By George: Here at Defamer, we've made it no secret that we didn't really care for Frost/Nixon (in the crowded cinematic genre that is "movies that employ a titular blackslash," we still have a soft spot for Face/Off). But could our opinions have been swayed by the suavest, most-mustachioed actor/director around, George Clooney? Writer Peter Morgan says Clooney made a full-court press for the helming gig: "(Clooney) said things like, 'We are really going to kick ass with this!' Not going with him was a complete fucking agony because he suggested doing some script work at his house by Lake Como - at which point my wife was just shaking her head." We can see it now: noted Clooney wingman Mark Wahlberg as Richard Nixon. "Hey there, Frostie. Say hi to your mother for me!" [Daily Express]

This photo from the Albuquerque set of Men Who Stare At Goats reassured us that George Clooney has proudly inherited the mustache mantel from Robert Downey Jr. We instantly felt the need to draw up another one of those celebrity mustache visual cue-charts—the kind we distribute as retractable blackboard teaching aids to classrooms that incorporate Defamer into their curricula. Help us decide which of these five candidates most closely hews to the goat-staring original in a brand new mustache poll after the jump!

Oh, swoon. Just when we thought we couldn't like him any more, Mad Men star Jon Hamm has to go and do a guest-spot on funniest show ever 30 Rock. As a potential love interest for Liz! So that's pretty great. He ably hosted Saturday Night Live last weekend, so we're confident he'll bring the funny. Is this guy on track to be the next George Clooney or what? He's charming and amiable but stern at times, has rugged good looks, and a relaxed but assured masculinity. He's got it all! Or does he... I mean, he's still living pretty modestly. The first season of Mad Men, given that it's an AMC show, probably didn't pay much and his second season contract most likely didn't give him a huge raise. Last we checked, he was living in Los Feliz and driving a leased Audi. So he's not quite tooling around his own Clooney Manor on Lake Como yet. Nor is Mad Men an enormous success or the Hamm name a household one. Yet. Actually he sort of reminds us of those young lads from Good Will Hunting who stood, some 11 years ago, poised to conquer the world. One went one way, the other another. And that has made all the difference. Mr. Hamm is, yes, about ten years older now than Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were when they broke out, but he's arguably at the same career crossroads. So now does he go the Affleck route and try to make his movie star name in cheesy blockbusters and just become a Big Famous Person? Or does he tread more stealthily, choosing diverse and difficult actor parts with fancy directors, like Damon did with The Talented Mr. Ripley and All The Pretty Horses. We know how all that turned out, so hopefully Hamm will take Damon route and do the art house pictures and become big ticket popcorn star. Just like Mr. Clooney, really, who zipped his way through good schlock (the Ocean's movies) and bad schlock (Batman & Robin) before he could really exercise some muscle and get his own creative pet projects made. Clooney has, really, the perfect acting career—a mixture of dark, substantive work and fun lighter fare—and Damon looks to be following ably in his footsteps. We hope that Hamm can do the same. Right now he's got both an indie and a big blockbustery thing in the can, so... two roads diverge.

♦ Jennifer Aniston is pregnant with John Mayer's baby. At least that's what the always-reliable Star is now reporting. [Star]
♦ Remember how Donald Trump said he'd help Ed McMahon by buying his home out of foreclosure? Seems like it was just a publicity stunt at McMahon's expense, although Ed's newfound career as a rap artist should pay the bills for now. [P6]
♦ Your daily dose of Madonna-Guy news: Madge says her husband lived "like a king" off her money and she's insisting the kids be with her during the holidays ("Christmas doesn't exist in the Madonna household because of Kabbalah"). For his part, Guy may already have a new girlfriend. [Daily Mail, Mirror, Page Six]

Actor Tobey Maguire has had another confrontation with the ever-dogged paparazzi, this incident ending in bloodshed. Apparently, his friend punched some photographer and was hauled off to jail. This is the second such outburst for the Spider-Man star, but he's not the only one to lash out at the wicked, prying photogs and their gaggle of flashing lights and inane questions. After the jump take a took at five other celebrities who have stood up and barked "No!" at the insidious rabble.

