Film & TV

Eclipse and New Moon pale in comparison with the first of the final two-parter, which took a massive £13.91m in three days, but its success leaves The Help needing aid. Meanwhile, Snowtown opens strong and Arthur Christmas sees a 10% rise

The winner

The jury may be out on the creative benefits of following the Harry Potter gameplan and dividing the final Twilight novel into two films, but in terms of economics the decision is certainly a winner for backers Summit and UK partner Entertainment One. The three-day opening here of Breaking Dawn – Part 1 bagged an astonishing £13.91m – a significant jump from New Moon's three-day debut of £11.68m, and even a modest uptick from last year's five-day opening for Eclipse (£13.76m, including previews of £6.37m). To take more in three days than Eclipse did in five is a result that was hardly predictable.

Reviews were on balance hostile, with a 47/100 rating at Metacritic and a 28% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. The feedback from Internet Movie Database users at first sight seems surprisingly low at 4.7 out of 10, until you discover this is a weighted average devised by the site to exclude any "vote stuffing" factor from franchise fans, and that the arithmetic mean is in fact 6.5.

Breaking Dawn's debut is the fifth-biggest three-day figure ever in the UK behind the two episodes of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (£18.32m and £23.75m), Quantum of Solace (£15.38m) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (£14.93m). Entertainment One points out that this makes Breaking Dawn the biggest-ever opener for an American film here, and it says a lot about how far the UK cinema market has travelled from the US dominance of 20 years ago that British cultural content is now seen as a commercial plus and lack of it a handicap.

While the Breaking Dawn three-day tally is certainly impressive, the first-day numbers are even better. The film's Friday takings of £6.35m represented the second-best first day in the history of the UK box office, behind only Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (£9.46m). First day for Deathly Hallows: Part 1 was £5.92m.

Every single entry in the weekend's Top 100 Engagements chart is occupied by Breaking Dawn, with the top seven cinemas each grossing over £100,000 from the film and 89 sites clearing £50,000 with it. Best of all is Vue Westfield Shepherds Bush with £141,000.

Theories abound as to why British cinemagoers have flocked to Breaking Dawn more than they did the previous Twilight episodes. It seems likely that the much-anticipated, long-delayed consummation of the Edward Cullen-Bella Swan relationship is a factor. Publicity stills featuring a bare-chested Robert Pattinson can't have hurt, while word will quickly have spread that Taylor Lautner is depicted shirtless within 30 seconds. Hollywood never went bankrupt giving the public what it wants.

The strong hold

Any weekend-to-weekend decline of less than 30% is considered a strong hold in the film business, so the 10% rise in takings for Arthur Christmas represents an exceptional performance. Of course, Christmas movies play by their own rules, and the Aardman animation seems to be following a similar slow-build pattern to Disney's A Christmas Carol two years ago. The film should play right through to the end of the festive holiday, although it will face increasing competition from fresh family fare as Christmas Day approaches.

The arthouse battle

While Snowtown, with over £37,000 from 25 screens plus £15,000 in previews, represents the top new release in the specialised sector, no single arthouse film can boast market domination. The Rum Diary (9th place), The Ides of March (10th), The Help (11th) and The Awakening (12th) are all engaging upscale audiences, while Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights (13th) is the top movie currently playing on fewer than 100 screens. A 49% drop for the Emily Brontë adaptation does not augur much longevity.

Having previously experienced modest drops of 14% and 30%, The Help suddenly falls 52% this week. Although you'd think the audiences for the two films are significantly different, it's hard not to concur that Breaking Dawn drew eyes away from The Help.

Cage fighting

Positioned as counter-programming to Breaking Dawn, Nicolas Cage vigilante thriller Justice opened mildly with £276,000 from 245 screens. More notable is the catastrophic fall experienced by Cage's other film Trespass, which debuted the previous weekend with £248,000 from 91 venues, its box-office boosted by a promotional giveaway in partnership with Sky TV. This weekend the ransom thriller plummets to £5,000 from 29 cinemas, a drop of 98%.

The future

Thanks to Breaking Dawn, overall the frame ranks third for the year, behind the mid-July and mid-August weekends that greeted the arrival of Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and The Inbetweeners Movie. The coming weekend looks potentially quieter, with a number of mid-range films competing for audiences. My Week with Marilyn, a prestige offering starring Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe, faces off against cancer comedy 50/50, starring Joseph Gordon Levitt and Seth Rogen, and psychological mystery Dream House, with Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. Sony have an awards contender on their hands with Moneyball, although baseball is never an easy sell in the UK and the addition of statistics may not help. Luckily for them, it stars Brad Pitt.

