenced), she doesn’t spend 46-50 weeks per year filming yet a person working will typically work that many weeks. Her grievous inconvenience lasts for fewer weeks and she has the option of declining.
I’ve never been crazy about her although I do think she’s lovely, looks-wise. She didn’t raise my opinion of her with those statements.
I don’t hate her - not just because I don’t know her personally (I don’t know Boris Johnson perosnally either, and I hate him) but because she hasn’t done or said anything really bad. Unlike, say, Mark Wahlberg, to compare her to a person of a similar age in the same field.
However, she does come off as a bit pretentious and up herself. I mean, “conscious uncoupling?” Who says that?
She also frequently judges other people, which opens her up to judgment. It’s not just having an opinion, but frequently saying her way is better. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you do have to live with the backdraft.
And plenty of career women have 60-70 hour weeks with families - ask a Tax Accountant in March what her kids look like. Or a systems developer when the schedule gets crashed. Or a salesperson who travels. But most of us do it with daycare, husbands, friends and grandparents, not nannies and cooks.
GOOP has the luxury of being able to afford to quit. Any time she wants to give up her hectic lifestyle and live on a beach with servants and her kids, that option is open to her (she might have a few contractual obligations to tie up). That is an incredibly luxury.
She seems completely incapable of putting herself in other people’s shoes. And having always lived a life of privilege, she really doesn’t understand how separated from the real world she is. Even her movie roles don’t help - she doesn’t pick “Erin Brockovich” type roles which might pull her out of her small world.
She’s pretty enough and a moderately competent actress. I don’t hate her, but I don’t really think about her much. She does come across as a tone-deaf flake, however.
Someone who in a recent sound bite on a talking head show said “there are no divorces in my family” and by avoiding use of the “d-word” thinks that somehow preserves that “distinction”.
Ok, Paltrow didn’t destroy Sky Captain on her own, but she really did stink it up big time. Imagine if someone with actual spunk or who was sexy in some way had played the role of Polly, a Rosalind Russell type, one who might have been able to generate or at LEAST convincingly fake chemistry with Ethan Frome, or whoever the hell the male lead was … would have been a much more fun movie.
As a working mom, I find her to be like the (some of, not all- dont crucify me!) annoying SAHMs that haughtily condemn that you are doing something to ruin your childs life by not being at home to bake cookies and create new ways to have Harry Potter themed parties. But I must say that she did give me a good chuckle when she allegedly replied to Madonnas chiding her for smoking, “I’ll quit smoking when you quit acting!”
Touche.
I’ve often thought that Blythe Danner in her prime would have nailed it.
But who would you have cast in Sky Captain? I can’t really think of anyone in that generation of actresses who has done the spunky, plucky, fast-talking girl reporter role. I just wonder if that style of acting is so passé that no one was prepared to do it right.
With all the sport people are making of the pile on Paltrow in this thread why bother understanding what the phrase means at all?. It’s So much easier just to shove it back at her with distain, after all she dissed working moms.
I caught an interview on the Today show the other morning with the lady that coined the term. She’s a psychologist, and says she came up with it as an alternative approach to divorce to reduce the better recriminations and make the process less confrontational and less harsh. Deal with the divorce without the custody fights and character assassinations and fights over possessions and homes and whatnot. The idea is that the people become “conscious” of their own motivations and desires and the factors that lead to the divorce, and so they then deliberately “uncouple” in a process to make it as easy on both parties and the children as possible.
Which sounds great in theory, except I’m skeptical that it is that easy. People are bitter and spiteful over the behavior of their exes, and owning up to their own roles doesn’t lessen that anger. Plus, some people are spiteful and mercenary.
But regardless of that, my issue is that she chose a term that sounds like the most pretentious and douchebaggy term she could imagine. It would be one thing if she were saying “I would like to use these techniques of conscious uncoupling to try to make your divorce better”. In other words, “conscious uncoupling” is a string of techniques or whatever to try to understand the reasons and thus reduce the acrimony. But the approach seems to be more of replacing divorce with the words conscious uncoupling, as if a conscious uncoupling is somehow a completely unrelated thing to a divorce, that it isn’t still ending a marriage and turning a couple into to single individuals.
And that’s what seems to be grating about Gwyneth’s use.
Reading that criticism, I find a couple issues with it right off the bat.
Okay, I’ll buy the complaint about soft focus and color, but then the next issue is
So Mr. Reviewer, you seem to be unaware that the Empire State Building was, in fact, designed and intended to be a Blimp docking station. Oops, we wouldn’t want facts to get in the way of your snark.
Followed by
The Hindenburg wasn’t the only Derigible. In fact, there was a second airship of that class, the Graf Zeppelin. It’s also interesting to note that the Hindenburg was not originally intended to be a hydrogen filled airship, but helium scarcity forced the redesign.
Be that as it may, if we were to assume the original Hindenburg crash did not occur and thus kill airships, it is entirely likely that the course of airships could have been different. And thus it is not unexceptional for there to be a “Hindenburg III” that is flying around. Maybe Hindenburg II is in Germany, or flying to Rio De Janairo. Who knows? The point is that it is a different future, and that name conveys in a milisecond something about the nature of that future, i.e. the prevalence of airships.
If that’s the level of criticism the critic can drag up, he’s a moron.
If Gwyneth Paltrow had tough hours when filing “Iron Man 3” it’s because she chose to, and because she was free to do so, being able to afford all the babysitting and such that came with it. Unless she is amazingly bad with money, she’s set for the rest of her life. She needn’t ever make a movie again, financially speaking.
A normal mom with a day job is stuck doing it until she’s 65 and maybe longer. She has little ability to take time off. There’s no comparison at all.
People getting into whether she’s a good actress or whether Sky Captain was her fault (she is, and it wasn’t) are kind of getting off topic. Nobody hates Natalie Portman but she was awful in “The Phantom Menace” and it was a terrible film. People hate Gwyneth Paltrow because she’s super rich and completely clueless that she is.
I don’t hate Gwyneth. She’s rich & a bit clueless, but has never used her position to preach against vaccination, or similar harmful foolishness. I’m sure her website would not impress me, so I don’t go there. Perhaps her “conscious uncoupling” will help her learn wisdom…
Do not blame her for going barefoot when playing with Robert Downey Jr. In heels, she’s too tall! (At least, he thinks so.)