Cosmopolitan (I'm assuming the British version because Gordon fucking Ramsey made the list too) says that 21 Jump Street star Johnny Depp—who's also in movies—is the hottest male on earth. Usual suspect George Clooney is runner up. And (what?!) Jake Gyllenhaal comes in third place. Gyllenhaal? Like, from Bubble Boy? The rest of the list after the jump. Spoiler alert: Manshark Michael Phelps didn't make the cut. 1 Johnny Depp, 45 2 George Clooney, 47 3 Jake Gyllenhaal, 27 4 Daniel Craig, 40 5 Brad Pitt, 44 6 James McAvoy, 29 7 JustinTimberlake, 27 8 Will Smith, 40 9 David Beckham, 33 10 Wentworth Miller, 36 11 Christian Bale, 34 12 Jonathan Rhys Meyers, 31 13 Take That: Gary Barlow, 37, Mark Owen, 36, Howard Donald, 40 and Jason Orange, 38 14 Ashton Kutcher, 30 15 Dermot O''Leary, 35 16 David Tennant, 37 17 Patrick Dempsey, 42 18 Clive Owen, 44 19 Pierce Brosnan, 55 20 Mark Ronson, 33 21 Gordon Ramsay, 41 22 Russell Brand, 33 23 Pharrell Williams, 35 24 Ryan Reynolds, 31 25 Olivier Martinez, 42 (ANI) [TopNews via OhNoTheyDidn't]

Having recently noted that George Clooney—on location in Puerto Rico while filming paranormal U.S. Army infantry comedy Men Who Stare at Goats—had inherited the mantle of Hollywood's most dashingly fur-lipped esquire from Robert Downey Jr., we're now saddened to inform you that things have taken a turn for the grim:While sunning himself on a chaise longue, the actor suddenly succumbed to a common moustache-newbie syndrome, in which the overstimulated follicles suddenly seize up—rendering the wearer physically immobile, yet in a tremendous amount of pain. Luckily, a team of cabana boys familiar with the condition arrived on the scene almost immediately, and went right about the process of massaging cocoa butter into Clooney's stiffened maw. Before long, the Clooney Smile™ had returned, and he soon went back to the business of committing dialogue to memory.

Having just gotten over the grieving process of parting with Robert Downey Jr.'s world class facial hair and thinking we were ready to start seeing other celebrity moustaches, who should dribble along but George Clooney, rocking the dopest saltn'pepperpiller we've ever seen. Throw in some visible abage going down beneath his sweat-soaked T-shirt, and the Clooney Smile™, and we forgot Downey and the Bandit ever even existed. After the jump: Clooney gets air!

The prospect of someday appearing on the World's Greatest Awards Show has proven quite the lure to big-screen stars in recent years, who've increasingly forgone the fool's errand of mainstream cinema for the more temperate waters of episodic television. A pair of stories making the rounds today, however, suggests the threshold between the two as a point of no return for those who dare to cross, starting with George Clooney, who yesterday turned down the prospect of a guest stint during ER's final season: "[H]e is not coming back," his publicist said. "It is something he has already done. He is busy making movies." Indeed, Men Who Stare at Goats just ruined your ER series finale. We apologize on his behalf. Meanwhile, Tim Roth is hoping the grass — or at least the money — is greener at Fox, where he's aboard Brian Grazer's Lie to Me, about a FBI-recruited scientist "with the innate ability to read whether people are telling the truth":

We're finding out the hard way this morning that an Emmy hangover is the worst kind of malaise: All rank breath, regrets and resentment, bundled up in a headache of knowing there must be something else you missed while watching the television industry implode. And now we know — it was an only slightly less torpid weekend at the movies. Still, it's never too late to wash down some of that bitter aftertaste with a run through the Monday Morning Box Office: 1. Lakeview Terrace — $15.6 million Well, we nailed this one, finally locking down the complex Audience Demand Formula™ for Lakeview's known quantities: Samuel Jackson as a bad guy multiplied by interracial lust, raised to the negative power of Neil LaBute's post-Wicker Man directorial efforts, and that total divided by R-rated date-movie competition from Dane Cook. You try it!2. Burn After Reading — $11.3 million The Coens' latest dropped barely 40% in its second week, forcing hive-mind Clooney haters to spike their semi-annual "George can't open!" pieces for at least two years until he returns in the admittedly challenging Men Who Stare At Goats. At which time all bets are off, even ours. 3. My Best Friend's Girl — $8.3 million Or about $5 million less than tracking indicated. Maybe Dane Cook was right — his vagina-like face doesn't sell tickets after all. 4. Igor — $8 million All over America, families warmed to the story of a hunchback pursuing his lifelong dream of becoming a second-rate bit of animation left to dangle in the marketplace by Harvey Weinstein to the tune of $3400 per screen. 5. Righteous Kill — $7.7 million. Go ahead — insert your "De Niro and Pacino kept it up for a whole week" jokes here.

