I know this happened last night but I must have been in bed when it happened because of the time difference and I only just clocked it just now so maybe a few of you didn’t see it. But yeah, basically last night Clint Eastwood went insane at the Republican National Convention that was held last night as he pretended that Barack Obama was sitting opposite him in an empty chair and grilled him about how he had failed to live up to his campaign promises. It’s really, really bizarre and kind of like something you might see on an old sketch show between some guy and a hand puppet, except there’s no hand puppet there’s just an empty chair.
Clint Eastwood rambles on and on for almost 12 minutes and just seems like a sad old man with senile dementia rather than the Man With No Name/Dirty Harry that we all know and love. The thing is Clint Eastwood isn’t a senile old man – despite looking like one – because he still makes and stars in movies that are way better than 90% of the other movies out there, so I don’t really know what he was going for on this one. Did he think it was funny? Or charming? It just came across as weird, creepy and bizarre, kind of like when your old uncle comes around for Christmas Dinner and is kind of fun for a couple of hours but then gets really weird after a few drinks and tries to put his arm around your cousin whilst slobbering all over them on the couch.
Most of the world (twitter) seemed to agree with this analysis of the events as Clint Eastwood was pretty much ridiculed by everyone on there. Roger Ebert said he was coming across as ‘sad and pathetic,’ whilst Chris Rock tweeted ‘Clint Eastwood on the phone with Obama now, ‘It all went according to plan, sir.’ Someone even created a fake twitter account called Insivible Obama that already has around 50K followers and tweets nuggets like “Quick. Turn on MSNBC. I’m going to be all over it right now. Well just my chair, unless u have invisible glasses. Or ur Clint Eastwood,” which is great right. The speech even inspired its very own hashtag craze that might rival planking and batmanning (or even horsemanning) – #eastwooding whereby a user would post a picture of themselves gesticulating at an empty chair. Original.
The speech isn’t actually that bad but it is really weird and was a really bad idea. Hopefully it won’t tarnish Clint Eastwood’s reputation too much because everyone wants to remember him as one of the baddest badasses in history, not some senile old man babbling at an empy chair. If you want to remember him that way, maybe don’t bother watching this video of the speech:
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=933hKyKNPFQ’]