Top 10 films

1. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, £13,910,877 from 543 sites (New)
2. Arthur Christmas, £2,317,963 from 462 sites. Total: £5,018,421
3. The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, £988,578 from 476 sites. Total: £14,095,718
4. Immortals, £950,230 from 423 sites. Total: £4,309,798
5. In Time, £453,958 from 354 sites. Total: £4,505,207
6. Tower Heist, £411,888 from 329 sites. Total: £3,711,355
7. Justice, £276,483 from 245 sites (New)
8. Johnny English Reborn, £256,828 from 362 sites. Total: £20,132,828
9. The Rum Diary, £230,740 from 275 sites. Total: £1,202,074
10. The Ides of March, £180,692 from 120 sites. Total: £2,574,632

Other openers

Snowtown, 25 screens, £37,305 (+ £15,018 previews)
Hero Hitler in Love, 7 screens, £19,505
How to Stop Being a Loser, 17 screens, £2,882 (+ £403 previews)
Welcome to the Rileys, 1 screen, £517
This Our Still Life, 1 screen, £368
Magic Trip, 4 screens, £306 (+ £333 previews)

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Delpy's film, The Right Profile, is set to focus on the Clash frontman's famous 1982 disappearance when a publicity stunt turned into reality

He was no stranger to the big screen during his lifetime, working with film-makers such as Alex Cox, Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki. Now Joe Strummer of the Clash looks set to be the subject of his own movie after the French film-maker and actor Julie Delpy signed to direct a biopic titled The Right Profile, reports Variety.

Delpy's film will focus on Strummer's famous 1982 disappearance from the spotlight, a stunt planned by the band's manager Bernie Rhodes to help boost flagging ticket sales for a Scottish tour which ended up with the singer and guitarist deciding to go missing . Uncertain about the subterfuge, Strummer travelled to France, where he is said to have taken part in the Paris marathon in April 1982 after a training regime consisting of drinking 10 pints of beer the night before the race. The Clash began to break up a year later with the departure of Mick Jones from the band, and finally split for good in 1986.

The Right Profile is the title of a song which appeared on the Clash's best known album, 1979's London Calling. The film is not the first biopic of Strummer to have been touted: Film4 was reportedly working on a film with the working title of Joe Public. Paul Viragh, who wrote the Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll was in charge of the screenplay , but the movie is not on the British production house's current list of forthcoming productions .

Strummer died suddenly in December 2002 from an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. The Clash were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame just a month later. The musician has been the subject of two documentaries in the intervening period: Julien Temple's Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten and Don Letts' Strummerville , which focuses mainly on the Joe Strummer Foundation for New Music charity set up by his wife Lucinda following her husband's death.

Delpy recently wrapped production on 2 Days in New York, the sequel to her 2007 comedy 2 Days in Paris, in which she also starred opposite Adam Goldberg. The followup sees her sharing 48 hours with new beau Chris Rock. Delpy is also reportedly planning a second sequel to Richard Linklater's 1995 much-loved indie romance Before Sunrise, following 2004's Before Sunset.

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Hugh Grant's appearance at the Leveson inquiry into tabloid intrusion was a bravura performance. Perhaps that is because it came straight from the heart

Hugh Grant's testimony to the Leveson inquiry, his ferocious denunciation of what he sees as the myths of celebrity hypocrisy and publicity addiction, took me back to the first film I ever reviewed for this paper. It was his romantic comedy Notting Hill, from 1999, starring Julia Roberts as Anna Scott, the impossibly beautiful movie star who comes to London and improbably falls in love with what Joan Collins would call a "civilian", a non-celebrity. This is Will Thacker, the divorced and lovably rumpled bookshop owner, played by Grant himself. One day, perhaps, Notting Hill will be a set text in media studies classes and historians of the hacking scandal will scrutinise Richard Curtis's screenplay line by line. Because it turns out to concern exactly what Grant has been talking about this week: the tabloid press, intrusion, publicity, and whether or not celebrities are always asking for it.

Anna figures out that the only way she and Will can meet privately, without the press sniffing it out, is paradoxically for Grant to pretend to be a journalist: bizarrely, he shows up at her press event at a West End hotel and must pose as an interviewer for Horse and Hound magazine, one of a number of journalists all hanging around waiting their turn. And all of this so he and Anna can chat, together, in her hotel suite. It is a funny and chaotic sequence – but the suggestion is clear. However silly they are, these are the good journalists, the responsible interviewers, the basically decent types and that is why Grant's nice character can get away with impersonating one.