♦ You'd think that for $85,000-a-month, you might shell out a few extra few bucks on a maid. Apparently not. According to the Star, there's no one cleaning up after Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's kids, and their French chateau is a complete pigsty that "looks like a war zone." [Star]
♦ Jennifer Lopez raised $127,000 for charity by competing in the Malibu triathalon. She then flew directly to New York and spent $800,000 on Marc Anthony's birthday party. [MSNBC]
♦ According to the always reliable Joe Francis, Lindsay Lohan is straight. [E!]
♦ Lindsay: Please don't discuss how you're supporting Barack in November. You're embarrassing him. [NYDN]

Never one to miss an opportunity to sing in public, superstar George Clooney picked up the nearest megaphone and began to croon the afternoon away. Clooney started off with a selection of songs made popular by his aunt, Rosemary Clooney, before transitioning into a jubilant medley of Rudy Valle and Frank Sinatra tunes. One female onlooker was quoted as saying that his appeal was due to the fact that "he's got the voice of the Velvet Fog, the charm of Dean Martin and the sex appeal of all three Jonas Brothers."

Vanity Fair's annual new establishment rankings—a highly subjective guide to status within editor Graydon Carter's universe—has always been more interesting for the losers more than the winners. The magazine's arbiters are too tactful to dole out many down arrows to the moguls, financiers and stars on the list; but the rankings themselves can't be fudged. Here's a list of last year's and this year's contenders ordered by the number of places they've fallen. (Those who've been dropped entirely are assumed to have been relegated to 101st place.)

· Low-budget suspense movie The Strangers, which managed to pretty effectively scare the crap out of us, is getting a sequel. It promises to cover all the rooms in a house Liv Tyler wasn't chased through by a trio of masked psychopaths in the original. [Variety] · NBC gives Chuck gets a full-season order, while America's Got Talent—which seems on course to reward a male Britney Spears impersonator $1 million—got a fourth season. [Variety] · Lonelygirl15 is returning for LG15: The Resistance. Could someone be a doll and fill Aaron Sorkin in on what's happened in the plot until now? [Variety] · ABC is hot for a comedy pilot from Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd that would follow three families as their lives are documented by a Dutch filmmaker. None of the families are Caveman-American, to our knowledge. [THR] · George Clooney is in negotiations to star in Jason Reitman's adaptation of Walter Kirn's frequent-flyer-mile-addiction novel, Up in the Air, effectively bumping this project up to First Class. (Feel free to use that, THR.) [THR]

• George Clooney's ex-girlfriend Sarah Larson may have cheated on the actor when she had a "weekend fling" with a "media mogul," although it appears she's paying for her crime since her new boyfriend is a lowly nightlife promoter named Joey Vanas. [P6]

"Sin City sources say that while the former cocktail waitress was dating Clooney, she 'came to Vegas for a weekend and cheated on him' with a media mogul." [Post]

With the exciting news that Brad Pitt has won his second best actor chalice today at the Venice Film Festival—for what the judging committee deemed his "indomitable spirit both on and off the screen, his effortless embodiment of the American masculine ideal, and the way sucking up to him will facilitate future access to his impossibly fertile and glamorous life partner, Angelina Jolie"—we thought it time to finally time to take a look at the movie which ushered him to victory. We speak, of course, of the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading, which had its world premiere tonight at the festival. If Pitt, as Javier Bardem did before him, could win top accolades with a hairstyle this ridiculous looking, then this truly must have been another masterwork from the sibling geniuses. Let's see what the critics are saying. (And yes, spoilers ensue.) · The Guardian uses the word "triumph" and gives it four stars out of five, calling it "a tightly wound, slickly plotted spy comedy that couldn't be in bigger contrast" to No Country for Old Men, but that the Coens film it most closely resembles is "the divorce-lawyer comedy Intolerable Cruelty." Everyone gets a chance to shine comically, but "Pitt, in fact, gets the best of the funny stuff, [though] has by some way the least screen time of all the principal cast." [The Guardian]· Counterpoint! Variety hated it. Calling it a "dark goofball comedy about assorted doofuses in Washington, D.C.," Burn "tries to mate sex farce with a satire of a paranoid political thriller," with "with arch and ungainly results." Further, a "seriously talented cast" has been "asked to act like cartoon characters," with everything turned up to a "grotesquely exaggerated extent." [Variety] · Yeesh. That last one didn't go so well. Let's go back to loving it again! The Times Online also gives it four stars. Noting it's the first Coen-penned screenplay since 2001's The Man Who Wasn’t There, they compare it to Raising Arizona and Fargo (yay!) in its "savagely comic taste for creative violence and a slightly mocking eye for detail." Carter Burwell’s score is a "brilliant...paranoid piece of film music," though if the movie lacks for anything, it's "warmth." [Times Online]

