Natalie Portman
Natalie Imbruglia Portman (born Nata-Lee Hershlag, Hebrew: נטע-לי הרשלג; June 9, 1981) is an Israeli-American actress, militant feminist/vegan, and the second hottest thing to come out of Israel, eclipsed only by Gal Gadot (and possibly God, if God is also a superheroine or at least has one for a wife). Her first role was in the 1994 action thriller Léon: The Pedophile, opposite Jean Reno, and she was later cast as Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, thinking it was a good move at the time and wouldn't nearly end her career and make her want to get a new job. She recovered from this role, and went on to star in more successful movies, including V for Vendetta, Garden State, and Black Swan. It is speculated that those movies were so successful because geeky guys think Natalie will magically become their girlfriend if they buy her movies.
Like James Franco, Portman is both attractive and intelligent, and in a society that valued her useful academic research skills, she would be more inspiring than any of the characters she's played. She earned a degree in psychology from Harvard to help her mind cope with the madness George Lucas had subjected her that would've destroyed any other young adult actor, with seemingly only her and Samuel L. Jackson's careers emerging alive from that series of nonsensical nightmares.
Early life[edit]
Hershlag was born in the back of a Chevy Astro van in Or Akiva, a small suburb located in the already-small Israel, not in Jerusalem as she claims to be. She was an unwanted child, and was put into a small breadbasket made of woven twigs and covered with a pink and yellow Winnie the Pooh blanket (which she caries to this day and has lovingly named "Tickle"). Her mother then released Nata-Lee into the Atlantic Ocean, where she floated for nearly a decade until she ended up in the sewers of Hollywood, California, United States.
It was actors Avner Herschlagerschnitzelkreiger and Shelley Stevens who found Nata-Lee floating in the sewers of Hollywood, and they took her in as their own. Nata-Lee's genes from her biological mother gave her a pale complexion, and the diet taught to her by her adoptive father has led to her petite figure. Nata-Lee commonly likes to say that she "really loves the States", but "her heart is with Israel". Some think this is a lie and claim that she's actually from Egypt, though that would carry a great stigma, considering what would have happened to the Jewish people in Egypt if it weren't for Moses circa 1800 AD.
Career[edit]
Léon: The Professional[edit]
At age 12, Nata-Lee began auditioning for local film and television rolls in LA, now using the stage name "Natalie Portman" (derived from "Natalie", meaning "kitten"; and "Portman", meaning "Portland Ave."). At first, she had a hard time finding a career, so she had to settle for being a waitress for some time, until they fired her because she knew too much. After several months without work, up-and-coming Portman broke into the film industry and landed her first acting job in 1994's Léon: The Pedophile Professional, a controversial mafia thriller by acclaimed director Luc Besson. Taking inspiration from Japanese anime, the film featured Portman as a lolicon named Mathilda who is taken in by professional hitman Léon after her father is killed by crooked DEA agents.
While industry insiders including Roger "Rabbit" Ebert predicted this role would win her an Oscar nomination for "Best Supporting Actress," she was excluded because, at age 13, she was too old. However, because of this amazing story of vague pedophilia master-student relations, she fortunately achieved amazing success in the Hollywood film industry.
Star Wars Prequels: A Psychoanalysis[edit]
With her name gracing the covers of magazines internationally, Portman found herself as one of the most coveted actresses in the film industry. Turning down several big-budget offers, she chose a low-budget picture by the name of Star Wars Episode I (Even Though It's Actually the Fourth Movie Released in the Series; Apparently George Lucas Has Problems Keeping His Numbers Straight): The Phantom Movie as her next starring role. The brainchild of a mentally-challenged hermit named George Lucas, Phantom centered on the struggle between the Jedi and an army of Zombie Gungans. 18-year-old Portman played 14-year-old Queen Padmé Amidala, but with a lot of makeup and a pair of stilts, she managed to pass as four years younger. It is a little-known fact that in some scenes of the movie, Natalie was replaced by Keira Knightley; the makeup was thus used to cover the true identity of the actor, and Natalie was released to finish high school. For some reason, Natalie decided that "school" was more important than making millions of dollars, so she took some time off to do that. The film tanked with fans of previous Star Wars movies, but still made big money.
