One Direction: This Is Us (3D) (PG)
dir: Morgan Spurlock

When the five-piece boy-band One Direction perform in the concert sequences of their first film, they are dwarfed at all times by vast fragmented images of themselves on video screens behind them. This is for the benefit of those fans seated so far back that they’re in a different postcode, but it also provides an ongoing metaphor for fame, which inflates people to many times their natural size while also breaking them into innumerable pieces and dispensing them among their worshippers. The special accomplishment of One Direction: This Is Us is to balance these contradictory versions of its subjects. On one hand, they are pop-culture titans who take in their skinny-jeaned stride a show in Mexico City before an audience of 65,000. On the other, they hide mischievously inside wheelie bins, loll around hotel suites in their pants and wonder aloud why Japan isn’t hotter when it sits, after all, slap-bang next to Australia.

The film intersperses excerpts from live shows with plentiful off-stage footage from the group’s first world tour, as well as a brief recap on their reality TV origins for those of us who haven’t watched The X Factor since the days of Peters & Lee. In that way, it works as both primer and fan-club memorabilia. There are childhood snaps and TV footage from a bygone era (i.e 2010). An extra-camp Simon Cowell, hands draped over a dainty teacup, explains how the fans propelled One Direction beyond their bronze finish in the X Factor final and into mega-stardom, but not how he manages to forge a centre parting in his busby-like hairdo.

Morgan Spurlock, who made his name directing gimmicky docu-comedies including Super Size Me, has a lot of fun with the disparity between the public and private incarnations of the band members. One, Liam, returns to the family home only to be spooked by a full-sized cardboard standee of himself, which his parents have installed in his room. What do you mean, “only a mother could tell them apart”? On the contrary, another miracle of Spurlock’s movie is that it brings to life as individual personalities these men who until now seemed to the uninitiated like little more than advertisements for maximum-hold hair product, with bodies attached.

Apart from Liam (big lug, credulous, sincere), let me introduce you to Niall (chirpy blonde goofball) and Zayn (brooding matinée-idol type). Less quirky is Louis, who has a touch of Stepford about him. But there’s always the rakish Harry, the band’s Lennon, prone to larking around during photo-shoots (“Do a normal one, please, Harry!”) but aware of when to hang back, say nothing, bide his time. He has a dry wit, too: contemplating the days when it seemed Zayn might be ejected from the group, he says, “Imagine:  Niall would have had to be the mysterious one.” (That’ll be Niall who farts in the tour bus, then denies it.)

Harry’s timing and fashion sense – he can carry off a trenchcoat while his bandmates slum it in hoodies – make it easy to imagine him in a members’ club in middle-age, though he must be wary of becoming the next Alex James. Come to think of it, that’s sage advice for anyone.

In touching on the neuroses of life in an unimaginably successful teen-bait chart act, One Direction: This Is Us doesn’t kill the monster in the manner of Head, the 1968 Monkees film which deconstructed the pop dream. But neither does it merely feed that monster; truer to say the film approaches it with the deepest curiosity, sometimes venturing inside the cage, elsewhere recoiling and prodding it with a stick. A recurring theme is the group’s amazement at how precisely they can modulate the behaviour of many thousands of strangers. To prove that One Direction have the most dedicated fans in the world, Niall rises at one point from the chair where he is being interviewed, bounces across the silent hotel room and throws open the window, where a swelling roar announces itself from the streets below. Spurlock wisely confines this all to one unbroken shot, like a conjuring trick, and the effect is reprised again and again—most spectacularly when the band peeks over the top of the Arena di Verona at thousands of fans whose volume they can raise or lower with the tiniest gesture.

It’s easy to see a strong sexual element here: five young men modulating the shrieks of an entire city’s female pubescent population with a mere flick of their wrists. But the situation plays in reverse too. The ravenous young women have the upper hand when they make it impossible for the group to leave a tiny Amsterdam sportswear shop. “One of ‘em tried to grab me ear,” laughs Liam, with the same degree of amused confusion with which the band greet the prospect of miso soup.

If the scenes of hysteria align One Direction: This Is Us with Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, the picture’s melancholy undercurrent brings it closer to a more emotionally conflicted pop movie such as the insightful In Bed with Madonna – and not only because Martin Scorsese, bringing his daughter backstage at Madison Square Garden to meet One Direction, offers the most awkward celebrity compliment since Kevin Costner told Madonna her show was “neat.” Generous screen time is given to One Direction Snr – the group’s parents, that is – who pine for their sons as if they’ve just departed for the trenches. The fathers seem almost fearful of how their boys will have changed once they return from the theatre of war, or in this case, sixteen nights at the O2 Arena. (That place can be nasty. Have you seen what they ask for a hot dog?)