Later, we see the bad journalists. A brutish Brit tabloid somehow finds an old porn film Anna did before she got famous. The paper splatters crass still images all over its pages making Anna look like an exhibitionist. Anna is devastated. Will tries to laugh it off, telling her it's absurd and that "today's newspapers will be lining tomorrow's wastepaper bins". Anna erupts with rage and the movie has a kind of magnesium-flare of outrage as, incandescent with anger at his naivete, Anna tells him that this kind of story sticks and smears "last for ever".

And Anna is right. It is only now we have proof that some journalists are prepared to do it to non-celebrities such as Milly Dowler that the industry has been forced to take it seriously. I myself have heard dozens of journalists over the years rehearse this line about, oh, it's just a bit of fun and it's just tomorrow's chip-wrapping. Some journalists even assume their own professional experience means they are entitled to laugh it off because they sort of know what it is like to be monstered. But they don't – any more than a professional hitman knows what it feels like to be shot.

Grant's performance for the inquiry was thoughtful and measured – though his fans will have noted the deployment of trademark frowns and hand gestures that Grant will sometimes use in the "serious" part of a scene, often as the prelude to a gag or to a romantic moment. He will look down and then slightly coquettishly up: a fascinating combination, I always think, of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Well, he took a risk in speaking out and has been duly sneered at: Amanda Platell has already taken a catty swipe, and once again, Piers Morgan made an ass of himself on this subject on Twitter, getting it wrong with a jeering and misjudged crack about Nelson Mandela. Grant and Steve Coogan have sought to widen the debate, by pointedly referring to the Mail group. Now, this could be partly because they wish to deflect accusations of hypocrisy for continuing to work for Rupert Murdoch's film and television companies. But they have a point: the debate has to be industry-wide and perhaps they realise that now is a moment in which they are licensed to speak out.

Do they need the press, though? Perhaps not. Nowadays, stars of the Grant/Coogan calibre are reasonably effectively barricaded from press intrusion and the tabloids now save their energy for the hungry and co-operative wannabes of reality TV. I have spoken to film PRs – exhausted and maddened after organising days of interviews with journalists who they claim are just as drama-queeny as bona-fide showbiz stars – and they mutter that 10-second TV ad spots will get far more bums on seats than some in-depth press interview anyway. So who needs it? Many believe that the whole interview/publicity circuit will melt away, as the stars speak directly to their millions of followers on Twitter.

Grant says he does interviews because, as a good team-player, he is honour-bound to help the film, and to refuse would be monstrous – and that is the reason for press junkets of the sort immortalised in Notting Hill. Well, that could be his motivation. But here I think Grant is a little naive. For many stars, the "interview" is an important part of the performance-portfolio: addressing the public through the page of a magazine or supplement is almost as important as addressing them through the cinema screen. It may not reach the public as widely as is assumed, but it is certainly as good a way as any of keeping yourself visible, and in play, for the next job.

When the famously reclusive director Terrence Malick came to the Cannes film festival this year with his film The Tree of Life, he was criticised for failing to give a press conference. There was also a rumour that ran like wildfire around the festival that, despite this, Malick nonetheless attended a private dinner at Cannes given by Rupert Murdoch, whose company Fox produced his film. Did he? And was he therefore a big fat hypocrite? Not necessarily. He just doesn't do press: and perhaps in the Web 2.0 age this stance will come to look less eccentric. Murdoch's own readiness to close the profitable News of the World shows that he himself perhaps thinks that press is a far less important part of his media infotainment empire than we all assumed.

Even if the concept of press publicity could be on the verge of obsolescence, the press reporting that Grant is talking about – the reporting that sets some of the tone for public life and of which he has been on the receiving end – is certainly very important in creating an atmosphere of bullying and cynicism. Grant is basically right, and what has fascinated me since he began to speak publicly on this issue is how people have tried to batter him, turn him into a punchline and generally knock him off his perch, on the grounds of an alleged hypocrisy that he declines to concede.

Clearly some believe that jeering at Grant for his alleged sanctimony is a risk-free way of creating "balanced" coverage of the hacking issue and extending a friendly hand to the still formidable Murdoch in his time of trial. But Grant has stayed, doggedly, on course. He is still there, still speaking out. Whether Platell or Morgan like it or not, he is winning the argument in this debate – winning it on points, perhaps, rather than a knockout, but winning it. This could yet turn out to be the performance of his career's autumnal phase.

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Bridesmaids film-maker asks Academy to consider offsetting shortfall in comedy nominations by creating new award

The Oscars should feature a comedy category, according to Judd Apatow, the director of Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Apatow took to Twitter to ask the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to consider including a separate category for comedic films, similar to the one introduced in 2001 for animated movies.

"Since comedies are rarely up for Oscars it does make sense to have a comedy category," he tweeted. "It's been like five times in a zillion years that [a comedy has] won best picture."