Dave Matthews, Kanye West, and Sheryl Crow are all performing like monkeys for VIPs in Denver this week. Also expected to be skulking around Denver this week are Ben Affleck, Josh Brolin, Annette Bening, Spike Lee, Anne Hathaway, Susan Sarandon and Charlize Theron, according to AFP. Oh, and Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi are performing before and after Obama's acceptance speech, at that stadium! Soooo many celebrities! Because America loves its celebrities, except that it also despises and resents them. You know how most of America's problems are caused not by the disastrous failure of government over the last like 30 years but by, uh, Tim Robbins? Yes, of course you do! So do Republicans, who learned long ago that the only thing America loved more than obsessively consuming pop culture object is loudly decrying the creators of those objects as unAmerican queers. The fact that Hollyweird (along with the music and television weird-ustries) caters directly and scientifically to every desire of every American demographic does not mean that anyone actually likes famous people, because, obviously, they are misanthropic wealthy blinkered assholes whose lives bear no resemblance to the lives of their audiences. Which is true! They are! Just like politicians and their constituencies! Except no one knows who their Representative is, and everyone knows who Ben Affleck is. He is the Vince Vaughan who isn't funny! And then it gets really odd, because even someone like Bruce Springsteen-who is unreservedly beloved by basically all white people older than 30-suddenly becomes a loathed example of garish flashy wealth when he sings a song for a Democrat. But, you may say, if you actually like Bruce Springsteen it is patently obvious that he has always sang bleeding heart songs about losers betrayed by their countries! But he also sings about cars which cause the Global Warming, which is a myth except when liberal celebrities have big houses, and then it is real. So. Now Obama has to "stay away" from these famous people, except for the ones singing to him on TV, and also George Clooney has issued a press release announcing that he's never texted Barack Obama. George Clooney, in case you are unfamiliar with him, is basically the single most well-liked man in America, which is why his support for Barack Obama is the kiss of death. Of course, if you are a Republican, you get to have the support of shitty country acts who are massively, hugely, insanely popular across the entire country except in the places where journalists live, so they don't count as "celebrities." Get it? Photoshop: Steve Dressler

Though he can usually be found perched upon his yacht in the still, blue waters of Lake Como, even a movie star like George Clooney must occasionally climb inside a car like a common plebe. When he does, accidents happen (though none on the level of Ocean's Twelve), and they could happen to you — that is, if you're an unnamed woman in Pennabilli, Italy. According to Showbiz Spy, Clooney recently rear-ended the woman (ahem) and he made it up to her in a major way:

· George Clooney gets back to what he does best—terrorism, law firms, and car explosions—by buying the rights to The Challenge, a book about the trial of Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver. [Variety] · Tom Cruise is close to signing on for the lead in The Tourist, a Spyglass remake of 2005 French thriller Anthony Zimmer, about an American abroad made the patsy to flush out a master criminal. Cruise would play the patsy. [Variety] · Las Vegas parking lot nuisance and prematurely ejected HBO head Chris Albrecht has left his job at IMG sports and entertainment management after just one year of a three-year contract. A "terse" statement blamed an inability to "raise substantial funds." [Variety] · Chick-flick-plundering network ABC follows up their pilot-order of a The Witches of Eastwick series with another for a show inspired by Maid In Manhattan. [THR] · Lionsgate has purchased scripts from screenwriting duo Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain for Conan and Amazon, with Scarlett Johansson attached to star in the latter. Open casting call for 3-foot-tall mainland extras to follow. [THR]