There is plenty of room for contemplation from the musicians themselves. During a staged camping trip, they ponder whether they will always be friends, and how strange it is that one day they won’t be doing “this” any more. Liam worries that people only like him because he’s a celebrity, while Harry points out that being called famous is no match for being considered a nice guy. It’s awfully poignant – like seeing the realisation of mortality dawning on a puppy’s face – and it tempers sweetly the bluster of the live shows, the blandness of the songs.

The band’s ambivalence about fame is expressed most piercingly during those digressions in which they dress in disguise to mill among their admirers, safe in the knowledge that no one would want to rip an ear from the head of the elderly, hirsute, overweight or ugly. When Niall dons whiskers and a padded suit to pose as a One Direction-hating security guard showing fans to their seats, he is flirting with what it would feel like to be anonymous, ignored, undesirable. “One Direction are crap,” he rages at the startled concertgoers before making his exit. “All go home!” In common with many parts of this sophisticated movie, it may be fake but that doesn’t make it any less real. 

David Cameron has recalled Parliament in order to have a vote on whether or not the UK should take military action against Syria. I applaud this move; it is one I have long argued for. But the early signs are not encouraging. The suggestion seems to be that we will make a limited response to the use of chemical weapons. In other words, this is not about regime change but about making some sort of tit for tat, "let's show them who's the boss", strike. Such an effort would be completely pointless.

Some argue that we should not be choosing sides in Syria. But we already have. Our leaders decided long ago that they wanted Assad out and have said so on numerous occasions. As a result, we either get involved with the idea of making a real, positive difference in Syria or we stay clear of the whole thing. After the chemical weapons incident of the 21st, sitting on the sidelines seems almost impossible. If we don't respond to chemical weapons being used, we give carte blanche to every tin pot dictator to use them with impunity from here on. But token engagement would be equally damaging to both the west and to Syria. If we're going to take action that we know will cost lives, it needs to be done with the thought in mind that many more lives will be saved in the long-term through our efforts.

I was on Daybreak this morning before Diane Abbott, who has warned that she may resign from the Labour frontbench if Ed Miliband endorses military intervention in Syria. While we fundamentally disagree on the basics, I agree with Diane on one thing: if Britain gets involved in any way militarily we take some level of ownership over the whole thing. We cannot 'kind of' get involved - once we're in, whatever happens in Syria from then on becomes our business in a way that isn't true if we sit on our hands. All of which is fine so long as we aim to make our intervention count.

People have compared the current situation we face with Syria to that we faced over Iraq 10 years ago. While there are many differences between the two scenarios (there is a war going on in Syria that we should be trying to stop, whereas there was no war in Iraq before we invaded), the parallel with Iraq that no one has yet made is the 1991 Gulf War and the failure to depose Saddam. It was about Kuwait, it was said at the time, nothing more. How likely is it that 12 years from now we are going to have to send troops into Syria when the civil war is still raging and the number of people killed or displaced has entered the millions? I think we would be severely regretting not having taken the chance to end the conflict when we had the opportunity to do so.

Mike Gapes: We are already involved

There have never been easy or risk-free options in Syria. Now, because of the failure of the “international community” to act earlier, all options are bad ones. Even before the gassing of thousands of people in oppositionheld districts of Damascus on 21 August, the conflict had left 100,000 dead, four million driven from their homes and over a million refugees in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.

John Baron: We’re better off helping refugees 

Where Miliband leads, Cameron follows. That is the political upshot of tonight's events. Everything we heard from Downing Street and William Hague earlier today suggested that MPs would vote tomorrow on whether to authorise British military action against Syria, despite the UN warning that its weapons inspectors would not complete their work for at least four days. But a few hours ago, after speculation that Labour was preparing to abstain, Miliband made his move.

He announced on Twitter that the party would table an amendment to the government's (then non-existent) motion requiring Cameron to return to the Commons to consult MPs after the UN team had reported on the Ghouta massacre. He added: "Parliament must tomorrow agree criteria for action, not write a blank cheque." Labour sources subsequently briefed that were the amendment not accepted, the party would vote against the motion.