Apart from animated movies, only six comedy films have received a nomination in the best film category at the Oscars in the past decade. Voters tend to plump for dramatic fare in the acting categories and action adventure, science fiction or fantasy in the technical categories, leaving comedy without much of a look in.

Film-makers working in the field often stand a better chance of coming home with a gong at the rival Golden Globes ceremony, staged by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which splits many of its awards into comedy/musical and drama sections. By way of example, last year The King's Speech's Colin Firth won the award for best performance in a drama, while Paul Giamatti won the equivalent comedy/musical award for Barney's Version.

The last romantic comedy to win the best film award at the Oscars was Shakespeare in Love in 1999. Comedy-dramas Driving Miss Daisy and Forrest Gump were winners in 1989 and 1994 respectively.

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Popular Jim Henson puppet show reported to get new primetime series with NBC after first film for a decade opens in the US

It's time to put on makeup, it's time to dress up right – The Muppets could be returning to television in a new primetime series.

US broadcaster NBC has ordered scripts for a new series about a family who live in Palm Springs and discover their new neighbours are The Muppets. A new Muppets film – the first for a decade - is about to open in the US and is due out in the UK in February.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the new Muppet TV series being developed for NBC is called The New Nabors and is being made Jim Henson Studios in association with Universal Television.

It will be written by 30 Rock executive producer John Riggi and John Hoffman, who will also executive produce alongside Jim Henson's daughter Lisa.

The hit show – which mixes live action with puppets – was originally created out of characters in another Jim Henson show, Sesame Street.

In 1976 The Muppets got their own series, which watched by an estimated 235 million viewers per week in more than 100 countries.

The Muppet Show ran for five years and gave birth to several spin-offs and films such as Muppet Babies and a version of A Christmas Carol.

Originally shown on ITV in the UK, a follow-up series Muppets Tonight aired on the BBC in 1996 but was less successful.

Other more recent incarnations include short specials for the internet and Disney on Studio DC: Almost Live. There has been talk of a revival on a US network since 2003 when Fox was said to be interested.

A special version of The Muppets' famous Manamana song was recorded recently in aid of Children In Need, featuring stars including John Humphrys, Graham Norton and Alan Carr.

NBC has also ordered a pilot for a new version of The Munsters, which is being billed as an imaginative reinvention of the comedy series as a one-hour drama.

The pilot, also being made by Universal Television, will be written and produced by Bryan Fuller, whose credits include Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me.

The Munsters, a 1960s CBS series in black and white, focused on a family of comical horror movie parodies including Herman, who looked like Frankenstein's monster, and Grandpa, a Dracula lookalike. The show satirised both the Universal horror films of the 1930s and 1940s and TV family sitcoms of the 1960s.

CBS' original show finished after 70 episodes in 1966 but The Munsters has proved popular when repeated over the years and it was revived for TV in the late 1980s as The Munsters Today. Several film and TV movie spin-offs have also been made.

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Scorsese's return to crime genre will be adaptation of novel by Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø featuring detective Harry Hole

Martin Scorsese is to return to the crime genre with The Snowman, an adaptation of the seventh book in Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø's series of novels about hardboiled Oslo detective Harry Hole.

Nesbø confirmed to a Swedish newspaper that Scorsese had signed on the dotted line. It's not known whether the film will be the Oscar-winner's follow-up to Hugo, his forthcoming 3D children's fantasy, or whether it will arrive at a later date.

The Snowman sees Nesbø's maverick cop investigating what appears to be Norway's first serial killer, a murderer who always leaves a snowman near the scene of his crime. The author came to prominence in Britain with the publication in 2006 of his Harry Hole novel The Redbreast. The Snowman, published here in 2010, and The Leopard, which followed this year, have cemented his reputation as one of the best of the current wave of Scandinavian writers, alongside Swedish authors such as Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, and his fellow Norwegian, Karin Fossum.

Nesbø reportedly had final choice of director for The Snowman and was happy to give his blessing to Scorsese. He will not insist on the film being set in Norway, raising the possibility that Scorsese might transfer the action to the US. Matthew Michael Carnahan, who wrote the upcoming Brad Pitt zombie flick World War Z as well as the script for the film version of State of Play, will work on the screenplay, with Working Title backing the production.

The Snowman will follow David Fincher's forthcoming Hollywood adaptation of Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, possibly the best known Scandinavian crime novel, into cinemas. The director of Se7en and Zodiac is choosing to retain the original novel's Swedish setting while employing a largely American and British cast alongside some Swedish actors.

Scorsese's Hugo, based on Brian Selznick's Caldecott medal-winning children's novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is due to arrive in cinemas on 23 November in the US and 2 December in the UK. It stars Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer and Jude Law.

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With domestic films repeatedly ranking in the nation's most viewed, the Turkish industry is booming as others around it stall

You couldn't move for new waves in the noughties: even Antarctica looked capable of knocking out its own film scene. But the Latin American buena onda in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, the South Korea extreme-Asia offshoot and the Russian blockbuster boom all had one thing in common. They found it hard to sustain their initial impact, whether it was because the global media moved on to the next big thing, or their key directors were poached by Hollywood, or there was a lack of sustained investment. Gael García Bernal reflected on the Mexican version of the problem at an NFT talk: "When we did Amores Perros, Mexico only made six films that year. There will be 65 films this year. But I don't know how many of those will be seen. The point is not just making them but of them becoming reality, of becoming films that are shown in cinemas."

One country, though, looks closer to hitting the self-sustaining sweet spot. And it laid the foundations in the latter half of the last decade, as global capital was turning putrid and other international film players were running out of steam. In 2004, Turkey made 27 feature films; four years later, it was twice that. Unlike Mexico, the local takeup for domestic films is high: about 55% (it was 1% in the mid-90s). Last year's top five films? All Turkish. This year's top three? Ditto. It's a formidably durable-looking turnaround for what was once the world's third-largest film producer: back in the 60s, Yesilçam (the Hollywood-style moniker the Turkish industry borrowed from a street in Istanbul's equivalent of Soho) was knocking out around 300 cheap'n'cheerful quickies a year.

The recent Turkish revival looks versatile, too. As well as the commercial side, it's also beginning to punch its weight on the international arthouse circuit with the kind of cinema on the schedule at the London Turkish film festival, which starts this week. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is showing, another imposing cornice of slow cinema by Nuri Bilge Ceylon, who has become the country's hot auteur namedrop; Bal, this year's Golden Bear winner at the Berlin festival, is also playing. They join Reda Erdem's Times and Winds, from 2006, as the big shiny pins for Turkey on the map of prestige 21st-century cinema.

But it's the steady flow of crowdpleasers for its own audiences – like this year's top dog, Eyyvah Eyvah 2, about a hapless clarinet player – that is driving Turkish film. The country doesn't have the sprawling diaspora Arabic-speaking market to exploit, like the Egyptian industry. There's the Turkish community in Germany, where its films and its star pupils, like Fatıh Akin, are doing equally well. But the popular stuff doesn't get much in the way of theatrical releases elsewhere, even in the UK, which is relatively subtitle-friendly and has a sizeable Turkish population too.

That's a shame, because the Turkish renaissance seems to be outward-looking. Gunning for presentability, the mainstream industry has got more clued up since the melodramas of the Yesilçam era. Claire Berlinski, writing for the National Review, quotes one cinema-goer talking about Sizi Seviyorum, a 2009 comedy: "It's about a man who has one-night stands and how his girlfriend takes revenge. In the old movies, the girl's big brothers [would have come] and killed him." The new breed has cottoned on to glossy Hollywood aesthetics, even occasionally roping in Hollywood actors: 2010's top film, Five Minarets in New York, features Danny Glover, Gina Gershon and Robert Patrick. This year's No 2, Ask Tesadüfleri Sever (Love Likes Coincidences), is a slick, time-frame-hopping romcom that wouldn't shame the speciality arms of the US studios. Its lovebirds are an Istanbul photographer and an actress-model-whatever; they're from the fast-growing urban middle class – the audience, in other words, for the Turkish revival.

Turkish cinema is already the most profitable film-making outfit in the Muslim world ($193m total domestic box office in 2010, against an estimated $16m for Egypt, which is more culturally influential). Only Indonesia, with its strange horror cottage-industry, produces more films. But what's really exciting is that, from what I've seen of it, the Turkish industry seems freer than its Islamic rivals to touch on contentious issues, perhaps because it exists in a secular state – the very thing that has allowed it to develop a commercial industry so quickly.

What I find especially fascinating are the (hugely successful) films about terrorism and US involvement in the Middle East. The notorious Valley of the Wolves: Iraq from 2006, described at the time as "Islam's Rambo", isn't exactly subtle, with its US troops who never saw a wedding party they didn't like to machine-gun and Gary Busey farming Iraqi PoWs for their organs. But it is an unsettling mirror-image of the Hollywood action-movie formula, and the way it has traditionally streamlined its protagonists' moral trajectories by stereotyping its villains. Better, before it collapses into contrived plotting, is Five Minarets in New York. The Kurdish singer-songwriter (and Gerard Butler lookalike) Mahsun Kırmızıgül writes, directs and stars as one of a pair of Turkish cops sent to NYC to extradite a suspected jihadist. Again, it's like watching an 80s popcorner – Red Heat or Coming to America – but given a cultural remix, where its Anatolian dickswingers lecture their US hosts, then headscratch about their own stance on terrorism.

