I believe there's such a thing as too much George Clooney

I don't know about anyone else but I am so sick and tired of hearing about George Clooney. Don't get me wrong, I don't really have anything against him: he has been in some good movies lately. I think very highly of Syriana and Michael Clayton, and he seems like a nice guy, but there have been a constant stream of articles coming at me for 3 years, all virtually saying the same thing: George Clooney is great, he's selfless, he does charity work, as if he's the only actor in Hollywood ever to be good-looking AND promote good causes.


Time Magazine recently had an entire cover story on Clooney with teases like "what are his secrets to success?" "how does he do it?" I already know the answers to these questions:

He does it because he doesn't take himself too seriously, he owns a lot of money and a condo in Italy, is friends with Brad Pitt, he has a famous show business aunt, he likes movies from the 1960s and feels passionate about how movies can carry political messages blah, blah, blah.


It's the same interview over and over again.

Here's the way Hollywood stars generally work: Sometimes, a star does something really great and breaks out (i.e. Jamie Foxx in Ray, Jonny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, Helen Mirren in The Queen, Jake Gyllenhall and Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain) and they're the focus of a lot of attention for a while and then the buzz generally dies out while newspapers and magazines write about other people. A way to really break out is if you have two movies close to each other or within the same calender year: Seth Rogen had Knocked Up and Superbad pretty close to each other, Jamie Foxx had Ray and Collateral, Michael Caine had a "career resurrection" with Weatherman, Bewitched AND Batman Begins; Leo DiCaprio had Blood Diamond and Departed.

This enables a magazine writer to not just conclude that the breakout star had a good performance but that he's on a roll.

Back to business: George Clooney had a breakout period in 2005 when he released Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck: Two movies that were message pictures. The themes of Good Night and Good Luck which Clooney directed, wrote, and everything else was: 1) the Red Scare was bad 2) Edward Murrow was good and 3) All journalists suck today. Syriana's theme which Clooney didn't write was that oil was a big and complicated issue.

Anyway, this period where the press becomes infatuated with a star usually lasts for a short while (it culminates into orgasmic proportions around the end of the calender year when magazines and newspapers do entertainers of the year-themed issues), but the press has been infatuated with George Cooney since 2005 and it's become a love affair that has to stop.


I know that Clooney is a charming and nice guy, but this is not news after constantly telling us this for 3 years. Unless he's done something new, like develop superpowers, I do not want to hear it. And Clooney, you're not helping either. Stop hogging the spotlight, and dominating press interviews for films like Ocean's 13 and Michael Clayton when you're clearly not the best actor in the film.


But back to the press: If you still insist on covering George Clooney, how about talking about Darfur. That's this region of Sudan that your boy George is apparently doing something to help make peace or facilitate, or something like that. I don't really know because you never really tell me that: all you tell me is that George Clooney is such a dreamy and great guy because he helps with Darfur, yet I haven't learnt a single thing about what's going on in Darfur from any of these articles since George-mania has struck. Off the top of my head, didn't Jane Goodall do a lot of charity work in Africa for her foundation. Do articles about Jane Goodall talk about how great of a person she is or do they just cut right to the chase and talk about the charity work.




Other examples of Clooney overkill:


The Washington Post wrote an article after the Oscars that reported "George Clooney, who has recently replaced Jack Nicholson as the big man in Hollywood, was on hand at the Oscars....." I'm sorry, how is this objective reporting? By what standard has Clooney replaced Nicholson? Why does George Clooney even need to be mentioned in the article, if he didn't even win anything? George Clooney was nominated but seemed like a pretty poor sport throughout. He was probably the 4th or 5th most talented nominee in the field yet, he kept spouting off about he pissed off he was about how he was going to lose to Daniel Day-Lewis, as if Jonny Depp and the others wouldn't have also beaten him. George Clooney was also on a ridiculous special by Oprah at last year's Oscars, where 6 Oscars winners interview each other. Clooney had an interview with Julia Roberts. Don't Julia Roberts and George Clooney talk all the time since they've worked on films together? How is this a special occasion? This past week Time put Clooney on the top 100 most influential people AGAIN with a tribute that said the exact same things everyone else said before

Why we can't leave Brittney alone

That person YouTube who got some publicity a couple weeks ago for proclaiming that we should leave Brittney alone actually had a valid point despite the fact that he appeared overemotional about the subject.

