Pulling a rabbit out of the hat: The Illusionist review

Fabulous movies don't have to be plot-filled. And great scripts can be stuck in development hell for fifty years.

Jacques Tati wrote the screenplay for The Illusionist back in 1956 as a way of trying to re-establish a relationship with his estranged late daughter, Sophie (see also Edinbourg rendez-vous? Yes, please)

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The Tati Estate has been very cautious about anyone producing the story, so Sylvain Chomet (the maker of the classic Belleville Rendez-Vous) needed the tact of a fox to convince the family to let him loose on the crown jewels as a feature-length animation.

And to persuade them to let him reset the movie largely in Edinburgh and the Highlands of Scotland.

Big on atmosphere, father-daughter relationships and the disappointment of fading dreams, The Illusionist is a period costume piece without nostalgia. It's a rites of passage story about growing up and growing old, sad without being tragic and with a strange nobility invested in the central character: Tati himself as the illusionist.

Almost a silent film, the movie has a great chance of an Oscar next year as Best Foreign Picture. Go see it for yourselves.


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Wither the watershed?

Mary Whitehouse is probably spinning furiously in the proverbial at the publication of the latest research from Ofcom.

The British public are apparently relaxed about swearing on television, the culprits even being lauded as role models. Gordon Ramsay has changed the 'bounds of acceptability' almost single-handedly, but his moment will surely pass eventually.

There must still be boundaries, though. Children's programming should be ring-fenced, but where is the limit of protection?

Would Doctor Who ever be profane? Would Radio 1 condone cursing rather than simply tolerate it? Would The X Factor ever entertain bad language?

No ... perhaps. Language limits are always on the move. Eventually people will get bored of excessive swearing, and the expletives will either disappear or youth culture will invent a new rude toolkit of words with which to frighten the media horses.


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A modern Aesop fable

The moral of the story: if you leave your back door open on a hot summer's night, and if a fox chooses to enter your house, and if you have babies asleep in their cots, you run the risk that the said foxes will attack the children.

This is what foxes do, nature happens despite the individual trauma within families this kind of incident causes.

The moral derived by the tabloids, however, will be to mount a cull on urban foxes: a campaign designed to placate readers' fears.

We often forget that human beings share the planet with wild animals, and that sometimes their agenda is different to ours.

So, the ultimate lesson to be learned: close the door and open a window, instead; preferably out of fox-jumping range.

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Wedlock and Mandible

The new London 2012 Olympic mascots are a bit of a tongue-twister and have the look and feel of a children's focus group. Say hello to Wenlock and Mandeville, for the Olympics and Paralympics respectively: cuddly, one-eyed steel-girder off-cuts from the Stadium.

The reaction, from adults, will be harsh initially, who will hark back with nostalgia to unreconstructed furry icons like World Cup Willie.

The children, however, should love them, especially with the four-minute Michael Morpurgo scripted animation. The mascots are inked in to earn £70 million from merchandising, and websites like Facebook and Twitter will be bombarded with interactive opportunities to engage with the dynamic duo.

Give it a few weeks and everyone will have come round to the concept. Two years to go, though, so Wenlock and Mandeville will have their work cut out to stay relevant to the news agenda.


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Lost childhoods

We live in a society rapidly receding to the mid-19th century in its attitudes to children, with the added ingredient of child sexuality excused by improved infant mortality figures in 21st-century Britain and the psychological 'emancipation' of the pill.

A belated outcry against retailers endorsement of items like high-heels for 8-year-olds, t-shirts with inappropriate slogans such as Future Wag, and padded bras for primary-school aged girls has succeeded in getting the products withdrawn. But what were we collectively thinking to let this happen in the first place? And why is Playboy Bunny merchandise still seen as being benign?

What it the boot was on the other foot? Padded jockstraps for 8-year-old, t-shirts with slogans like Future Pimp, and home gyms for toddlers to hone their six-packs? I think not.

And thank goodness the stereotypes haven't veered into race relations.

There will always be a market for tacky, insensitive merchandise. Sometimes the public needs to be protected against itself.


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SamCam mam jam

Just when Samantha Cameron was revving up to support her husband on the campaign trail she goes and gets pregnant.

I'm not sure how this will play with voters. Tory types may prefer her not to get out there, claiming that she will need rest, and it will focus attention on Conservative policies for the family.

It's probably politically neutral news, but does add an extra spicy ingredient to the battle of the PM's wives.

Virtual reality bites

More Americans are currently visiting Facebook than Google. What does this mean?

Are people are perhaps more interested in relationships than in looking things up? Or is Facebook simply more addictive than Google within vulnerable demographics?

This has a downside. There is an increasing demand for clinical intervention to treat addiction to the internet (e.g. the Capio Nightingale Hospital, the Priory). And the internet is not going away anytime soon.

Perhaps the next dotcom fortune will be made devising applications by which people can automatically update Facebook and the like. The time of the online butler is coming, as seen in Minority Report.


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Gunning for John Doe

Public enemy number one? Probably any twenty-something Scouser starting a jail sentence in British in the last few weeks.

Except Jon Venables by now probably speaks the Queen's English with a Home Counties' accent and may be furnishing a clutch of A-Levels for all anyone knows.

The problem with any release of accurate information about Mr Venables' recent return to prison, 17 years after his release with a new identity, is that it would render any future trial impossible. The rage since James Bulger's murder in 1993 has not diminished: any mob vengeance against Mr Venables would muddy the morality of the case and bring society down to the level of gangster anarchy.

Meanwhile, newspapers seem to be printing what they like. The moment an editor goes to jail in the instant the public will know truth from rampant speculation.

And whatever happens in the future, like Winnie Johnson (mother of Keith Bennett, victor of the moors' murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley), Denise Fergus, formerly Bulger, will never really have closure.

All the world's a book ...

... at least for today: World Book Day, in the UK.

This annual event of generic promotion has morphed in Britain as an opportunity to flog books to children: mentally and materially.

Prior to 1997, there was no concerted event around which the book trade -- publishers, booksellers, libraries and educators -- could coalesce. I know, I was one of the voices advocating such an event (through the channel of the ginger group, Booksn), and was a founder member of the steering committee for World Book Day.

The challenge has always been to involve adults more, for World Book Day to be seen as an event for all ages. The original UNESCO concept had no such problem: World Book and Copyright Day always takes place annually on 23 April, building on Catalonia's Book and Rose Fair (staged on St George's Day) and the fortuitous anniveraries falling on the date (including William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Vladimir Nabokov and Josep Pla).

Whatever the origin, books remain vital to culture and our sense of humanity, and World Book Day provides an opportunity for that fact to be remembered.

Stalking J K Rowling

High-profile authors must have good lawyers these days.

Just like successful musicians being accused of ripping off unsigned bands etc., the trend extends to bestselling brands like J K Rowling's Harry Potter books and films.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, literary stalking is the basest form of rapacity. And Joanne Rowling must be swamped by hoards of chancers chasing the harrypotter tailgate.

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The Clueless generation candidates

Exam cheating is up: various gadgets are being smuggled into exam rooms to give performance-enhancing boosts to test scores.

Mobile phones, Blackberrys and iPods are all being pressed into service in the cause of getting better grades.

But why penalise creative use of technology? Why not provide laptops, mobiles and the like to everyone -- like educators do in Finland -- to assess candidates' abilities to analyse, argue points of view and write coherently, rather than distill the exam experience down to an exercise of memory.

The internet instantly makes available more knowledge than any one person can ever know; we are all relative dunces in the digital age. Only Google can be a polymath. Communication of ideas, not parroting of the facts, is the real transferable skill for the 21st-century marketplace.

Daddy not-so-cool

Today's further revelations on the scale of footballer John Terry's involvement with an ex-Chelsea colleague's partner raises a moral dilemma. Should private lives that would grace the scripts of Shameless affect the professional position of sportsmen; specifically, should Mr Terry lose the England captaincy as a result?

The question is a legal can of worms. The Venn diagram of 'current sportsmen' intersecting with 'positive role models for society' is a vanishingly small group (in which the likes of Roger Federer, Andy Murray, Andrew Flintoff, Kevin Pietersen, Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button, Johnny Wilkinson, David Beckham and Lance Armstrong can be found). Giving a young man a fortune is a dangerous thing. (Incidentally, there is a far higher proportionate of high-profile sportswomen who are great role models for girls: the likes of Rebecca Adlington, Paula Ratcliffe, Laura Robson, Clare Taylor, Elly Simmonds.)