You don't get this kind of directness from the Gulf countries currently pouring millions into Hollywood: they won't touch blockbuster-scale projects with this kind of loaded subject matter. Iran and Egypt are still purely making small-scale films, nothing like these unabashedly commercial films unafraid to barge their way into the political arena. As anyone who's seen the Turkish Star Wars or ET will attest, Yesilçam once had a hilariously parasitic relationship with American cinema. But now the ante has been upped, and the Turkish industry is learning to employ Hollywood bombast for its own ends. The results might be clumsy or abrasive, but they're very exciting too. The makings of an alternative, un-American mainstream could be staring us in the face.

• The London Turkish film festival runs from Thursday to 8 December. Five Minarets in New York is out on DVD now.

• What global box-office stories should we be writing about? How does Hollywood hawk its wares in your country? Let us know in the comments below.

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Downloaded movie prices are about 30% to 50% higher than buying an actual DVD. That's if you can find the film online

Ask anyone who's studied copyright policy – scholars of music and literature, economists, sociologists, law professors – and they'll tell you that the No 1 problem with copyright is that it is enacted without recourse to evidence.

Professor Ian Hargreaves, the latest eminent scholar commissioned by government to review Britain's copyright policy, lamented that his advice echoed many of his predecessors', none of which had been heeded.

Policymakers are unabashed about the lack of evidence in copyright policy — the EC's 2011 Single Market for Intellectual Property Rights report declares "The case does not need to be made anymore: IPR in their different forms and shapes are key assets of the EU economy." Of course, "the case does not need to be made" is another way of saying, "the case has not been made".

Writing in the Guardian, Ben Goldacre has examined the most-cited statistics about piracy, job creation and GDP contributions in the so-called creative industries and found them so singularly lacking that he declared: "As far as I'm concerned, everything from this industry is false, until proven otherwise."

When Andy Burnham assumed control of the DCMS brief in the last parliament, he acknowledged that the policies of his government had flown in the face of the impartial evidence from the government's commissioned research. But he continued and extended those policies, declaring that his policies wouldn't be evidence-based, but rather based on "the moral case at the heart of copyright law".

Whatever that is.

All this and more is documented in infuriating detail in William Patry's forthcoming book How to Fix Copyright – Patry being America's foremost copyright scholar and author of such standard texts as Copyright Law and Practice.

The UK Open Rights Group (disclosure: I co-founded this group and serve as a volunteer on its advisory board) recently contributed some more evidence to the debate – and its very timely indeed.

ORG and partner Consumer Focus undertook some empirical research on the state of the lawful market for downloadable movies in the UK. This is important because whenever our government or courts undertake to increase penalties for copyright violations – measures such as our nascent national censorship regime for sites that offend the entertainment industry – it is always with a kind of sad head-shake and the lament that despite the healthy, burgeoning lawful market for downloadable material, stubborn pirates continue to take copyrighted works without permission.

ORG's study Can't look now: finding film online investigated the lawful availability of downloads for "recent bestsellers and catalogues of critically acclaimed films, including the top 50 British films" and what they found was that the claims of the lawful market for movies are as evidence-free as the piracy claims they accompany.

Here's what ORG found: though close to 100% of their sample were available as DVDs, more than half of the top 50 UK films of all time were not available as downloads. The numbers are only slightly better for Bafta winners: just 58% of Bafta best film winners since 1960 can be bought or rented as digital downloads (the bulk of these are through iTunes – take away the iTunes marketplace, which isn't available unless you use Mac or Windows, and only 27% of the Bafta winners can be had legally).

And while recent blockbusters fare better, it's still a patchwork, requiring the public to open accounts with several services to access the whole catalogue (which still has many important omissions).

But even in those marketplaces, movies are a bad deal – movie prices are about 30% to 50% higher when downloaded over the internet versus buying the same movies on DVDs. Some entertainment industry insiders argue that DVDs, boxes and so forth add negligible expense to their bottom line, but it's hard to see how movie could cost less on physical DVDs than as ethereal bits, unless the explanation is price-gouging. To add insult to injury, the high-priced online versions are often sold at lower resolutions than the same movies on cheap DVDs.

ORG is generous in their conclusions, absolving the industry of culpability for this problem. Consumers have moved online faster than the film industry whose films they want to watch. They are being confronted with the equivalent of empty shelves. It is unsurprising that many people have found ways of discovering and watching films online from unofficial channels. Blocking all the sites that offer non-licensed content in the world‚ presuming this could be done successfully in practice‚ would not improve a consumer's chances of buying a film online that is not for sale.

