February 2016

George Clooney appeared on The Ellen Show this week to promote Hail Caesar, his latest film offering and probably the first Clooney film I’ve been interested in for a very long time. But I love the Coen Brothers and I love that they almost always cast Clooney as a dunce. We haven’t had a good old fashioned Clooney promotional tour since last year’s Tomorrowland, during which we were inundated with stories about Amal Clooney and how fantastic/brilliant/amazing she is. I’m at the point now where I think George partially (or mostly) got married to change his branding, his script, his public persona. He was at a point in his life where his stories were no longer “cute,” so he had to get some new stories. Enter Amal. And now he can’t (or won’t) shut up about her, about their marriage, about their wedding and all of it. So, when he was chatting with Ellen, he went into detail about how he proposed. This story has the weird vibe of feeling too rehearsed and completely untrue. George claims he decided Amal was his future wife about six months into their relationship, a fact which will probably cause Stacy Keibler to do some math. He claims that they didn’t talk about getting married at all beforehand and that he alone tried to set the scene by lighting candles, cooking dinner and choosing their playlist. He makes it sound like it came so out of left field that Amal wasn’t even wearing a cute outfit. Then: “I’ve got it all set up, timed out and the song is coming and she gets up to go wash the dishes, which she’s never done. And I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ and she comes back in. And finally I said, ‘Ya know, I blew out the candle’ and I said, ‘I think the lighter’s in the box behind you.’ And she reaches around and she pulls out the box and I’ve got just the ring sitting in there and she pulls it out and she looks at it and she’s like, ‘It’s a ring’ – like as if somebody had left it there some other time…I’m doing all the moves I could do with my face, and I got down on my knee and said, ‘I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life without you.’ And she kept looking at the ring and she was looking at me and she was like ‘Oh my God.’ And now we know because of the playlist, how long it actually took, and it was like 25 minutes, 25 minutes! And finally I was like, ‘Look, I hope the answer is yes, but I need an answer I’m 52 and I could throw out my hip pretty soon.’” Do you believe this story? Or is this just a monologue that he’s prepared? I don’t know. But I never thought I would see the day when George Clooney would be this eager to talk about his personal life to this extent. Oh, and he says at the beginning of the story that the proposal was “one of those horrible moments we didn’t talk about.” Yes, that’s why he prepared a monologue about it. And here’s video of Clooney and Rihanna playing Never Have I Ever. Is it just me or was Clooney trying to flirt with Rih-Rih and she wasn’t having it? Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet.