Myleene and Angelina Jolie's 10 point plan to save Labour

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Mansion-class celebs are coming for Labour. First there was Myleene Klass’s ITV sofa assault on Ed Miliband’s property tax plans — “You can’t just point at things and tax them!” — to which a frozen Ed failed to answer “Yes you can if it’s a house!”
Then Hollywood royalty waded in on the row. Angelina Jolie (net worth with Brad £269m) told Channel 4’s Jon Snow that she may — shock, horror — decide not to move to a Marylebone mansion if Labour decides to tax it. “That might put me off.”
With Myles and Angie on his case, Miliband’s no-balls shadow chancellor is quaking. In an Evening Standard column Ed Balls admitted that plans to tax £2m-plus properties “are not popular with everyone but we but we are being clear about where the money is coming from for our health service.”
Let’s face it, if you put Myleene and “Tomb Raider” Angelina into a ring with the two Eds for gloves-off fisticuffs, there’s little doubt about who would end up face down on the mat. These high-net worth stars, known for their humanitarian leanings and constant use of the pages of Hello! to show off their fabulous lifestyle, have now jumped to the defence of the hard put-upon pluto-grannies from this tax thingummy.
And to save the Eds from a further pasting, Myles and Angie have got together to have a go at rewriting the Labour manifesto to make it more celeb-friendly. Truly, with Brangelina serious about getting a “foothold” in London — and she being “responsible about money” — who better to give advice on economy policy?

So here is their 10-point plan to remake Britain:

1. Poor people should stop complaining. It’s within their power to become who they want to be. All you need is hard work, expensive education and high-powered pushy parents. Go for it!

2. Celebrities pay a lot of tax already (well, the ones not smart enough to use tax-avoidance schemes). The least we could do is give them their own lane on the motorway to drive their hot wheels past adoring fans. If it’s good enough for Kim Jong Un...

3. Elections will be fought out in an X-Factor cum Bake Off — that’s right. Sing or bake, or both. The public decides. Digital democracy at work.

4. Politics is boring and turning people off. From now on, PMQs will be replaced with a Klaas and Jolie masterclass in economics, including priceless advice on how to disburse your millions across the world and stay ahead of the taxman.

5. The British royal family needs a makeover, so let’s have a TV vote for who should be the next Queen. (Hint: someone younger, beautiful with a string of hit songs and/or movies).

6. Most NHS costs can be reduced by healthier lifestyles — its strictly seaweed from now on. Jolie-Klass TV will offer tips to the nation on healthy eating and daily workouts. Get out the lycra and get with the programme.

7. All school uniforms will be from Littlewoods and M&S, with free Baby K Clothes for nursery age toddlers — royalties to Myleene. Kerrching!

8. Most life lessons can be gleaned from a careful viewing of Lara Croft, Mr and Mrs Smith, Maleficent and The Tourist. Compulsory movie classes in schools from age five and school assemblies will learn to sing the Hear’Say back catalogue.

9. Free acting and classical music lessons for offenders to encourage rehabilitation with inspiration from Myles and Angie. A lucky few will get places on the Ex-Con Factor, hosted by Andy Coulson.

10. No more politics of envy. You are beautiful and talented — not as beautiful or talented as us obviously, but everyone can aspire to be the best.

There you go, Ed. Alternatively you could just tell these millionaires that if they don’t want to pay their tax, they are welcome to leave. I hear Malibu is lovely this time of year — they can be happy knowing we’ll find a socially useful way to occupy those empty mansions.

Interstellar dreams, the Rosetta landing and where is Christopher Waltz?