At 5:15pm, according to Labour's account, Cameron "totally ruled out" a second vote. But just an hour and a half later, confronted by an incipient rebellion on the Tory backbenches, he blinked. The government motion was published and guaranteed that a "further vote of the House of Commons" would be held before any "direct British involvement". In line with Labour's position it stated that "[This House] agrees that the United Nations Secretary General should ensure a briefing to the United Nations Security Council immediately upon the completion of the team’s initial mission; Believes that the United Nations Security Council must have the opportunity immediately to consider that briefing and that every effort should be made to secure a Security Council Resolution backing military action before any such action is taken."

Cameron is now faced with the embarrassment of recalling parliament to hold a vote on a vote. Had he proceeded with less haste, MPs could have returned to Westminster next week as planned and voted after the UN inspectors had reported.

For Miliband, the question remains how he will respond once the evidence has been presented. He has merely postponed, rather than obviated, this dilemma. But whether or not Labour eventually supports intervention, few would dispute, after the experience of Iraq, that is prudent to wait until all the facts are in. A sceptical public, rightly, expects nothing less. In an inversion of Blair, he has ensured that the policy is shaped around the facts, rather than the facts around the policy and insulated himself from the charge that the inspectors "should have been given more time".

By seeking to proceed from action to evidence, rather than from evidence to action, Cameron misjudged the mood of both Labour and his own MPs. Tonight, it is Miliband who looks like both the stronger and the smarter leader.

This House expresses its revulsion at the killing of hundreds of civilians in Ghutah, Syria on 21 August 2013; believes that this was a moral outrage; recalls the importance of upholding the worldwide prohibition on the use of chemical weapons; makes clear that the use of chemical weapons is a grave breach of international law; agrees with the UN Secretary General that the UN weapons inspectors must be able to report to the UN Security Council and that the Security Council must live up to its responsibilities to protect civilians; supports steps to provide humanitarian protection to the people of Syria but will only support military action involving UK forces if and when the following conditions have been met:

1. The UN weapons inspectors, upon the conclusion of their mission in the Eastern Ghutah, being given the necessary opportunity to make a report to the Security Council on the evidence and their findings, and confirmation by them that chemical weapons have been used in Syria;
2. The production of compelling evidence that the Syrian regime was responsible for the use of these weapons;
3. The UN Security Council having considered and voted on this matter in the light of the reports of the weapons inspectors and the evidence submitted;
4. There being a clear legal basis in international law for taking collective military action to protect the Syrian people on humanitarian grounds;
5. That such action must have regard to the potential consequences in the region, and must therefore be legal, proportionate, time-limited and have precise and achievable objectives designed to deter the future use of prohibited chemical weapons in Syria; aan
6. That the Prime Minister reports further to the House on the achievement of these conditions so that the House can vote on UK participation in such action.

This House further notes that such action relates solely to efforts to deter the use of chemical weapons and does not sanction any wider action in Syria.

1. The rush to judgment on Syria is a catastrophic and deadly error (Daily Telegraph)

Britain and America show contempt for the lessons of the past in pressing for action, says Peter Oborne. 

2. Today Ed Miliband can speak for Britain on Syria (Guardian)

The UK parliament has more power than many realise, writes Martin Kettle. A Labour leader told to show boldness now has a chance to so.

3. Cameron risks a war with his own party (Daily Mail)

Despite his bellicose rhetoric, there are also serious reservations over the Prime Minister’s chosen course of action among his own cabinet ministers, writes Simon Heffer. 

4. The Syrian regime cannot use chemical weapons without being punished (Guardian)

If, as seems certain, the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons there is no choice but to take military action with or without a UN mandate, says Malcolm Rifkind. 

5. We need regime change, not a wrist slap (Times)

‘Punitive strikes’ don’t work, writes Roger Boyes. The only way to protect the suffering Syrian people is to rid them of Bashar Assad.

6. Syria - not quite like the run-up to Iraq... but not that different either (Independent)

The contrast ceases when it comes to the evasive justifications for military intervention, writes Steve Richards.

7. If our MPs still have any doubts, they've a moral duty to vote no (Daily Mail)

MPs should be asking themselves today and over the coming weekend if there’s a danger that attacking Syria will cause more suffering than it can possibly prevent, says a Daily Mail editorial.

8. Even if Assad used chemical weapons, the west has no mandate to act as a global policeman (Guardian)

By ordering air strikes against Syria without UN security council support, Obama will be doing the same as Bush in 2003, writes Hans Blix.

9. Without HS2 our railways will be full to bursting (Times)

The government will not suddenly spend on commuter lines, says Daniel Knowles. 

10. Whitehall offers transparency by the overstuffed truckload (Daily Telegraph)

The facts and figures of government are all there, if only we knew how to find them, writes Sue Cameron. 

Labour's amendment to the Syria motion to be debated in Parliament later on today has caused fury in Government circles, it would seem.

As Sam Coates and Francis Elliott report in today's Times (£):

Now, that's a turn of phrase that The Thick of It's Malcolm Tucker would be proud of.

(H/T to @RobDotHutton for the screengrab)

With Labour, Lib Dem rebels and up to 70 Tory backbenchers all opposed to immediate British military action against Syria, David Cameron faced the prospect of parliamentary defeat. It was this that forced him to back down last night and accept Ed Miliband's demand that no decision be made until after the UN weapons inspectors have presented their findings on last week's Ghouta massacre to the Security Council. 

The government motion was published and guaranteed that a "further vote of the House of Commons" would be held before any "direct British involvement". In line with Labour's position it stated that "[This House] agrees that the United Nations Secretary General should ensure a briefing to the United Nations Security Council immediately upon the completion of the team’s initial mission; Believes that the United Nations Security Council must have the opportunity immediately to consider that briefing and that every effort should be made to secure a Security Council Resolution backing military action before any such action is taken."

But if Cameron believed that a political consensus had been achieved, it looked like he was wrong to do so. Labour has signalled that it still plans to vote for its own amendment this evening and has refused to rule out opposing the government's motion. A party spokesman said this morning that the party's amendment "provides a roadmap towards what must happen before any action is taken" and sets out "clearer criteria" than the government's.

The question now is what concessions Cameron would have to offer to secure Miliband's support and whether he is prepared to do so. Labour's amendment, for instance, suggests that military action should only take place if there is "compelling evidence" that the regime was responsible for the use of chemical weapons but the government's motion makes no such stipulation and notes that "the team’s mandate is to confirm whether chemical weapons were used and not to apportion blame". As things stand, it is hard to see how that divide will be bridged. But unless Cameron is able to win Labour round, or to persuade a sufficient number of coalition MPs to support the government, he faces the prospect of something unprecedented in recent history: parliamentary defeat on a matter of peace and war. 

With the glowing media attention the USA is currently enjoying, it would be very easy indeed to use Facebook’s first Global Government Requests Report to further stick the boot into an increasingly murky-looking administration.

In the stats released by the social network, America’s total volume of data requests dwarfs any other country’s, with between 11,000 and 12,000 requests involving up to 21000 individual accounts made during the first half of 2013.

But although tempting, it’s perhaps unwise to let recent outrage over NSA surveillance colour one’s judgement of the numbers. While the USA’s demands for Facebook data have been unsurprisingly vast, that’s no reason to exculpate other countries from their participation in the cultural tug-of-war over citizen's data.

The clue is in the name of Facebook’s report – specifically, the word global.

Even a cursory bout of cigarette-packet mathematics (see table below) reveals that, when the report’s data is viewed in the light of figures on national population and Facebook usage, America is not alone in its appetite for information on its citizens.

In terms of total requests made per million Facebook users in a country, for example, Germany is some way ahead, with 75.4 compared to the USA’s 69.3. In terms of fruitful requests per million users, the US leads the pack at 54.7 – but not by much: the UK manages 40.8.

Ben Werdmuller, CTO of US-based startup Latakoo and a proponent of the indieweb movement, which aims to challenge the data monopoly of the web giants, thinks that to chalk the Facebook figures up to the excesses of American national security is to ignore a wider problem.    

"Any finger-pointing at any one nation amounts to scapegoating. The problem is global and endemic. Nobody has clean hands. In Silicon Valley, we have to accept that the systems we've built are empowering both governments and corporations to more easily violate our privacy."

With a great volume of data, as Spiderman once memorably said, comes great responsibility.

Of course, it’s hard to go much further in analysing Facebook’s report than to acknowledge that there’s a problem, and that it’s a widespread one. This is hardly breaking news. The problem is that this report, while interesting, is simply a necessary PR response to a media storm over data security – its language is vague, and it is short on specifics.  

In particular, it would be very interesting to know how the total requests by country break down into those relating to criminal matters, and those relating to issues of national security. Such data, I suspect, could once again put the American statistics in a new light.

On this point, however, I’ll let Facebook have (nearly) the last word:

"While we view this compilation as an important first report, it will not be our last. In coming reports, we hope to be able to provide even more information about the requests we receive from law enforcement authorities."

We will be waiting eagerly.

Vodafone in talks over selling 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless (FT)

Vodafone has confirmed it is in talks with Verizon Communication about the sale of its 45 per cent stake in Verizon Wireless to the US telecoms group, moving the companies closer to resolving one of the longest-running stand-offs in recent dealmaking history.

