UP Adrien Brody and Elsa Pataky
Sometimes, an event of such magnitude occurs that those charged with relaying
the news wish they could prove just how devoted they are to the task. This
week, for instance, Celebrity Watch wishes that it could run all the way
from Marathon to you, shout out what it has discovered, then just literally
drop down dead from exhaustion and total celebrity excitement.
And what is it that is in CW's cold, dead, still quite sweaty hands?
Undoubtedly the most important copy of Hello! magazine ever published.
Because this week's issue marks the emergence of a new Super Couple on to
the world's stage. A pair who make Posh and Becks look like, oh, Mike
Baldwin and Deirdre Barlow. This duo comprises the Oscar-winning star of The
Pianist, Adrien Brody, and his girlfriend, Elsa Pataky (“Perhaps best known
to English-speaking audiences for her role in Snakes On A Plane, as Hello!
modestly put it.) Readers, it has us from Elsa's opening quote: “When I saw
the castle, I asked Adrien: 'Is this ours?' He said: 'Yes' - welcome home.”
Over the course of the next 34 pages - 34!!! You could cover the past 300
years of Sino/Japanese diplomacy in nine! - your eyes will be so excited by
what they are seeing that they will ricochet around your head like a
pinball. For Pataky and Brody haven't just bought a ginormous castle in
upstate New York; they have bought celebrity's future high watermark of
amazingness.
Here is Brody sitting, seemingly naked, in an empty bath, reading a script
while Pataky looks at him lovingly. There, Brody kisses Pataky's hand as
they sit astride matching horses. Most notable of all, however, is their
pioneering work in discovering a wholly new place to show a magazine how
much they love each other. A JCB! They establish what will surely be the
ground rules in any future attempts: man in the driving seat, lady, in
floor-length chiffon, in the bucket. Amazing. Their life doesn't just say
“Worldwide depression? What worldwide depression?”, it also says, “World?
What world?” CW bangs its metaphorical spoon on the table - a gigantic
antique African drum, the size of a trampoline, covered in vintage Casio
keyboards, like they're Damon Albarn or something - and screams “More!”
UP Vladimir Putin
Many fear Putin as a cold, war-mongering autocrat who will only ever leave
the Kremlin in a coffin. Not CW, however; CW analyses international figures
on a much deeper level than most, and sees that he is displaying all the
signs of an imminent shift into showbusiness. First there were the “topless
fishing shots”, which got immediate press attention; very Jodie Marsh/Abi
Titmuss. Then there were the “I totally just shot this tiger” shots,
bringing in the 25-40 male demographic; very Bear Grylls. And now, as if to
confirm his unstoppable trajectory towards replacing Dannii Minogue on X
Factor 2009, we have his first DVD, Let's Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin. CW
ascribes a great deal of living to the age of 33 down to never calling men
with 6,000 strategic nuclear missiles “as camp as a Christmas tree”, and so
will, for the moment, demur from discussing the DVD further.
DOWN Sharon Stone
Sad times in the Stone camp. The woman who was practising “bushcraft” years
before the survivalist Ray Mears has failed to gain custody of her child,
Roan. Some reports suggest that Stone wanted her son's “foot odour problem”
to be solved by Botox injections to his feet, as opposed to an alternative
“cure”: wearing trainers and socks. But who's to say that the more fabulous,
Hollywood way would not have been just as effective? The next time that Roan
acts as all young boys do - attempting an amateur and show-boaty form of
“kung fu” on one of his younger cousins - Stone could perhaps try to “detox”
the naughtiness out of him, with a series of $400 aloe colonic irrigations.
UP Liam Gallagher
Time for CW's now-weekly descent into a maelstrom of increasingly poor puns,
triggered by a recent celebrity event. This week, the pun sprinkler-system
has been set off by the news of Liam Gallagher's secret beauty regimen.
“Liam's been dyeing his hair for a hile now. And wearing make-up,” Noel
Gallagher revealed, almost certainly solely to wind up his younger brother.
Perhaps Liam has been resorting to other female accoutrements of vanity?
Rollers With It? Cigarettes and Al-kohl? WonderBra-wall? Don't Look Back in
Tanga (a tanga being a type of “giant thong” briefly popular in the early
Nineties)?
