Tomb Raider Poster $12.95

BY DANIEL BAIG | Seated with me at a round white-cloth-covered table in a too-small room at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons are eight other journalists from all over North America, representing various big city papers and a syndicate (Reuters) or two. One of the reporters says that he’s just heard that Simon West, director of Tomb Raider, the movie we are here for today, was taken off the project during the editing stage by the studio, not allowed to add his input. Nobody else has information to add to or has even heard about this — though since we all attended a screening of the movie the night before, nobody is at all surprised to hear it --, and the topic soon gives way to one enthusiastically talked and joked about by a number of the male reporters present — the size of Angelina Jolie’s breasts in the movie, which general consensus among those discussing the issue in the room (the women are mostly rolling their eyes) holds were augmented by means of a padded bra. Jokes are made — "Really, this movie has TWO stars, Angelina and her --" someone else interrupts -- "No, three, right? There’s her left . . . ."

It’s not hard to figure out why her breasts are on our mind right now — because they’re staring us right in the face. Every one of us has in front of him or her a glossy folder given to us just now by the good folks from Paramount. The cover is a gorgeous, extraordinarily eye-catching reproduction of Tomb Raider’s one-sheet (the poster). This is not the image seen on billboards of Angelina swinging on a rope, but the one of her standing legs akimbo, looking down and off to the left, hair (except for two decorative strands falling in front of her left shoulder) pulled back into a long ponytail which appears to have at that exact moment been flipped to the right, arms at each side with a gun in each hand, wearing a skin tight black tanktop, skin tight black short shorts, and a black leather belt decorated with a large skull-embossed brass buckle and from which hang straps helping to hold up the holsters -- one wrapped tightly around each bare thigh.

In all this description, though, I’ve left out the picture’s most prominent feature, the one thing to which your eyes are immediately drawn to. The "lighting" of the image is very dramatic. For the most part, Angelina is being lit from the back, as if she’s standing directly in front of a bright light source; consequently, most of her is in some degree of shadow. However, there’s also the appearance of some sort of keylight being aimed at her from just beyond the upper left corner of the poster; it lovingly highlights the curve of her right breast, which, because of her unusual stance, with her right shoulder slanted much higher than the left, is jutting up and out, almost as if it’s trying to escape from the two-dimensional plane it’s trapped in.

Indiana Jones was never marketed like this.

* * *

The Angelina Jolie who walks in and sits down pretty much directly across the table from me doesn’t look a great deal like her screen incarnation as Lara Croft. Far from wearing body-hugging clothing, she has on a flimsy-looking men’s white V-neck cotton undershirt. Around her neck there’s a thin silver cord. No ponytail, but her hair IS very long, falling down from either side of her head in front of her shoulders and reaching below the self-same objects of our preoccupation a short while ago, which are now most definitely NOT "leading the charge" as they were in the film. Her eyes, green in the movie, like her video game incarnation, today are hazel. Her arms are extraordinarily skinny. On the inside of the right one is a very small double-cross tattoo. And, as is quite common among matinee idols, she has a face and head which in person appear unusually large — especially her eyes and her forehead.

Things start out pleasantly enough. The accompanying publicist begins by announcing that we’ll go around the room, everybody introducing themselves. Angelina looks at her with a bit of surprise, and asks, "oh, themselves?" The publicist, a bit defensive — or scared? — asks her in a low voice, "What?", her meaning being do you have an objection. Angelina replies, "Oh, no, sure, it’s just that they’re pushing me for time."

(Angelina is totally correct. I don’t think a single one of us feels as if our ego will be damaged by Angelina not getting to know our name. This isn’t a social occasion, and the time allotted for these sessions is always far too short for everyone to ask the questions they want to ask. It really is stupid to waste time like this.)

The publicist replies, "Oh, sorry, well, just, quickly." Angelina points to herself and in a big voice says, "Angie." Everybody laughs. It’s a good start. She then acknowledges each of us after we give our name and press affiliation with a pleasant, "Hi!"

Formalities over, the questions begin, and the first one, from the woman next to me, is a real softball. "Angelina, what did you do to prepare for the role of Lara Croft, both mentally and physically." Inwardly I sigh. For one thing, this is the type of question that doesn’t need to be asked because the answer is already covered EXTENSIVELY in the production notes we’ve all been given (inside that folder). And the star tends to repeat almost verbatim what they said earlier for that pre-prepared material. And finally, this kind of question can easily allow for a five minute answer, which is a little unfair when time is so very limited.

A few more innocuous questions follow. One interesting tidbit — Angelina’s knowledge of the Tomb Raider video game dates back to her first marriage; her husband used to play the game, and she’d try and "just get frustrated; I couldn’t get her over a wall so I’d just throw the thing . . ." She added that, "I was also aware of all the kind of campy jokes about her . . . the obvious shots they take on her, things that even, even I as a woman would say, ‘Oh, that’s RIDICULOUS . . . how is she POSSIBLY jumping. And yet, saw [sic] what was kind of great about having somebody who’s a curvaceous woman. We didn’t want to go the extreme of the game, but we wanted to make her her, with her braid, and her breasts, and her boots."

(It should perhaps be noted that the first mention of breasts was thus actually from the star herself.)

And then, two questions later, everything starts to go downhill very quickly. The reporter sitting closest to Angelina tosses out, "Talk about the bra!" Instantaneous, raucous laughter from the guy sitting on my other side, and from the questioner himself — but not, unfortunately, from our interviewee. "Talk about the bra," she repeats back to him in a distinctly unamused tone of voice. "It’s amazing how FASCINATED people are with breasts," she continues, "it’s really something." The reporter, still laughing, replies, "Well, it’s a special effect in the movie." Once again Angelina repeats his words, this time as if she’s asking for clarification — "It’s a special effect in the movie?" The reporter next to me now comes to his journalistic brother’s defense; he holds up that his copy of that folder I described earlier, and points to the glowing right breast for Angelina to see — "They’re pretty prominent here." Judging by the look in her eyes now, this bit of evidence brandishing does not seem to have won her over.

