George Clooney is one of the most socially-conscious actors around today – something we know because he made a film that was vaguely about oil or something once – and there isn't a good cause that he won't stand directly behind.
But sometimes we get the feeling that George Clooney bites off a little more than he can chew. Speaking out about the Darfur crisis? Fine. Trying to stop mass atrocities? Easy. AIDS? Poverty? Piece of cake. But now George Clooney has decided to do the impossible and try and tackle the biggest humanitarian crisis of our times – the Britney Spears custody case. Britney Spears getting banned from driving her children after she was caught running a red light has angered George Clooney so much that he's launched into an impassioned defence of her treatment at the hands of the paparazzi, something that he plans to follow-up next week with a incisive commentary on the current state of J-Lo's baby-bump.
Think what you like, but George Clooney loves the press. George Clooney loves the press because his father was a journalist and he made a film about journalists once. However, the love affair between George Clooney and the press is a strange kind of affair, like when you meet a girl who insists on punching you in the face as hard as she can during sex.
Because even though his face is always leering out at us from billboards, magazine advertisements and TV commercials advertising whatever generic product he can lay his hands on at any given point in time, George Clooney hates having his picture taken. So strong is George Clooney's hatred for the paparazzi that he once tried to date Leonardo DiCaprio to stop it happening, for god's sake. And that's before the paparazzi even tried to kill him – so imagine how mad George Clooney is now that they sort of have.
Last week a tape emerged of George Clooney throwing a tantrum because some photographers in cars may have possibly driven so dangerously that he was almost knocked off his motorbike again. And that's given George all the impetus he needs to start berating the paparazzi in public again. Not for his sake, you understand, for the sake of Britney Spears, who was recently banned from driving her children around because she ran a red light on a dangerous intersection.
Obviously, as George Clooney points out, this wasn't actually Britney's fault. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Clooney said:
"You look at the footage of Britney running the red light – there's eight guys with cameras at night in the middle of the street. There are no rules now. It's getting to a point where people that are not involved are getting hurt… What they're doing is illegal, it's high speed chases and they're competing with each other. They're not trying to catch me doing something stupid; they're trying to create me doing something stupid. You don't get to break all these laws and then say, 'I'm just doing my job.' The guys that commit all these crimes are rewarded for it. It creates bounty hunters in a way."
Oh, this old minefield again. Now, you could argue that the paparazzi are only doing what they do because magazine editors pay them tens of thousands of dollars for photos, and that's because the public enjoys looking at them more than not looking at them. Or you could argue that if the paparazzi didn't follow Britney Spears around then her new album would have sunk like a stone since she isn't doing any other promotion for it.
Or you could argue that the website which hosted the video of George Clooney losing his temper is owned by AOL, which is part of Time Warner so therefore in the same company that made Syriana and the Ocean's films, meaning that in a way it's actually funding his moviestar lifestyle.
They're all valid points, as is George Clooney's that breaking the law isn't very clever. So who's right and who's wrong? We're going to make up our mind just as soon as we've figured out which option means George Clooney doesn't have to do so many of those bastard adverts everywhere all the time.