Portman then starred in Episode II: Attack of the Clowns, a timeless space epic centering around the resistance by a few brave droid souls against an evil army of cloned Maoris. This movie featured relative newcomer Hayden Christensen, the only actor to appear in over a dozen mediocre movies while still getting work. Portman's romance scenes with Christensen are regarded as some of the most enduring images in over a century of American cinema. Since then Natalie and Hayden have been best friends, and they frequently throw parties together and secretly have sex while away from their respective boyfriends and girlfriends. After winning several prestigious film awards, including the coveted Academy Award and Golden Raspberry, Portman's fame kept growing rapidly. Finishing her contractual obligations by completing Episode III: Revenge of the PADME DIES in the summer of 2005, she moved on to more challenging positions in both her personal, professional, and inter-Forcial life. The prequels were box-office successes but nobody remembers them, mostly because those who watched them died for reasons still unknown, but presumably caused by Jar Jar Binks.
Portman still wraps her analytic mind around the psychological enigma of these multi-million-dollar digital paintings that could have fed hundreds in villages across the world with the budget of even just a few seconds of their CGI. As a Harvard-trained psychologist, she must have spent countless hours looking for an explanation as to what the apparent meaning and moral of these movies is and what the artist was thinking when they were making it, other than "Jar Jar is the key to all this" and "It's like poetry, they rhyme." It seems the only value of these movies and their confusing storyline is as a diagnostic tool akin to a Rorshach test or the Thematic apperception test, where one creates a story to go along with images to make sense of them, as the alleged story presented makes less sense than what a child would come up with on the spot while playing with plastic toy army men.
| “ | A motion picture must be true to life. If a picture portrays a false emotion a false emotion it trains people seeing it to react abnormally. Take the Star Wars prequels for example, why should anyone act like these people? Can you even identify what emotion, if any, they are feeling? I still don't know what the hell the Trade Federation actually did, or what kind of a religion and Senate would allow artificial womb farms, or what woman would put up with that much violence from her boyfriend.
At least when I played a terrorist bomber or a twelve year old in love with an assassin it made sense, I'd let my kid watch those before letting him watch his mom getting choked. |
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— Natalie Portman on the psychology of motion pictures
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V for Versatility: Please don't type cast me![edit]
Still riding the crest of her now-astronomical successes, Portman cemented her stardom by starring in the film V for Vendetta. Here she manages to balance romance, politics, and action on a knife's edge, doing all the things the Star Wars prequels attempted and failed to do, even with a brooding masked figure in black with a blade. V unlike Anakin valued his partner's input, leaving the decision to blow up parliament in her hand. He could also carry on a conversation about something other than work or telling his partner she’s hot, while Anakin talks only about what his bosses think of him, and how intoxicating Padme is.
V cooks for Evey, and serenades her with music, art, and quotes from literature; while it's mere fan conjecture at this point whether Anakin ever learned how to cook anything, even Yoda's soup recipe, he never even reads Padme the full Jedi Code which isn't even a page long; his entire religion is seemingly less complicated than the standard-length poem. V has a cool apartment, albeit one she is not allowed to leave, featuring stolen paintings, a wall of books, a jukebox, and a suit of knight armor for fencing practice. Who knows if the Jedi even let Anakin have his own room or if he just slept in the monk's barracks; it wasn't important enough to make the final cut. Like Anakin, Evey gets a haircut following her conversion, but more like an actual Buddhist monk, even though she's just a detainee. However unlike Anakin, we actually see her undergo formalized training with her teacher in the form of hellish physical and psychological conditioning to resist torture, whereas who knows what Anakin's Jedi training actually consisted of, or if the Jedi temple had a gym; that's just a tiny little personal detail that's not nearly as important as the big-budget CGI picture.