But whether or not the film industry can be held blameless for the patchwork, confusing, expensive, second-rate online market for movies, it's clear that punishing people because they're staying away from the market will do no good. It would be smarter to divert the nation's policy to supplying lawful alternatives rather than beating us up for not buying movies that aren't offered for sale in the first place.

Now, here's the question: will government take this evidence on board and act on it, or will they continue the grand, evidence-free tradition?

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In our writers' favourite film series, John Carpenter's body-mangling monster horror gives Dave Turner the shivers

• Did this review transport you to another world or leave you cold? Wrap up your own review here or break the ice in the comments below

I was 15 when I first saw John Carpenter's The Thing. It was a night of firsts: my first 18 certificate movie on the big screen, and my first date with the wonderful Morag. The night started well when my much-maligned bum-fluff moustache didn't so much as raise a titter at the ticket kiosk, though I personally think it was my Simon Le Bon-inspired spiky mullet that gave me that wee bit of extra gravitas. Or perhaps it was the leg warmers. Either way, Morag was clearly impressed, and that was before I ordered the large Kia-Ora and the wine gums. A fiver went a long way back then.

The Thing came out in 1982, a few years after Alien had changed the horror landscape forever. While they are thematically similar, Carpenter's masterpiece is in fact a reimagining of the 1951 B-movie The Thing From Another World, in which an alien creature is discovered in the ice, thaws out, and then runs amok in an Arctic military base. While the central conceit remains, the earlier movie imagines a lumbering Frankenstein-monster clone, while Carpenter's is a shape-shifting chimera whose every cell is a living creature, and is truer to the source material, a short story by John W Campbell.

The Thing starts with a lone dog being pursued through the icy wasteland by a couple of enraged Norwegians in a helicopter who, in one of the movie's few comedy moments, are shot and blown–up respectively. The dog is then taken in by the staff of a nearby Antarctic survey base, the stock-in-trade disparate bunch of American character actors, soon to be monster-fodder. Plus Kurt Russell who, as chess-playing, whisky drinking, cowboy-hatted helicopter pilot RJ MacReady has never been better. He is the original cowboy versus alien, and is far too cool even for the Antarctic winter.

So far, so good: Morag and I are holding hands and slurping loudly on our Kia-Ora – and then the dog erupts into a jaw-dropping myriad of tentacles, slime, mangled body parts and huge teeth, unlike anything I had seen in The Hammer House of Horror. I was petrified.

From then on Carpenter masterfully orchestrates proceedings. The menace of the dark polar night and the claustrophobic confines of the base are utilised to raise the fear, tension and paranoia to unbearable heights. This is a creature that doesn't just hide in the dark, but could be your friend, your colleague, or the girl beside you whose hand you are breaking in a terrified vice-like grip.

The movie is about the creature, which means characterisation and plot become secondary – but who cares? A man's chest becomes huge jaws that bite off a doctor's arms; a head disengages from a torso, sprouts legs and eyes on stalks, and then scurries off; a hairless, slimy dog head explodes from a man's chest. Throughout The Thing, man and creature merge in horrific, bloody contortions that would give Hieronymus Bosch nightmares, and almost everyone dies horribly. Brilliant.

By the end I was a quivering, sweat-drenched wreck, and soon afterwards was single once more. On the screen the two survivors sit and drink, and wait for the end, or for the sequel that never came. Until now. Strictly speaking The Thing 2011 is a prequel, and without Carpenter and Russell it has its job cut out as nothing can have the same impact as The Thing did over 30 years ago. Though I can't wait.

Morag, wherever you are, I forgive you. I'm not sure if you can still get Kia-Ora, but give me a call if you fancy some wine gums.

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We need regulation of the press and financial sector that will hold people to account without smothering 'animal spirits'

How should David Cameron react to today's High Pay Commission report that blows the whistle on boardroom remuneration rackets that have seen pay rises of up to 5,000% over the past less-than-glorious 30 years? He should ask himself: "What would Dad think?" I imagine Dad would think much as Hugh Grant told us all yesterday what he thinks about the out-of-control tabloids.

I don't actually know what Donald Cameron – he died last year– would have thought of contemporary pay antics in the City, which have infected major industrial firms and (even worse) the upper echelons of the public sector. But he was a senior partner of stockbrokers Panmure Gordon, which was swallowed up by the big fish after the financial "big bang" – deregulation of the City – of 1986 though it has since been spat out again to resume an independent existence, like Jonah after the whale.

So we can assume Donald was probably disciplined "old school – born with a severe physical disability, extremely short legs, in 1932 – and wrinkled his nose at the "loadsa money" culture that Margaret Thatcher introduced and Gordon Brown half-taxed until the good times ran out.