Ackermann steps down at Zurich Insurance (FT)

Josef Ackermann has resigned as chairman of Zurich Insurance after little more than a year in office, saying that he felt under pressure to take responsibility following the suspected suicide of the group’s chief financial officer.

Co-op Group reports big banking loss (BBC)

The Co-operative Group has reported heavy losses as a result of a huge write-down of assets at its troubled banking arm.

The group lost £559m in the first half of the year, having written off £496m of bad loans at Co-op Bank.

WPP profits rise by a fifth as UK ad market rebounds (Telegraph)

Sir Martin Sorrell's media giant, WPP, has posted a 19pc rise in pre-tax profits as the UK advertising market picked up steam.

BOJ policymaker warns emerging markets may see more outflows (Reuters)

The global economy could be hurt if the withdrawal of funds from emerging markets picks up ahead of an expected reduction in the U.S. Federal Reserve's monetary stimulus, a Bank of Japan board member said on Thursday.

Merrill Lynch, the wealth management division of Bank of America (BofA), has agreed to pay a penalty of $160m (£103.1m) to about 1,200 employees in the US to settle a long-term racial discrimination lawsuit.

The advisory firm has not disclosed the matter officially. However, its spokesperson Bill Halldin in a statement said: “We are working toward a very positive resolution of a lawsuit filed in 2005 and enhancing opportunities for African-American financial advisers.”

The settlement fine is claimed to be the largest ever paid by an employer in a racial discrimination lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed by George McReynolds, who served the firm in Nashville for 30 years, in 2005, alleging that the brokerage firm offered higher-pay accounting positions to whites and provided only lower-pay clerical positions to African-Americans.

Merrill Lynch’s workforce had about 2 per cent of African-Americans when the lawsuit was filed. 

Suzanne Bish, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers,  was quoted by the BBC as saying: “It has been a long journey and our clients have persevered through quite a bit of adversity. We’re hopeful now that the case has been resolved that there will be meaningful reform and a real difference in terms of opportunities for African-Americans.”

Law firm Stowell & Friedman, which earlier consulted settlement of a class-action gender discrimination lawsuit against Merrill Lynch in 1998, represented McReynolds in the lawsuit. It may receive about 20 per cent of the settlement amount for winning the case.

In his long-term fight, the lead plaintiff McReynolds saw initial setbacks when a Chicago federal judge denied confirming the lawsuit as a class action.

The British oil and gas giant BP has lost a second chance to halt compensation payments for the victims of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion that killed 11 workers and leaked about four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

In the latest ruling, the US District Judge Carl Barbier said that a probe into alleged payout fraud at the Mobile, Alabama claims assistance center did not find any credible evidence.

In July, Barbier rejected BP’s demand to halt the payments till the completion of investigation by Louis Freeh, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). BP has been arguing that fraud and false payments are pooling up the compensation fund.

Freeh was appointed by Barbier to probe into allegations of misconduct in claims settlement process.

Barbier was quoted by Bloomberg as saying: “None of the claims represented by the firms of two of the panelists have been approved, paid or appealed. The alleged conflicts are not a basis upon which to suspend the entire claims payment program.”

Geoff Morrell, a BP spokesman in an e-mail statement to Bloomberg, said: “As we await the completion of this broad investigation [by Mr Freeh], we continue to believe a temporary pause in payments is warranted. BP is reviewing its options with respect to the district court’s decision today.”

BP initially estimated the oil spill compensation to be about $7.8bn (£5.03bn). However, due to rise in costs, it increased the compensation to $9.6bn.

It appears that, belatedly, the US, UK, France and their allies have concluded that a limited military attack on Syria is necessary to punish what Secretary of State John Kerry calls the "moral obscenity" of Assad’s chemical weapons attack in Ghouta last week. Already western policy-makers are making the case for action that does not require explicit UN authorisation, causing predictable anguish for many who will see yet another dangerous, unilateral intervention. But the true danger, for those whose anguish is measured not in column inches or Newsnight debates, but in mortal danger, lies not in bypassing the moribund and morally-flawed UN Security Council, but in framing the justification for action so narrowly.

This intervention will be spun by our leaders as an act of moral strength, but this is only half true. Kerry's powerful, heartfelt entreaty that "the cause of our common humanity" requires "accountability" for the use of chemical weapons, could mask a devastating corollary: that the US and broader international community will tolerate crimes against humanity carried out using conventional weapons. Our Prime Minister offers an even more narrowly defined casus belli, saying "this is not about wars in the Middle East, this is not even about Syria. It’s about the use of chemical weapons and making sure as a world we deter their use." This fails those vulnerable to 'conventional' slaughter and emboldens evil regimes present and future, which might now calculate that 100,000 'conventional' deaths will be tolerated, especially if they have a UNSC ally, yet 1,000 WMD deaths will be punished.