Few people realize how inherently wrong it is to pick on celebrities, but the vast majority of celebrities the general American public does have the decency to leave alone. Others like Brittney, Lindsay, Clay Aiken, Christina Aguilerra, and recently Tom Cruise serve an important need in the entertainment industry: Material for talk show hosts' opening monologue jokes. Of course, there are the awkward occasions when one of these guests is actually on the show (rumor has it that J.Lo refuses to be on Conan O'Brien, for example) but it puts the talk show hosts in the good graces of the public as well as their other celebrity guests in the leave-their-private-lives-alone class who enjoy a good laugh as much as the next person.

You would think that these talk show monologues are a small part of a talk show and therefore insignificant, but keep in mind that this industry is expanding to include the likes of Best Week Ever, The Soup, Chelsea Handler, and the TV Guide Channel. I saw Chelsea Handler's show and while she's an admirable comedian, her list of people it's OK to make fun of consist of only five people. If Brittney were to suddenly live a noble, decent and healthy life, Chelsea Handler would lose 20% of her material! So, therefore it's in the interest of people like her to make sure Brittney keeps screwing up in life and to portray her that way

Memo to America and Tom Cruise: It's time to make up

I have had just about enough of the way America is treating Tom Cruise. Poor guy. As a nation, I think we've been a little selfish and inconsiderate to treat someone who's been our favorite actor with such disdain just because he's in love with a girl and wanted to express it and his religious beliefs. Because we all know that in this country it's taboo to proselytise your religion (um...hello, Christian Evangelicals). However, I still can't believe how wishy-washy our nation is. We've held this guy up as our top movie star for 20 years and then all of a sudden, we don't like him anymore because he's crazy? Sure, he's crazy but isn't that what you love him for?

I knew a girl who loved the film Jerry MaGuire but didn't like Tom Cruise because he was crazy and I just don't get that. Tom Cruise's characters are usually not stoners or relaxed people. His screen persona is that of a crazy person. In Jerry MaGuire, he plays a guy who decides to quit his job on the spur of the moment, stays up all night writing some manifesto about how *drum roll* we should be nice to our clients, asks his seceretary to marry her for seemingly no good reason at all, and shouts things at the top of his like "Help Me, Help You" to Cuba Gooding Jr. That guy sounds twice as crazy as the real Tom Cruise and we still love it. The actual Tom Cruise in real life new Katie Homes for longer than he knew the secretary before proposing to her and hasn't ever quit a job. In fact, Tom Cruise is considered by pretty much every director and costar he's ever had to be the hardest-working person they know.

I know Cruise comes off as conceited and arrogant, but actual reports from people who know him say he's the opposite. The more I've looked into Tom Cruise since the couch-jumping incident the more I see less and less to dislike about him.

The sins of Paris Hilton

I think the good news about the Paris Hilton case is that at the very least, she's now making headlines for something that is relevant and a hell of a lot more interesting than when she was making national headlines for absolutely nothing. Paris is a person but one of no significance whatsoever on any artistic level. She's a celebrity who's famous for....honestly, I can't even remember what she was originally famous for. Can anyone else? The truth is that Paris Hilton has always been a media construction. She's famous only because the media says she's famous and even the very debate over whether she deserves to be famous benefited her because it fed into the publicity machine and negative publicity is superior than the realization that there's nothing to be famous about.

But with this whole prison ordeal, things are a-changing. The debate surrounding Paris Hilton is now about far more interesting stuff: the conditions in the prison system, who should pay for prison, whether celebrities are above the law, etc. It's also possible that young teens are getting an education on public health from reading about Paris' disorders.

So whatever you feel about the Paris Hilton case, I call it an improvement. I think the one problem is that people are unwilling to give credit when it's due to Paris, the person. I'm not saying that Paris Hilton neccessarily deserves credit (for the record, I do think she deserves some credit for holding her head up high and accepting the sentence as best she can) but I don't think Paris the person has a fighting chance anymore to prove to the public that she's grown as a person. At this point, she's no match for her own public image and while Paris, the person, is capable of growth, the Paris that the media is used to seeing isn't.

Besides, people are unwilling to forgive Paris for being such a nuissance in our collective culture all these years. My opinion: The angry mob of people who want to see Paris remain in prison aren't really mad at Paris. As I said before, Paris Hilton was never really anything but a media construction. How can you be mad at someone who's nothing? I think the anger that we are showing with this is really directed at ourselves for allowing Paris Hilton to become famous in the first place. I think the anger at Paris is probably misdirected by parents who are mad at their daughters for buying copies of US Weekly and indulging the craze of these celebrities.

Is it Ocean's 13 or Ocean's 4?