UP Jade Goody
Cultural lightning rod-cum-national whipping boy, Goody has been talking to
OK! about her treatment for stage three cervical cancer. CW tends to get
quite tetchy with anyone (such as Jordan, or CW's mum) who suggests that
it's in some way “unseemly” for her to be giving paid interviews about her
illness; CW strongly thinks that if you have an aggressive tumour that went
undiagnosed for more than three years, have just had a hysterectomy and now
face the possibility that, if you don't undergo chemotherapy, your children
could be motherless by Christmas, getting a couple of grand from OK! to talk
about it is a fairly modest silver-lining to a black cloud roughly the size
of thePhilippines.
That said, however, CW is genuinely quite horrified at some of the questions
OK! put to Goody. With her on/off boyfriend, Jack Tweed, currently in jail,
she has had to cope with her illness alone. OK! tackled this aspect of her
life with the question: “How's [Jack] coping - has he been safe in the
showers?” Because it's always nice when a national publication asks if your
partner is being raped in prison. Follow-up questions/comments included:
“What if one of the kids at school goes up to [your kids] and says 'Your mum
is going to die'?”; “Would you come back as a ghost?”; and, fairly
incredibly, “You'll be like a cockroach, who'll live for ever.” CW tries not
to make being an armchair working-class warrior into a habit, but really;
would they talk like this to nice, middle-class Kirsty Wark, say, as she cut
all her hair off and prepared for chemotherapy?
DOWN Cristiano Ronaldo
This week Ronaldo opened his boutique, CR7, in Lisbon, selling floral “man
bags”, diamanté-studded belts and jeans with leather pockets. Now CW doesn't
enjoy pointing it out when aggressively hetereosexual men inadvertently do
something that makes them look like leather-clad man sluts in Hoist gear.But
it cannot help pondering if Ronaldo has noticed what happens if you utter
“CR7, CR7, CR7” over and over, very quickly. No, keep going. Ah, you see?
“See arse heaven.” It's a secret buried message, like in The Da Vinci Code.
(FYI, Ronaldo: CR7 is also the postcode for Croydon.)
UP Minnie Driver
Driver, newly blessed with issue, has released pictures of the baby, Henry,
on MySpace, thus showing, if not her age (all the kids are on Bebo now,
Grandma), then a winning distance from all those celebrities who flog their
first baby pictures for millions. With wholly admirable Amazonian mystery,
Driver is refusing to name the father of the baby, confirming only that he
is British. CW has studied the picture of Driver carefully, however, and
feels fairly confident on offering odds of 5/2, Winston Churchill; 6/1 Ian
Hislop; 4/1, Minty from EastEnders.
DOWN Lily Cole
The coming academic year will be a difficult one for male Future Pillars of
the Establishment, for the ginger-eyebrowed supermodel Lily Cole is
beginning her academic career at King's College, Cambridge. Aside from being
worth £3 million, Cole also appears on the cover of the current issue of
French Playboy, wearing kneesocks and piggy-tails, and hugging a giant teddy
bear. One can only hope that the college will be offering modules in “How To
Forget That Picture When Cole Asks You Where The Porter's Lodge Is”, and
“What to Do With Your Face If Cole Accidentally Touches You in a Queue”.
DOWN Angelina Jolie
CW is very pro-Jolie. She's a bleeding-heart liberal with queen bee-stung
lips, who's got Brad Pitt changing the nappies of half the world's
dispossessed children. She certainly makes it into CW's Big Book of Kick-Ass
Feminists with Great Hair. However, alarm bells are ringing at Jolie's
latest decision. Plagued by rumours of her postnatal depression after the
birth of twins in August, she has announced that she will be relocating the
family to ... Berlin! Because - like Paris in springtime, or Prague on
Christmas Eve - there's nothing like the sight and smell of wet German
concrete in November to raise the spirits.
UP Aggie MacKenzie
MacKenzie, of How Clean Is Your House? (that seems a culture aeon ago,
farther back than Watergate, or the repeal of the Corn Laws. But not as long
ago as Changing Rooms) reveals her former job: “We were taken into a room
and a man said, 'This isn't the Foreign Office; this is MI6'.” But after two
years she was “seeing things I really didn't want to see”, and left. Alas,
it was unclear whether she meant dubious Secret Service tactics or a
build-up of limescale in the staffroom kettle.