Another problem concerns the apparent Damascene conversion of William Hague and his counterparts to the view that, as many proponents of intervention have long argued, it is "possible to respond to chemical weapons without complete unity on the UN Security Council...to take action based on great humanitarian need and humanitarian crisis". Hague’s volte-face on the fallacy of equating UNSC authorisation or lack thereof with moral rectitude is not the problem. It is that this newly ethical and assertive approach to international law is to be reserved exclusively for what he terms chemical weapons "outrages". On the surface we see moral strength in waiving a reliance on UNSC unanimity to pursue a clear ethical approach to an egregious crime. But underneath we should see punitive, not protective action.

Since so much recent commentary has focused on the blurring of President Obama’s 'red lines', the actual enforcement of them in the coming days will obscure the far more dangerous blurring of moral lines. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s statement indicates just how little has really changed: "What we are not considering is regime change, trying to topple the Assad regime, trying to settle the civil war in Syria one way or another. That needs to be settled through a political process." We find ourselves in the bizarre position of planning military action against a regime that Kerry asserts has offended the "conscience of the world" through its wicked use of chemical weapons against its own people yet, despite this, we pledge at the outset not to seek its removal from power. This is akin to punishing an assailant for having committed a heinous murder with a gun, but leaving him free to roam so long as future killings are carried out with a machete.

People should not be lulled into the sense that the world has grown up and learned to enforce its own basic rules, the most important being "the right to life, liberty and security of person" as stated in Article 3 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The red line of the use of chemical weapons should indeed be punished severely. But our moral assertiveness must not end there. There are much bigger red puddles of blood throughout Syria and across our world, which surely outrage our "common humanity". For the sake of victims of illegitimate, un-democratic, vicious regimes, it is vital that the "conscience of the world" does not cower behind artificial red lines, and wherever possible, takes action against all crimes against humanity.

I come to you today not to review Richard Curtis’s new film About Time but rather to scrutinise one of its most revealingly misjudged scenes. Not that I am wholeheartedly negative about this curious movie. Despite loathing the previous two pictures from this writer-director (The Boat That Rocked and Love, Actually), I can see that About Time is a progression of sorts for Curtis.

One of his cleverest moves was to choose the pink-and-perky Domhnall Gleeson to play Tim, the budding lawyer who is told on his 21st birthday by his father (Bill Nighy) that all the men in their family have the ability to travel through time — just within their own lifetime, that is, and only backwards to events that have already happened and then forwards again to the present day. A very British sort of time-travel, in other words. Though Gleeson himself is Irish — he’s the son of the great character actor Brendan Gleeson — he is playing an easily flummoxed, self-deprecating Englishman. The sort of part that Hugh Grant should think about taking on once he has tired of portraying grizzled vigilantes and depraved porn barons.

Gleeson is vital to any success the film can claim. Whatever blatant manipulations it engineers (and there are a lot), it helps to have a lead actor of unimpeachable sweetness and integrity. Gleeson can certainly play scuzzy (have a look at his cameo in the Coen brothers’ True Grit or his lead role as a rural misfit-turned-pimp in the little-seen Sensation) but here he is blemishless and sincere, without being boring. He blinks into the dazzling light of every opportunity like a new-born baby.

That brings me to one of the scenes which the film gets so badly wrong. In a weightless comedy, tone is everything, and the slightest wobble can distribute through the rest of the movie shockwaves from which it can be hard to recover. That’s what happens when Tim returns home with Mary (Rachel McAdams) with the intention of sleeping with her for the first time. Unfortunately, all does not go to plan, and the experience is over rather more quickly than might have been hoped. So Tim uses his unique powers to rewrite his sexual history before the ink is even dry: he rewinds time to earlier in the evening so that he can emerge with more prestige from his first time in bed with Mary. He has sex with her again. And again.  

When I first saw the scene in isolation, I laughed. In that context, it works, because we don’t know if the balance will be restored — if Mary will find out what happened and be incensed, or if there will be some manner of poetic justice. But she doesn’t. And there isn’t. So within the film, it’s destabilising. It kills the comedy.