Ocean's 13 is coming to theaters this week and I'm already wishing this film was never made. It's not the actual film I'm wishing didn't exist. Despite the abysmal failure of Ocean's 12, it's very probable that, considering the potential of Stephen Sodebergh and the strength of Ocean's 11, this film will be good and I'm looking forward to seeing it.


But the question is whether it's worth having to see these self-indulgent fests of self-praise that occurs when Matt Damon, George Clooney, and Brad Pitt all over the press circuit this week? Now, don't get me wrong. I have no problem with Matt Damon and while Brad Pitt can tend to get a little overly metaphysical/spiritual/philosophical when asked simple interview questions, he's OK with me as well. If George Clooney is far off in Africa or campaigning for his dad, I'm OK with him too. My problem isn't really with George Clooney as much as it is how his ability to make every (male and female) Hollywood reporter fall in love with him results in an over coverage of him with hard-hitting stories like "George Clooney: a great and selfless guy or the greatest, most handsomest, most selfless guy there is?." By selfless, do you mean "talks about himself less"? Because, I haven't seen much evidence of that. Also, did you omit actor with range in there? Well, that's cause he doesn't have much of it. I do think he deserved the Oscar for Syrianna (and some people don't), but that's about as far as his range stretches. "Oh, let's not bash George Clooney," you say, "He's doing great stuff for Darfur." Well, the George Clooney publicity machine is not doing it' s job very well because I challenge you all: How much do you know about Darfur because of George Clooney? The articles that have come out with regard to George Clooney are along the lines of "Clooney: Great guy because he went to Darfur" rather than "Here's what's going on in Darfur"

So as I was saying: Matt Damon by himself = Good, Brad Pitt by himself = Mostly good, George Clooney = Mildly Tolerable. However, when you get the three in the same room, it's a whole different monster. They start congratulating each other on winning People Magazine's sexiest man award, fooling around with reporters and giving humorous answers (except when the questions are about politics in which case, George never misses the opportunity to promote his cause*), and talking about how great each other are. Add Julia Roberts and see things get worse. so it might be a blessing in disguise that she's absent from this one.


These guys were so distracted by how much fun they were having on the set of Ocean's 12 that they forgot to double-check at the end of the film if they had made a coherent plot (Stephen Sodebergh has been guilty of this before: see Full Frontal). I remember on three separate (Letterman, Inside the Actor's Studio and Good Morning America) occasions, Matt Damon had felt a need to remind us in interviews that while he and the gang were having fun in Ocean's 12, that they were still professionals and were going to deliver us a professional product. That should have been our first clue as to how bad Ocean's 12 would be. When he was promoting The Legend of Bagger Vance, he wasn't bragging about how professional he and Will Smith were able to maintain their work. That's sort of implied.
Ocean's 11 was notable in 2001 for the fact that all these A-list selflessly took pay cuts so that the film could support such a large ensemble. It doesn't look like their egos took a pay cut, unfortunately. These guys have so much fun with each other that I think they forget there are other people in the cast. I seriously wonder if Brad Pitt could even name the other 11 members of his own cast? Don Cheadle pops up occasionally so at best, we should just call this film Ocean's 4 judging by the press releases. I never see Shaobo Qin, Eddie Jemison, Scott Caan, or Casey Affleck involved in any of the press interviews. Poor Casey has the unfortunate distinction of being Ben Affleck's brother and on top of that he doesn't even get any recognition for his own film.
Lastly, what about Elliot Gould and Carl Reiner? Carl Reiner is a comedic legend and Elliot Gould was one of the best actors in the '70s through a string of Rob Altman films. You would think they might have gotten some recognition as well.
*I don't have anything against Clooney's politics and agree with his viewpoints. In my opinion, the political views expressed in his pictures are that if nothing else, "we should be open and be allowed to criticize our government." At the same time, he babbles on non-stop about his politics to the point where it bores me to death and doesn't seem to have an off-switch. I felt it was slightly insensitive to use his Golden Globe acceptance speech to deliver a Jack Abramoff as if he was filling int for Jay Leno on the Tonight Show.
Footnote:
I'm slightly less upset over this matter, when I learned that Carl Reiner was on Late Night with Craig Furgeson tonight. In the film, he admits that Ocean's 12 wasn't good but Ocean's 13 is well-written and greatly enhanced by Al Pacino. We will wait and see. Reiner was also shilling out for the greatness of Cheadle, Clooney, and Pitt. Well, Carl, don't sell yourself short, you're a great actor yourself.