It seems like having a #DadBod is no longer going to cut it.

The hottest new trend in Hollywood – amongst fathers, that is – is just being sad. A sad dad, to be precise.

And this is all thanks to Brad Pitt’s latest interview with lifestyle magazine GQ.

Netizens did not go easy on him despite it being the first time he’s spoken to the media since his high-profile divorce from Angelina Jolie.

But judging by the photo shoot Pitt did for GQ, it’s easy to understand why he’s being mocked mercilessly online.

The spread shows the 53-year-old actor on location at a few of America’s national parks.

He appeared startlingly gaunt and it didn’t help that his outfits (and poses) were, well, not that flattering.

In one picture, he’s seen in a pink ensemble. From head to toe.

As if that’s not disturbing enough, he adopted a semi-foetal pose for the camera.

This tweet says it all.

That’s right, he was actually compared to – of all things – a worm.

Here’s another one of his questionable poses.

To be fair, Pitt isn’t the only “sad dad” in Hollywood right now.

According to a recent feature by lifestyle site The Daily Beast, three of Tinseltown’s most famous faces are leading the pack: Pitt, Tobey Maguire and Ben Affleck.

Why? They all got divorced.

Also, while they’re maintaining a rather melancholic demeanour, their wives are reportedly living it up elsewhere.

In no order of who’s the saddest, here’s the lowdown on what these poor men went through recently:

Brad Pitt, 56

Pitt and his ex, Jolie, are A-listers who were affectionately termed as ‘Brangelina’. When news of their split broke, fans all over couldn’t handle the trauma.

Just like Pitt.

Why he agreed to the GQ photoshoot (and all of his strange poses) – we’ll never know.

But aside from his photos, perhaps he had something to get off his chest and wanted to tell his side of the story.

So maybe – just maybe – we should give the poor guy a break. And he deserves props for doing an actual interview complete with a fashion spread.

Ben Affleck, 44

Batman can be sad too, OK?

While he’s said to be on good terms with his estranged wife, Jennifer Garner, he has recently moved out of their family home according to various reports.

The two stars announced their divorce back in April after their split in July 2015. They were married for 10 years.

Recent photos of Affleck show him looking forlorn and pretty unfortunate.

Chin up, dude. And kudos to him for being open about completing his second stint in rehab for alcohol abuse.

It’s clear that the man has had a rough time.

Tobey Maguire, 41

What is it with men who play superheroes on the big screen?

The Spider-Man actor separated from his ex, Jennifer Meyer, back in late 2016. They share two kids together.

Like Affleck, he reportedly maintains an amicable relationship with his former wife.

However, it’s a pretty sad thing to hear if your wife is partying it up at her own birthday bash with the who’s who of Hollywood in attendance, and you’re not there.

Everyone from Jennifer Aniston to Katy Perry were reportedly on hand to celebrate with the 40-year-old jewellery designer.

Yup, all without Maguire’s help.

But wait, before you feel all sorry and think the guy has no squad – Maguire’s longtime bud is none other than the Oscar-winning heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio. Small consolation, perhaps?

ssandrea@sph.com.sg

MARYLOU ANDREW: You started your career as a TVC director in Dubai in the 90s. Why not in Pakistan?

ANWAR AL AMIN: I am glad I started here, if I had started in Pakistan no one would have taken me seriously. The problem is that there is no international recognition; no one knows anything about the creatives or directors in Pakistan because they are all in their own bubble. They need to come out of it and put their work in award ceremonies. Dubai is all about awards and originality. What happens in Pakistan is basically copied. Here it is different; the norms and professionalism are totally different.

MLA: How have you seen the production business changing in the last few years?

AAA: Production is becoming very demanding. In Dubai you need to come up with new ideas all the time, because the competition is very tough. It is not like in Pakistan, where the business revolves around three or four directors. Here the options are unlimited and they can hire directors from anywhere in the world. When I first came here they wanted English directors and English cameramen. Even the agencies felt that their creative directors had to be from England. Then a few guys came from India and they changed perceptions and people realised that talent doesn’t have to have white skin and blue eyes, it can come from the Asian sector as well. Now most of the creative directors in Dubai are either from India or from Lebanon. The emergence of Asian talent has been a game changer.

MLA: Why has this region been able to attract all this talent?

AAA: The pay is high and people are appreciated here. The kind of salaries that CDs and copywriters get in Pakistan is a joke. That is how talent is respected and it grows – when they are compensated properly. In Pakistan creative directors want to jump into filmmaking after a couple of years because they think they can make money there.

MLA: You work with agencies in Dubai and in Pakistan – what is the difference in the work style?

AAA: There is a huge difference. Here everything starts with originality whereas in Pakistan it always starts with a YouTube reference that usually links back to India. I also work like this in Pakistan; I grab one scene from here, another from there and do it like that.

MLA: Why don’t you work differently considering that you have all of this exposure?

AAA: I try but you have to find people who think like you. If you work with a seth company they don’t have any business ethics. Indian copies, Indian cinema and Indian style of advertising are acceptable. They are always asking you to copy things but why? We have our own stories, our own talent. I am very selective now about the type of work I do. I want to do human storytelling and this is not happening in Pakistan.

“The pay is high and people are appreciated here. The kind of salaries that CDs and copywriters get in Pakistan is a joke. That is how talent is respected and it grows when they are compensated properly. In Pakistan creative directors want to jump into filmmaking after a couple of years because they think can make money there.”

MLA: How many TVCs do you do per year?

AAA: About 10 to 12 TVCs a year and for this region it is quite a lot. In Pakistan, directors shoot two or three commercials a month, but I don’t want to take on a lot of work and then not deliver quality. I spend a lot of time in pre-production. In Pakistan the approach is very different, all they want to do is make money. We also want to make money, but we want to create something original. Even if I watch my commercial two to three years down the line I should be happy. I try to refine and mould ideas in my own style and that becomes more like my creativity. In Dubai when we are given a storyboard, we need to come up with a proper interpretation.

MLA: Do you want to diversify away from TVCs?

AAA: In this work you reach a saturation point fast. So what next? Filmmaking? First you need to test your temperament, can you handle the script or not? I have seen some big flops in Pakistan. Along with the right temperament, you need a lot of time for the screenplay, the pre and post. For me, I will not jump into it right away. I will probably do a documentary first to see if I am good enough to do a film.

MLA: Let’s say a young director wants to come to Dubai and set up here. What advice would you give him or her?

AAA: I always have a question when young people enter this field: are they doing it for the money or to make a difference? If they are doing it for the money, please go and do something else. I have met some good young people here and in Pakistan but the focus is not there. Some of them are good in art direction but want to jump into direction – don’t do that. Do what you are good at. Self realisation is the main thing. Don’t do it because others are doing it.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

– Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” from The Collected Poems

Sylvia Plath indeed died memorably as foreshadowed in a poem written in the final months of her life. A renowned American poet, she was married to the celebrated British poet, Ted Hughes, and committed suicide by putting her head in a gas oven.

On the night of February 11, 1963, Plath’s children were sleeping in another room where she had set out bread and milk for them. Plath then taped the door frame and stuffed the gap underneath the door with towels. Finally, she turned on the gas and rested her head on a folded cloth on the open oven door.

The final acts of Sylvia Plath’s life were to make sure her children, two-year-old Frieda and one-year-old Nick, would be safe and fed. While she was going about ending her life, her husband was in another flat in London with another woman.

Recently discovered unpublished letters from Plath to her psychiatrist Dr Ruth Barnhouse alleged that she suffered physical and psychological abuse from Hughes.

One letter, about events on September 22, 1962, revealed that he beat her while Plath was pregnant and two days later, she miscarried their second child. They separated that very month. Another letter sent the next month alleged that Hughes told her that he wished she was dead.

These letters are part of a collection by a feminist scholar, Harriet Rosenstein, of correspondence between Plath and Barnhouse, particularly in the year leading up to her death, during which Plath discovered that her husband was having an affair with a friend of theirs, Assia Wevill.

In addition to his well-known infidelity, these allegations of abuse bring a new dimension to understanding Plath and Hughes’s failed marriage and the final months of Plath’s life.

A Literary Union

Plath’s only novel The Bell Jar, semi-autobigraphical, was published in January 1963, less than a month before her death. Posthumously, her poetry collection Ariel (published in 1965) gained her mainstream recognition which Plath had predicted, writing to her mother, “I am writing the best poems of my life. They will make my name.”

Carol Ann Duffy, another prolific woman poet, wrote that Plaths poems were uniquely feminist. Plath wrote in the confessional style of poetry primarily about “the experience of being a woman”.

Plath believed that it was important to “control and manipulate her experiences…with an informed and an intelligent mind” in her poetry. By doing so, she shed the influence of confessional poets preceding her such as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, and found her distinct voice.

Plath and Hughes’s relationship is legendary in the literary world. They married in 1956, four months after their first meeting at Cambridge University where she was a Fulbright scholar. They had a fruitful literary union – writing poetry together every day in the first years of their married life.

They heavily influenced each other’s work though they drew from entirely different subjects. Hughes’s poems were deeply rooted in nature and relied particularly on symbolism. Plath’s writing, on the other hand, was about her life experiences.

She also morbidly obsessed over death in many of her poems. An excerpt from one of her most famous poems, “Daddy”, revealed her anguish at her father’s death, her first suicide attempt, and her meeting Ted Hughes.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

Hughes soon went on to publish his first collection of poems, Hawk in the Rain, which won him widespread acclaim. Plath was still relatively unknown in the literary world outside poetry circles. Depression and suicidal tendencies resurfaced, exacerbated by her marriage falling apart, with Hughes leaving her for his then-lover, Wevill.