Mary is not aware of Tim’s powers at all — it’s a bizarre narrative demarcation that women in Curtis’s movie are neither capable of time-travel nor even cognisant of its existence. So while Tim knows that he has had sex with Mary multiple times, and we have been let in on that secret, she is oblivious. Let’s look at that again outside the context of romantic comedy: a man has sex with a woman multiple times without her consent (or rather, with her consent given only once) and without her knowledge. Has Tim not committed something that would play in any other genre as date-rape? He just happens to use time-travel rather than Rohypnol. (Read Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata, in which the main character’s ability to freeze time enables him to ogle and even grope women, and you will see the same situation played honestly.)

Of course, no one demands that fictional characters in any genre should maintain high moral standards. Some of the greatest of all comedies (Elaine May’s A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid or Billy Wilder’s The Apartment and Some Like It Hot) feature people behaving despicably, all without any cost to our enjoyment. If anything, that moral dimension adds weight and risk to every laugh. But where About Time goes wrong is in applying no implied critical voice, no sceptical distance, to Tim’s actions.

To see how badly Curtis messes up, it is helpful to look at another movie which gets the same scenario exactly right. In Groundhog Day, the misanthropic Phil (Bill Murray) also experiences a temporal anomaly, though in his case it is not a super-power but a punishment: he’s trapped in a time-loop and forced to relive the same day over and over for many years, even decades. Phil uses the curse of repetition to gain precisely the same nature of carnal advantage that Tim engineers for himself. We see him in one scene grilling a woman for biographical details about her school days, so that when he sees her the “next” day (though for her, it is the first time she is experiencing that day) he can use the information he has harvested to provide a conversational “in”. By the evening, he has wormed his way into her bed.

In theory, it is the same scenario as About Time, with an identical reliance on the privileged knowledge shared by audience and hero. The key difference is that Phil is a repugnant character at that point in the film, with a long road to self-improvement ahead of him, and Bill Murray is a master in bringing infinite gradations to his sleaziness. Tim, on the other hand, is held up at all times as a delightful and charming boy-next-door type whose worst flaw is that he puts his foot in his mouth once in a while. This leaves his sexual misdemeanour unchecked, his conduct unchallenged.

Add to this Tim’s own control over the narrative (he has the privilege of voiceover, which Phil in Groundhog Day does not) and it becomes clear that the film has denied itself the facility to comment in any way on Tim’s lack of propriety, his effective rape of Mary for our entertainment. Without the amoral pantomime of a Bill Murray-type as a get-out clause (we may like Murray but we’re not supposed to approve of his actions), the audience is invited only to applaud Tim’s actions. In this instance, Domhnall Gleeson’s charm not only cannot save the scene, it actively exacerbates its horrors: we cannot square our general sympathy for him with what he’s done.

Mary is none the wiser. It’s bad enough that Curtis has neglected to write her as a proper human being: her characteristics are to be loving and supportive to Tim and to produce his children, which are not actually characteristics at all. Any choice she makes about their relationship cannot be based on the full set of facts about the sort of person he is. Reader, she marries him.

Curtis wrote a similar scene, hinging on a woman being oblivious to the exact nature of her sexual relationship with a man, in the most unsavoury part of The Boat That Rocked. But that was generally a grubby picture, so perhaps the mistake didn’t cast quite the long shadow that it does over About Time, which is in many other ways gentle and compassionate. That disastrous scene in the new movie, though, is not without value. It should be singled out in film studies classes, and played alongside its counterpart in Groundhog Day, as an example of where a theoretically rich comic device can become so severely devalued in practice.

About Time is released on 4 September.

America's aims in Syria are not what the government wants you to think.

You can see the evidence in what action is being suggested. Jay Carney, the White House chief spokesman, yesterday categorically ruled out regime change as an objective. “The options that we are considering are not about regime change,” he said to the assembled White House press corps. “They are about responding to a clear violation of an international standard that prohibits the use of chemical weapons.” But the targeted strikes being proposed will only perpetuate the butchery – and that is what they are designed to do.

A true solution to the conflict in Syria would have been difficult and incredibly complex even two years ago. It would take a long time, and more money than would probably be palatable to either Britain or America. Solving this problem would mean attempting rapprochement between two factions whose hatred for each other is drenched in the blood of thousands and steeped in years of murder. It is probably impossible.

But nobody is even talking about a solution, and there's a reason for that.

America is not interested in regime change. Obama does not want to be a war-time president. Nor is he interested in the humanitarian argument for intervention for any more than rhetorical purposes. A cursory glance shows his 'red line' of the use of chemical weapons to be ridiculous. The death toll in Syria stands at more than a hundred thousand people. The rhetoric has been that Assad must be “punished” for the use of chemical weapons, but why? The tools used to reach this number are immaterial in the face of that horror. Who cares whether people were killed with shells, mortar or gas?

