It’s hard to imagine how each and every one of our mothers is different than an Adjustment Bureau. Both mom and the bureau’s job is to make sure you stay on the path they deem to be the correct one and to put you back on the right track (in their opinion) when you’ve veered off of it. In a sense, each and every one of us has our own Adjustment Bureau, which is the best thing you can tell yourself when you don’t have a dog or a girlfriend.
But there have been times when we’ve ignored our Adjustment Bureau. Sometimes it works out for us and we’re secure in the choice we made; better for it because we were in control. Other times we were harmed because we disregarded the sound advice we were given. In any case, Matt Damon’s character in The Adjustment Bureau does the former: after he gets a glimpse at what his life will be like in the future and decides he doesn’t want it for himself, he begins the fight to change course so he doesn’t fulfill his own fate. Here is a list of other celebrities who, if shown where they’d be today, would probably wish they’d done things differently, too.
Christina Aguilera
All it would take to get a younger Christina Aguilera to sign on to be a Mousketeer for life would be a screening of her performance (and screw up) of the National Anthem at this year’s Super Bowl. But if that didn’t work, you could always tell her that in ten years, the biggest dangers to her career weren’t going to be Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson – instead, it would be public intoxication charges that were filed on the morning of March 1st, 2011 and a gig as a “musical coach” on NBC’s upcoming show, The Voice.
A Life Adjusted: If she had just written down the lyrics on a football and gotten sloshed at home, we never would have started to speculate about her downward spiral.
Nicolas Cage
If this member of the Coppola family had been allowed a peek into his future to see that the movies he was filming were making $5.2 million (Drive Angry), $10.6 million (Season of the Witch) and $4.3 million (The Weather Man) on their opening weekends, he probably wouldn’t have bought any, if all, of the following properties: an island in the Bahamas worth $7 million, a property in New Orleans worth $5.5 million, a home in Miami worth $10 million, and various castles in Germany and England. Cage’s business manager maintained that in 2007, Cage owned 15 personal residences when he went on a shopping spree and purchased 3 more that totaled $33 million. Additionally, he said that at the time, Cage also owned 22 automobiles (9 of which were Rolls Royces). Obviously if Cage had his taxes by putting cap on his home-ownership, he wouldn’t have to film movies that nobody wants to see just so he can get the government off his back.
A Life Adjusted: Cage probably wishes that all he needed was a waterfront property to be happy.
Ashlee Simpson
Had someone told Ashlee that she’d be in the process of divorcing her husband and without anything resembling a singing career by 2011, she’d probably want to have the chance to do numerous things differently. But definitely one of the first things she’d want to have a second chance at would be the performance on SNL in October of 2005 where she was caught lip syncing. If she could take it back, she certainly would by not going along with her father’s suggestion of using a “vocal guide track” to hide how her acid reflux had affected her voice. Instead, she would have withdrawn from the performance completely and saved her hoedown for a day in the future when she prepared the perfect s’more.
A Life Adjusted: If she hadn’t have gotten pregnant, she would not have felt pressure to get married and then would have been able to devote her time to teaching her sister about music.
Selma Blair
Selma Blair isn’t exactly on every casting director’s list right now, and that’s probably because in the past, she hasn’t exactly chosen roles that best showcase her talent. If given the chance to remove herself from one of the movies she’s filmed, she’d probably take herself out of the cast of The Sweetest Thing, where she filmed a scene where a man got his penis stuck in her mouth while she was giving him a blowjob because his piercing got caught on her tonsils, and she had to an Aerosmith song with his genitals in her mouth so her throat would relax enough so it could be safely taken out. If she had considered how this would have considered that scene would have taken her out of the running for some really great parts, she probably wouldn’t have wanted to do it.
A Life Adjusted: If she had turned down her role in The Sweetest Thing, she may have been considered for Black Swan.
Michael Richards
Michael Richards is an actor who’s been successful enough in his career that he doesn’t have to think about what he could have done differently. And even if nothing annoys him more than people on the street continuing to refer to him as Kramer, surely he’d rather that over being remembered for the time he did stand up at the Laugh Factory in November of 2006, when an African American in the audience heckled him and Richards responded with a racial slur and saying that if it were fifty years ago, the heckler would have been lynched. After the incident, Richards appeared on Letterman via satellite and issued an apology, and tried to explain that he wanted to diffuse the situation at the comedy club by being even more outrageous than the person in the audience, but regretted the way that he did so. We have barely heard from him since.
A Life Adjusted: Richards probably wishes he was deaf in one ear, and therefore unable to hear the heckler.
Winona Ryder
Winona Ryder has been in some pretty high profile movies and is known for being a very talented actress, but she’s proof that even people as seemingly normal and sound of mind as she is aren’t above getting caught on video stealing $5,500 from the Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. Winona’s career was temporarily halted when she was charged with shoplifting in December of 2001 and was sentenced to 480 hours of community service, $3,700 in fines, and $6,355 in restitution to Saks, and the stigma has continued to follow her around since. And even though her body of work makes this event simply a minor lapse in judgment, it’s also proof that her career has been tainted by something she did in her personal life.
A Life Adjusted: Winona would have preferred if she’d stolen her neighbor’s US Weekly.
John Mayer
It’s an unquestionable fact that John Mayer is a decent musician. Despite having dropped out of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mayer has gone on to win seven Grammy awards and has established a solid following for himself. However, fans couldn’t help but be displeased with the several comments he made to the media about Jessica Simpson. In an interview in the March 2010 issue of Playboy, Mayer said Simpson was his “drug,” called her “crack cocaine,” and described their sexual relationship as being “sexual napalm.” Additionally, fans were dismayed when, in the same interview, Mayer dropped the N-word while trying to describe what a “hood pass” meant. He has since apologized, and even though he rarely ever talks about it, we haven’t forgotten that it happened.
A Life Adjusted: Mayer wishes he didn’t feel so compelled to convince us of his intelligence.
Charlie Sheen
We find ourselves in a moment of Charlie Sheen, which means any list we compile has to have him in it. But he particularly belongs in this group of people because if he ever gets truly better, then he might even regret all the things he’s said and all the people he’s hurt around him. But if the Charlie Sheen whose rants we’ve been witnessing every morning is as “better” as he’s going to get, then he’s never going to regret anything ever. He’s stated that he’s proud of his mistakes and feels they are the perfect lessons for him to pass onto his children, but the fact that he still has pride over his past indicates that he doesn’t particularly care whether or not he ever uses again.
A Life Adjusted: N/A, because like death, adjustments are for losers