At this point I look over at the two publicists who have been sitting in the room this whole time, apparently as chaperones of sorts. The closer one is looking appalled, alternating shocked stares at the two guys with glances down at her paper to figure out who they are — before the sessions started, a Paramount employee wrote down who everyone was in and where exactly they were seated, something I’d never encountered at previous junkets. She and her colleague soon start to confer in whispers.

Anglina, sounding distinctly ticked off, answers, "They’re pretty prominent? She’s LARA CROFT. You know what I mean? It’s not like . . . I mean --" she indicates her upper chest "–Batman has HIS shit . . . It’s not THAT um, it’s, it’s a PART of her character."

Sounding less friendly with each word, she immediately continues. "I’ll make it REAL simple for you. I’m a 36 C. In the game, she’s a double D. In the movie, she’s a D. So we split the difference, and made her more athletic. My waist is MUCH bigger than hers, ‘cause in the game she’s like a 24, I’m probably a 28. Her hips are very curvaceous, mine are much more boyish. She’s much more athletic and she has smaller breasts but she’s STILL Lara Croft so they’re . . . it’s like the equivalent of having a proper padded bra on."

By this time, I was feeling embarrassed to be in the room. I wanted to quickly move on to a very different topic, just to calm things down and bring back the fun, pleasant vibe which had vanished. So I jumped in with a question that I thought Angelina would actually enjoy answering. Actors often like to talk about their acting itself, the process of finding their character, inventing a prior history for their character, etc. This kind of question acknowledges that they do more than just show up and spout lines they’ve memorized. In the production notes we had been given, I had read something that struck me as kind of silly. Tomb Raider has a character named Alex West, played by British actor Daniel Craig (here portraying an American, totally convincingly). He’s not exactly the bad guy, though he does work for the bad guy. When we first meet him, he and Lara bump into each other and it seems fairly obvious that they used to date. Then, towards the end of the film Lara seems to be momentarily stymied in her quest to save the world because he is being used as a hostage; after that he seems to be mortally injured, and she goes to great risk to kiss him goodbye. However, in the press kit it says that "he and Lara Croft may or may not have been involved in the past." There hadn’t seemed to be any doubt about it in the movie.

So, before the breast men could ask a mammary-related followup, I called out, "For Lara’s relationship in the movie with Alex, the character that Daniel Craig plays?" I paused, because Angelina had still been staring at the other guys. Now she turned to me, and said, "Um-hum," so I continued, "in the movie when you first meet we get a sense of the relationship between the two of you in the past, it’s not really spoken about, did you try and work out a back story for that . . . you and Da- Daniel Craig [sic] . . ." On my tape recording of the interview I can hear my voice start to falter and my words start to get mixed up. "Is that making not sense to you, my question? [sic]" The reason for my sudden speech impairment was what you can’t see on the tape but what I definitely remember vividly — Angelina’s body language and facial expression as I was speaking. She put her hands palms down onto the table, as if she had to prop herself up because she was stunned by my stupidity; she shook her head back and forth, widely and slowly, and gave a look of baffled, outraged confusion. If she had given this kind of demonstration of overacting in Girl,Interrupted she would never have won the Oscar.

"No!" she said like she was speaking to an idiot, "I don’t understand . . . . He stole something from her --"

"Well, it’s in the production notes . . . and some actors like to create back stories . . . ." I tried to explain. I then repeated that I had gotten the idea from the production notes. Why? Because I had just noticed that the publicists seemed to be taking a distinct, concerned interest in my exchange with Angelina. I was afraid they hadn’t really heard my question either, but just saw her displeasure with it.

Angelina answered me. "They have a back story, and it’s in the film -- it’s very clear. Somehow along the lines they were on an adventure together and he stole something from her . . . . That was the big back story. I don’t think about Lara as having sex with anybody. I don’t think she did sleep with him, EVER. I don’t think, you know, I never really figured out who or if ever she slept with ANYBODY, ‘cause she’s so kind of bored easy [sic] . . . .

At this point I was becoming horrified. Here I had tried to move AWAY from the turn towards the prurient the interview had taken and apparently Angelina thought I was trying to go FURTHER in that direction! And as if to confirm my fears about the people from Paramount, at this point, hearing her indignantly defend Lara’s right to celibacy and privacy, they rushed out of the room. ‘Great!’ I thought. ‘It’s ME they’re going to blame!’

Angelina went on, though. "So there’s no real, um, thing. They MADE certain things you can see in the movie, and I was watching it, and I thought, where did that LOVE music first come in, when Alex and I are first talking??"

Relieved — ‘Oh, now she’s finally agreeing with me, she doesn’t think it was all my gutter imagination — why couldn’t the publicists have stayed to hear THIS part??’, I jumped in — "Yeah, that’s why I thought --"

She continued, "That’s not in MY head, that’s the editing thing . . ."

"You kiss him goodbye in the water --" I added. Mistake.

Sounding annoyed again, she didn’t even wait for me to finish — "I didn’t KISS him goodbye! There were three breaths I gave him before he drowned, but they cut it down to one. But I took a very deep breath before I went down and it wasn’t a kiss. But they just kind of edited it that way and made it more . . . I don’t know. But it was actually just giving him air."

Oh.

To myself, I thought, ‘and how was I supposed to know that?’ But, chagrined, I stayed quiet for the rest of the interview.