When Evey and V talked politics it was about things they both agreed on, like fascism being bad; when Padme and Anakin talked politics they just argued about whether the Confederacy of Independent Systems had a right to leave an ineffective political union, and whether enforcing that union through violence was really the right thing to do in a society that claims to value personal freedoms (the answer is "Yes" for both political and marital unions, according to the Jedi Church). Really, the worst thing V has going on is that part of his basement looks like a death camp, and he abducts unconscious women rather than let them get tortured by the police whom just earlier tried to rape them — which really when, compared to murdering a bunch of innocent children in a village massacre, killing a bunch of kids again in church, then choking your pregnant wife, isn't that unforgivable. V for Vendetta is definitely the better date movie about the rise of fascist politics and stabbing government officials, and it won't raise the question of where babies come from, unlike the clone factories in Attack of the Clones, so it's much more kid-friendly, seeing as explaining sex is a bigger issue for most parents than just having lots of explosions and blood.
The Avenge-hers[edit]
Portman played Thor's girlfriend Jane Foster in the 2011 superhero movie Thor. Here she got to be a detained scientist and have her homeless boyfriend live with her for a while; that's slightly better than being rescued. Like most superheroes' girlfriends in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jane pretty much disappears after the first movie conveniently just to prove the hero wasn't gay, then get out of the way. She is played by a framed photo in The Avengers and had to be tricked into coming back for Thor: The Dark World by Disney hiring then firing a female director. The Mouse knows she's eventually going to be wielding that hammer to help them compete with Wonder Woman, so she has them by the balls.
Black Swan in the Perfect Blue[edit]
“Every guy saw Black Swan not for his girlfriend, but for himself, because Natalie Portman was in it. I mean, who wouldn't want to dock in Natalie's port, man?”
In 2010, Portman experienced her breakout role into the ballet industry with Black Swan. The movie co-starred her fellow Jews, Mila Kunis and Winona Ryder, who were reported to have driven up production costs with their stereotypical salary demands. For Black Swan, someone watched the anime Perfect Blue about an idol singer being stalked, much as Christopher Nolan watched Paprika then took out the psychologist and replaced her with dream burglars for Inception. You know what they say about imitation being the highest form of flattery, except for stalking your idols; at least that's what George Lucas told Akira Kurosawa.
In the movie, Portman assumes the role of lower-class mammy-type character Nina trying to make it big in the ballet industry. The movie is centered around her epic struggle with arch-nemesis Lily (Kunis), who alongside his sadomasochistic pet fish Beth (Ryder), plot to steal Portman's role, sanity, and boyfriend. Ultimately, in a shock-ending, it is revealed that Lily is Nina's mother.
Knight of Cups[edit]
In 2015, Portman went back to Medieval times playing a knight in Knight of Cups. Originally she thought she would have to be a hair dresser, until the final dress rehearsal when the main actress didn't show up, so they hired Portman to be the girl who gets caught in the tree, gets her hair caught on fire, dies in the water and eats the food out of the fridge. She swings her mace at the director when she gets drunk and goes mad. Portman controls herself then takes a whack at it again when she breaks up with her boyfriend. Everybody thinks it's a great hit for the movie; Natalie is insulted.
Current work[edit]
Portman's taste for the living Force has earned her many guest spots on prestigious talk shows such as Oprah, The Late Show with [Gutless Neoliberal Comedian], and HoloNet News. Portman claims that imbibing the midi-chlorians of slain foes allows her to "Commune with the great Lord Binks."
Although she's known to some as the ex-wife of Darth Vader and Justin Chatwin, Natalie is more well-known for her appeal to hormonal adolescent boys, and is incredibly famous in this demographic due to the lingering success of her midriff. Sample studies showed that only 30% of Americans remembered her from her roles in big-budget movies such as the Star Wars prequels and V for Vendetta, as opposed to remembering her from the "Trending" topics on their Twitters.
Personal life[edit]
Natalie has loved her Star Wars costar Hayden Christensen since the day they first worked together, and will hate Rachel Bilson 'til the day she dies for stealing Hayden from her. It is on her list of chores to marry Hayden someday but she never gets around to it (plus she never gets around him; have you seen his bowling ba—I mean, nose?). Hayden obviously has no interest in Natalie, though Natalie goes to his house every day and attaches a note to his door that says: "I love you. Love Natalie. Or: Natalie Loves Hayden."
Portman is a staunch supporter of PETA, and hates meat-eaters. She eats grass for breakfast after painstakingly growing it for hours, and does not like the rumors going around that she sneaks bacon on the side. Natalie also loves pulling pranks, having sewed a pig-nose on Christensen while he was sleeping.
See also[edit]
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