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It's not every day that there is a story of human achievement that makes you proud to be a higher simian.
The Rosetta probe travelled 6 billion miles and landed on a comet that orbits the Sun at up to 135,000kmph. That's precision! It bounced, and its not getting enough sunlight to power its batteries, but hell, they did it - a decade after takeoff from earth.
And it's especially pleasing that the remarkable landing of a robotic probe on Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko is a European Space Agency triumph.
Most of the time when I think about the human race its our pathological species-and-habitat-destroying rush to cataclysm that leaves Nature no choice but to declare, right, it's pestilence and flood for you lot. Rather like the scenario in Interstellar.
Rosetta's comet landing coincidentally happened in the same week that Christopher Nolan's galactic smash hits our screens – or was it a fiendish bit of scheduling by the distributors? The film is a return to the golden age of space fiction with a massive nod to the big daddy of space epics, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Nolan and his writer brother have said how important films like Space Odyssey and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters were in their own love affair with the genre. As children they recreated Star Wars and filmed it with the basic equipment at their disposal.
No wonder that Spielberg was initially lined up to work on the movie, until he dropped out and Nolan took it on.
Interstellar combines the eco-apocalyptic with the soaring thrills of going where no Hollywood stars (Matthew McConnaughey and Anne Hathaway) have gone before. The comparison with Space Odyssey is revealing. In Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's breakthrough epic, we are in the full flush of an optimistic space age – the movie was released a couple of years before Neil Armstrong strolled on the Moon.
By contrast, Nolan's crew head for a black hole to save the planet from ecological destruction - or rather, they've given up on Earth and are looking for a new home. McConnaughey is a farmer who was once a promising pilot but discovers a secret Nasa base where a save the world suicide mission through a black hole is being plotted.
The threat in Interstellar is extinction and human frailty. In Space Odyssey it is a homicidal computer - again, the twist in Nolan's film is that the intelligent robots are friendly and the only reliable partners for the astronauts when their fellow space explorers keep letting them down.
Some have criticised the film for reinforcing the idea that there is no solution to man's destruction of the environment - the answer is to leave this dustbowl planet behind and start again. It's a fair point but it certainly provides the dramatic impetus for the mission.
It's also noticeable how American this project it - the rest of the planet seems to have collapsed back to subsistence. Only a secret Nasa holdout is capable of launching a mission to find an exoplanet capable of supporting life.
When the astronauts do find a new planet, the Stars and Stripes are ubiquitous. It's as if Brit Nolan wants to make Americans feel great again in an age when most assume the US faces terminal decline as a global power (despite still having military bases in every continent).
Space Odyssey doesn't have this nationalistic overtone (both Clarke and Kubrick were wary of such sentiments), while Spielberg's Close Encounters features an overtly international project to welcome the ETs to Earth.
In a sense, Nolan takes us back to the frontier mythology of a few brave men - and one woman - who are prepared to go into the unknown and found a new colony. Yes, McConnaughey does keep saying he's doing it for the people back on Earth  - not just the Americans - but then what's with the 19th century flag in the dirt symbolism?
There's one (possibly two) miscasts in Interstellar - I just can't accept Matt Damon as a brainy scientist - surely he's the one who kicks ass in Bourne and such like? No, the part of Dr Mann was made for someone (a) not American (b) European and (c) Christopher Waltz.
And as for Michael Caine as a professorial English Einstein, well, okay, we can go with that. Fundamentally, it's all far too Anglo-Saxon. Yes, there is a black astronaut - the excellent David Gyasi - but ne'er a funny accent to be heard.
But that aside, I fell totally in love with the aesthetic 70s-ness of the film - a return to the golden age of sets and effects that you can almost touch and feel. Everything from the creaking farm, to the retro space suits and the fabulous blue-screen consols in the space ship, and all those Star Wars-style dirty white panelled ship interiors. Even space itself looked analogue.
The curse of CGI is banished, and as someone else may have said, Gravity may have been mind-blowing for pure adrenalin and 3-D effects, but it was weightless and insubstantial compared to the huge reach and scope of Interstellar's visual and spiritual-journey ambitions. Not since Carl Sagan's Contact has a space movie felt like it has the philosophical gravity to explore the ultimate questions of What's Out There and Are We Alone?
And then there's the climax, when we follow the hero over the event horizon into the fifth dimension - I think, if anything, it beats Space Odyssey in its leap into the utterly alien and yet familiar time-space multi-verse. It is something to behold.
Images and sensations from the movie have come back in flashes in the days since I saw it. Like, does love have an evolutionary purpose to preserving the species? What is the true role of gravity in the universe? And what happens to us when the food starts to run out? What are we prepared to do to save the species - or ourselves?
Interstellar asks these questions and imaginatively answers them while taking us on a jaw-dropping journey. That counts for something. It's Nolan's best film since Dark Knight and his most ambitious since Memento.
But back in 2014, the ESA takes the crown for Rosetta, and Nasa does best in Hollywood.