Probably the decision will come down to whether John Terry has lost the authority and respect he needs in the eyes of his team-mates. Given that the England team is not blessed with saints, he'll probably keep his job. But the sport's image is diminished, and Mr Terry's sponsors may join Tiger Woods's in sitting on their hands until the flak dies down as well as his wife perhaps taking the legal high ground.

What a mess. Not exactly Bobby Moore, even if England do win the World Cup in 2010. And it puts a new complexion on why John Terry declined to join Manchester City earlier in the season.

Catcher waves goodbye

I felt as sorry as hell to hear the news. With a minimum of fanfare, J D Salinger, the creator of Holden Caulfield, is no more.

The Catcher in the Rye, and his earlier novels, have already shot up the Amazon sales charts with up to 3000 per cent increases.

There are a rumoured fifteen unpublished Salinger novels locked up in a vault. Now that the famously reclusive writer has passed away, what's the betting his Estate will allow publication of his work? If the publishing trade has its way (specifically literary agent Andrew 'The Jackal' Wylie), the first of these books would appear before the end of the year, probably in time for Christmas.

And it's a no-brainer for Hollywood to try to adapt The Catcher in the Rye now there is no obstacle to do so.

Minx stink: parental furore over web game

My Minx makes the case for the licence fee. How so, I predict you'll be asking?

Market forces mean that girls of 7 upwards have been flocking to the designer-style web game to create fashion-icon avatars on the pull and on the pill complete with lowest-common denominator must-have accessories:

• Racist character stereotypes. Check.
• Tasteless storyline threads. Check
• Inappropriate sexual content. Check.
• Pushing parental boundaries. Check.

Blighty Arts, the producers of the game. say My Minx is 'harmless, tongue-in-cheek entertainment'; but they can't even spell the name of their products (sic, 'My Minix') despite all the glitz of their user-interface design.

The relentless push for eyeballs means content gets dragged to the gutter in an unregulated market. Hence the internet and the likes of Fox TV can dream up grotesque virtual and reality freak shows with impunity from regulators.

The licence-fee arrangements in the UK enshrine public-taste standards, which at least keeps some of the wildest ideas off our screens. A constant barrage of tasteless programming eventually become boring, so it always needs to recruit new viewers and participants; hence the relentless, deliberate content pitched at children.

This is the media content equivalent of the drug pusher, and it isn't a pretty sight. The logical extension of such forces to give the mob want they want is ever more graphic sex and violence aimed at progressively younger audiences. This vision of society celebrates a regression to a pre-Enlightenment, violent past.

But perhaps, as the internet is so pervasive, the gloves are already off when it comes to content: at least until the next swing of the pendulum that attempts to impose a moral framework on a feral, free-for-all society where anything goes ... and frequently does.

War on tiny terrors

The old Constable Savage sketch on Not the Nine O'Clock News needs updating.

Two children's television presenters, Anna Williamson and Jamie Rickers on the GMTV cartoon vehicle Toonattik, got stopped by police on London's South Bank on the grounds they were 'Dork hunting' in flak jackets and sunglasses while being followed by a film crew. They were armed with spangly hairdryers and kids walkie-talkies.

Police issued the pair with a warning under the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008.

Despite the predictable furore, the twist is that this might have given real terrorists some ideas. What better ruse to disguise yourself as a comedy superhero when in reality you're up to no good in the name of whatever Al-Qaeda cause is their latest rallying point.

Unfortunately, given the level of security Britain now faces, seemingly facile stories like this will continue to emerge. But, even so, you still couldn't make it up.

Friday night without Jonathan Ross

So, Jonathan Ross has vacated his £18-million seat at the BBC on the probable grounds that middle England wasn't happy with his salary and his perceived light punishment for the disastrous Andrew Sachs radio prank. The truth is probably more complicated, and his replacements are already being touted.