It was at this time, during the last months of her life, that she produced prodigious work. The Collected Poems went on to win her a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Plath was 30-years-old when she killed herself.

This was not her first suicide attempt. As referenced in “Daddy”, Plath had taken a large number of sleeping pills at the age of 20 in her family home. She had been subsequently treated with electroconvulsive therapy and had been struggling with depression since adolescence.

Feminists and fans alike have taken up Plath’s cause since the 1970s – her gravestone has had repeated attempts to have Hughes’s name obliterated from it and Hughes was publicly denounced as a murderer during his lifetime.

Hughes had multiple affairs, often around the same time, and many believed that her husband’s callous cruelty and infidelity drove a depressed Plath to take her own life.

When Wevill killed herself in a similar manner as Plath; it was dejà vu for Ted Hughes and the public six years later. This time, however, there was another casualty – her four-year-old daughter with Hughes, Shura. At the time, Hughes was involved with other women, including Carol Orchard (who he later married), and Wevill had been facing public backlash for her alleged role in Plath’s suicide.

Hughes’s Defence

On behalf of his estate, Hughes’s widow, Carol, denied the claims of physical abuse by her late husband towards his first wife, saying they are “as absurd as they are shocking”. It is however difficult to treat Ted Hughes as an innocent party in Plath’s suicide.

Thanks to the recent discovery of these letters, Hughes’s abusive behaviour to Plath is documented but other such behaviour may have escaped the public eye. Wevill’s subsequent suicide suggests repeated abusive behaviour on the part of Hughes.

Hughes’s actions had tragic consequences for Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill and Shura, and his children with Plath who lost their mother at a very young age. His personal reputation was all that suffered; in death, Plath’s legend surpassed him in fame.

According to Hughes’s friends, he lived the rest of his life in the shadow of Plath’s fame, shouldering the burden of public-directed guilt. Hughes continued to have a distinguished career regardless, being made Poet Laureate in Britain in 1984.

His actions in the years since Plath’s death have also been criticised. Hughes destroyed Plath’s final journal – saying it was in the best interests of their children. As executor of her estate, Hughes was also accused of editing and reordering her collections of poetry and journals to his wishes in addition to restricting access to her papers.

For years, Hughes kept silent. He finally spoke about this troubled relationship with Plath in a collection of poems, Birthday Letters, published in 1998. He died later that year at the age of 68. In 2010, a previously unseen poem by Hughes, “Last Letter”, relates his recollection of the events leading up to Plath’s suicide. It begins:

What happened that night?

Your final night.

Plath’s story illustrates the consequences of domestic abuse and mental illness and highlights the impunity of men to get away with repeated abusive behaviour.

Her legacy will always be defined by her depression and eventual suicide, and now too by the revelations of domestic abuse.

This is a shame in the light of Plath’s poetic genius. She inspired poets, particularly women, of her time and later generations to write in their own voice as she did. Much of her best work was written in the final, desperate months of her life.

In life and in death, Sylvia Plath was as exceptional as her poetry.

LOS ANGELES – Miley Cyrus says she is steering away from marijuana, alcohol and nipple pasties and rolling out a new sound that could help people take her more seriously after she was dubbed one of pop music’s bad girls.

Speaking to Billboard Magazine in an interview published late on Wednesday, the former Disney star, 24, said she wanted to be “super clear and sharp” and focus on a new collection of songs that takes her back to her country music roots.

“I haven’t smoked weed in three weeks, which is the longest I’ve ever (gone without it). I’m not doing drugs, I’m not drinking, I’m completely clean right now! That was just something that I wanted to do,” Cyrus said.

The singer, whose father is country music singer Billy Ray Cyrus and whose godmother is Dolly Parton, will release new single “Malibu” on May 11.

Billboard said it was a love song inspired by her fiance, actor Liam Hemsworth, with whom she reunited last year after a 2013 breakup.

Cyrus, who rose to fame on the Disney Channel show “Hannah Montana,” ditched her innocent image in 2013, admitting to drug use and appearing scantily clad in public and in music videos.

I haven’t smoked weed in three weeks, which is the longest I’ve ever (gone without it). I’m not doing drugs, I’m not drinking, I’m completely clean right now! That was just something that I wanted to do – Miley Cyrus

She grabbed headlines when she dressed in latex lingerie and twerked on stage with R&B singer Robin Thicke at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, in a performance that landed her the title of pop music’s bad girl.

Her upcoming new album will feature more acoustic songs and melodies written by

Cyrus, and will include a song for Hillary Clinton, whom she supported in last year’s US presidential election, and another anthem dedicated to women in the workplace, Billboard said. Discussing politics,

Cyrus, who will return as a judge on NBC reality singing show “The Voice” later this year, said she wanted to reach out to her more conservative fans.

“I like talking to people that don’t agree with me, but I don’t think I can do that in an aggressive way,” the singer said.

“I don’t think those people are going to listen to me when I’m sitting there in nipple pasties, you know?,” she added.