The truth is that evening the odds in Syria – which the West has already been doing, by drip-feeding supplies and weaponry to rebel forces – has turned a brief if bloody resolution into an interminable meat-grinder, in which no side has the decisive edge, and flattening out some more of Assad's tactical advantages will only maintain this grisly status quo.

Here is why that is attractive to the American government. At the moment, the conflict in Syria is acting as a sort of sump; collecting the resources of America's enemies in a confined space. It's a black hole for extremists. When Assad's army re-took the town of Qusayr in June, they were supported by Lebanese Hezbollah. Iran, too, is supporting him: the Independent on Sunday reported in June that a contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops would be sent to fight alongside Syrian government forces. Tehran has even threatened to strike at Israel should America attack Syria, a move which could start a disastrous chain of events.

On the other side, Jabhat Al-Nusra, widely regarded the most effective and disciplined rebel group fighting the Assad regime, is openly linked with Al-Qaeda; another jihadist affiliate, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is a hugely powerful faction of the rebel Free Syrian Army.

As far as the White House is concerned, this is a zero-sum game. While these groups are spending money and resources fighting in Syria, the threat they pose to the West is greatly diminished. If Al-Qaeda is focussing on overturning Assad, it is not plotting the next 9/11; and it is even possible that it might be grateful to the US for even miserly airborne assistance. My enemy's enemy, so the saying goes, is my friend.

Obama and his advisers will also be calculating that victory for the rebels in Syria could allow anti-Western sentiment to resurface under an extreme Islamist regime. Another lesson from recent history: in Iraq, it was after Saddam was toppled that things went to hell in a handcart.

So that leads to the awkward conclusion: that a half-hearted airborne intervention in Syria is designed not to rock this deadly boat, but to steady it.

The situation for Putin is much the same. Perpetual civil war in Syria works almost as well for Russia as for the United States. Russia has enormous business ties with Assad's Syria – some 20 billion dollars worth, according to the Congressional Research Service, and they stand to lose this if Assad is toppled – as well as Russia's only military naval base outside of its borders, . But Syria is also a large-scale buyer of Russian arms; spending nearly five billion dollars in the four years to 2010, and that number has increased significantly since the conflict began, with Assad signing deals to buy advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missiles and MiG-29 fighter jets in just the last few months.

More importantly, the Syrian conflict allows Putin to tighten political support at home in an era of increasing unrest and protest by increasing anti-American, and anti-Western sentiment. With Russia and the US implacable on the UN security council, no resolution is likely, however much Russian foreign ministers may bluster about “catastrophic consequences” if the US and its allies were to intervene.

Russia doesn't want the rebels to win, because it will lose its business and its naval base. America doesn't want the rebels to win because the state they will most likely form will be an extremist Al-Qaeda backed breeding-ground for terrorism, led by the Al-Nusra Front.

So Syria has become effectively a straw man, by tacit agreement of both Russia and America. And as long as the straw man continues to burn, neither side cares how many civilians are lost in the inferno.

After scepticism that David Cameron would even get close to his goal of reducing net migration to "tens of thousands" a year by the end of this parliament, the Conservatives have recently hailed their success in cutting it by a third since 2010. But today's figures from the ONS show that, after five successive quarters of decline, the numbers are now moving in the wrong direction.

In the year to December 2012, net migration (the difference between the number of emigrants and immigrants) stood at 176,000, up from 153,000 in the year to September 2012. This was due to a decline in emigration (which fell from 351,000 to 321,000), rather than an increase in immigration (which fell from 566,000 to 497,000), but since Cameron chose to adopt the net migration figure as his metric of success, the trend is politically problematic (if not economically problematic. As I've previously noted, migrants contribute far more in taxes than they receive in benefits and services and the OBR estimates that Britain needs net migration of around 140,000 a year to limit the increase in the national debt to 99 per cent of GDP.)

Worse for the Tories, it will become even harder for them to reach their target once the transitional controls on Romanian and Bulgarian expire on 1 January 2014. While there are likely to be far fewer new arrivals than UKIP and the right-wing press suggest, the Migration Matters Trust estimates that at least 20,000 will move to the UK. With Cameron powerless to restrict EU immigration, owing to the principle of the free movement of labour, the likelihood is that the total number will rise. Ahead of next summer's European elections, that will prove a political gift for Farage and co.