Mr Ross claims he wants to be a house husband, but the rise of his partner-in-crime Russell Brand as a film actor and fiancé to Katy Perry (pop strumpet du jour) probably means he'll have other irons in the fire. So, what might be the options? His family tree may hold some clues:

• Personal biography: Jonathan Ross, film critic, television and radio presenter
• Married to: Jane Goldman, screenwriter (e.g. Stardust), author, bra model and television presenter (e.g. Jane Goldman Investigates);
• Son of: Martha Ross, actress and radio presenter;
• Brother of: Paul Ross, journalist, and television and radio presenter;
• Brother of: Miles Ross, producer, director, actor and writer
• Brother of: Lisa Ross, works in 'the media';
• Brother of: Simon Ross, television producer, Cactus TV [joint MD] (e.g. Richard & Judy, Saturday Kitchen, The TV Book Club)
• Brother-in-law of: Amanda Ross: ditto Simon, especially the book club, voted most influential person in UK book publishing in 2006.

This is a built-in family network, even if Mr Ross has no real need of nepotism due to his spell of 20-plus years in front of a microphone.

My guess? A few months of purdah followed by either a big contract with Sky TV as film critic/presenter (i.e. big media fish slightly on the way down, replacing alumnus Barry Norman) or presenting big documentary and chat-show specials on ITV (i.e. following the resurrection route recently trodden by Piers Morgan) or devising some new panel quiz format that takes terrestrial TV by storm (i.e. following his previous comebacks on They Think It's All Over and Shooting Stars).

I don't see him having the patience or the humility to write books/screenplays and stay off the air for very long. And, as the Ross family have always lived in the Leyton area, I can't see him moving permanently from his London roots, say to Hollywood, for the sake of his wife's screenwriting career.

But whatever he does next it will be for less than £6 million a year, a figure that represents a South Sea bubble high point for any television presenter: it will not be exceeded in real terms for many years -- if ever. Viewer ratings will not, in the end, trump talent gold-rush economics.

How to be Topp at Hogwarts

This isn't exactly a 'Stop the Press' posting, but here goes.

While recuperating from a fiendish chest infection over the past week, I've been reading the Molesworth books written by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated, famously, by Ronald Searle. These books are the mispelt, illustrated musings of Nigel Molesworth a schoolboy at St Cuthbert's, a fictional prep school for boarders. The series was written originally as a boy's-eye version of the earlier St Trinian's stories created by Ronald Searle.

In one of the original quartet of the Molesworth 'novels', How to Be Topp, our hero complains that Latin often comprises reading ancient plays in the original vernacular. He emphasises his point by writing one himself, entitled 'The Hogwarts', under the nom de plume Marcus Plautus Molesworthus.

Lightbulb flashed yet? Despite what Joanne Rowling may say, I reckon she must be a fan of Molesworth, and used the name 'Hogwarts' for her school of witchcraft and wizardry as an homage to the series. Many of the incantations used by characters in the Harry Potter stories are in a form of cod Latin, which could be subtle references to the 'How to Be Topp in Latin' source. And Harry Potter himself even looks like N. Molesworth.

All very interesting and new to me, if already spotted by Potter fans and academics in cyberspace up to ten years ago.

Pharoahs were no slave-drivers

Hmm. Thousands of years of people thinking the Ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids got a raw deal and rough treatment in a slave-master working scenario seem to be in doubt. Newly discovered graves by the side of pyramids in Giza show that pyramid builders were valued, high-status workers who worked on three-month rotations and were fed plenty of meat.

Any standing on the shoulders of giants may have to be rethought if entrepreneurs of more recent times have mistreated workers on the basis that 'whatever was good enough for the Egyptians was good enough for us' (e.g. the cotton industry of the Industrial Revolution, involving cotton mills in North-West England, gin distilleries and the slave trade in Liverpool, slave traders in West Africa and cotton-fields in the southern States of the USA).

Does this finding mean other historical working relationships need to be re-examined? The Christians in the Colosseum or slave-powered galleys or Ancient Rome? The sacrificial rites of the Ancient Aztecs? The child labour and sweatshops of the Industrial Revolution? Er, probably not.

Doctor Ooh

... or maybe even Doctor Ood. The first part of the timelord's 2009 Christmas special The End of Time shown on BBC One tonight was a postmodern mesh of self-reflection over the Russell T. Davies era: the whole dog-and-pony show.

There will also be millions of children who woke up to Santa bearing gifts this morning who will have nightmares tonight inspired by The Master. Lots of hand-holding, landing lights left switched on and favourite bedtime stories being read tonight, and that's just the parents.