These Venice Film Festival photos are hilarious. They have everything: trash bangs, terrible posture, a political crashout, tragic highlights and what looks like a pair of orthopedic lifts. Last night in Venice, George and Amal Clooney walked the red carpet for the first film screening (Danny Boyle’s Ink), and then George received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. It was presented by my nemesis Laura Dern, who wore a little-girl pink Prada dress and those god-awful bangs.

As for George and Amal… her dress was a familiar-looking Tom Ford by Haider Ackermann. Some other celebrity just wore a version of this and I just spent too long trying to remember who it was – it was Priyanka, but hers was a column dress by a different designer (and hers was much better). I can’t help but look at George’s shoes as well – I’m pretty sure they are orthopedic lifts, probably to help with his bad back. Amal is going to need back support in the longterm if she continues to hunch over to avoid towering over George.

As for George’s Golden Lion speech, he once again tried to chime in about politics. This dude crashed out so hard in 2024, he fled to France and got emergency French citizenship.

“We’re living through a moment in time where the people in charge and people with the most money are telling us to fear one another,” Clooney said. “But we know better than that, don’t we? Because history does teach us a lesson.”

He continued, “The first people that authoritarians try to shut down are not politicians. They’re journalists who ask questions, they’re the artists who refuse simple answers, the filmmakers, writers, actors and musicians who insist that someone you never met is deserving of your empathy.”

Clooney asserted that “stories are always dangerous to people who peddle in fear” and “the people who are afraid of books and music and stories are never the heroes in history.”

He added, “So yes, movies don’t stop wars, they don’t lower inflation, they don’t fix elections. But they do do something remarkable. They remind us that a stranger is never stranger, and that he might just be the hero in somebody else’s story. And if we can still sit together in the dark and care about people we’ve never met, I think we’ll be OK.”

Clooney then thanked his friends and his wife, Amal Clooney, who was beaming in the audience. “I am at a loss for words to describe how much I love my wife and how proud I am of her and our two children,” he said.

[From Variety]

At this point, I don’t even have words to describe my disgust at George and his continued efforts to sound wise and politically savvy. At best, he’s a dilettante cosplaying a political activist. At worst… well…

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.