We know that's what Nick Clegg's father, Nicholas, also a retired banker but still among us, thinks, because Clegg junior has told us so.

Today's Guardian reports on the High Pay Commission's (HPC) final report sets it out pretty well, though it looks like a pre-publication leak from a body – the commission was set up by the left-leaning thinktank Compass and the dear old Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, both Guardian soul-mates of sorts.

The paper has made a fuss for years about top pay and, yes, I do know we have had a little in-house excitement of our own on that score, as Private Eye loves to remind us. It's another reason for making a fuss.

Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, one of our world-class Big Pharma companies, puts his finger on the problem when he explains to the HPC panel that "trust in business has clearly eroded and needs to be reconstructed. It's very dangerous if a country doesn't trust the private sector."

Don't throw bricks at the man, he's right about this – unless you think the Soviet Union offered an attractive alternative model (it didn't).

In his own robust commentary, Nils Pratley says: "it's time for reform, not pleas for restraint." There are too many rackets – short, medium and long-term incentives, share option, huge pension pots (the tax deductible racket has finally been capped at £50k a year) and it should be made more simple, says Pratley.

We need greater transparency, detailed pay ratios and employees on those cosy remuneration committees, says the HPC.

As Pratley reminds everyone, we've been here before and fluffed our lines. Can it be better this time? The read-across to the Leveson inquiry – which I attended yesterday – is a striking one. The tabloids thought they were "untouchable", Hugh Grant explained during what I thought powerful and persuasive testimony which persistently sought to put the Daily Mail and its Sunday sister into the phone-hacking and paparazzi frame.

The Mail issued a categorical denial of phone-hacking when News International was finally engulfed last summer. "It had better be right," I remember thinking at the time; also that it is a very well-run operation, one which I respect as well as fear.

Its populist instincts have been on the right side of the bankers' pay story and it has a couple of pro-consumer stories (one about bank fees) in today's edition. Yes, I know, editor-in-chief Paul Dacre makes a £1m or so a year, but the Mail is a commercial success, unlike those broken-backed, taxpayer subsidised banks.

That said, its ferocious counter-blast in today's Mail against Grant's specific allegations against it (phone-hacking is only part of the wider picture) is very narrowly drawn and pretty unattractive even on its own terms.

Grant also said that some tabloids had promised to stop using paparazzi photos – many such cameramen are now ex-criminals because the rewards are so high, the police told Grant – after Princess Diana's death in 1997, but only did so for a short time.

The only false note I thought that Grant struck was when he said it's illegal to take a photo for publication in public without permission in France and that French privacy law does give "a more civilised existence to people in public life". The actor kept saying yesterday that we need a vigorous free press – ready to challenge, dissent and "take the piss" – but that the "toxic" wing of the British press had got completely out of control.

Graham Shear, a tough solicitor who acts for errant footballers, suggested that journalists need ethics training. That will upset the tabs, some of whom probably think ethics is the county east of London.

What's this got to do with top people's pay? Quite a lot. Human beings acting without self-restraint and fear of the consequences can be pretty awful. Listening to Bob and Sally Dowler recall their own dreadful experiences yesterday I wondered at how sane and decent they were.

I also wondered how the people who did this to them – they wondered too – could be so disconnected from their common humanity that they would give grieving parents false hope that their child was alive. "Camp guards," I murmured under my breath.

I don't see Bob Diamond, chief executive at Barclays, as a potential camp guard (for one thing, it's far too junior a position), but whenever I hear him talking at a select committee or on the radio I think he sounds none-too-smart, in fact like a moral idiot who is as distanced from the realities of life as a paparazzo swearing at a woman in the street to make her cry. "They get more money if you cry," I once heard Princess Diana say.

Is there more to £6.5m-a-year-and-counting Bob than money? There must be. He's described as "an avid sports fan," not necessarily a bad sign. And I once saw him - unrecognised except by management – in the audience at the Donmar Warehouse theatre (was it for Mary Stuart?) – which must be a good sign.

He's on the board of the Old Vic, run by fellow-American, Kevin Spacey, who is not a Republican or adviser to Boris. Perhaps it all goes with the territory.

There is always a reaction to excess, though it sometimes takes a long time to make itself felt and can also produce outcomes worse than what went before.

In Britain we have a chance to use public revulsion against free market excess – not unlike the reaction to trade union excess in the 1978-79 "winter of discontent" – and the curiously fragile dynamics of the Con-Lib coalition to rein in market excesses, which have built up like a tsunami since the Thatcher years.

So it was good to read this week that Vladimir Putin was booed in public in Moscow this week, he's frightening man, so that's a good sign. But on the same page of today's Guardian you can read that the South African government is tightening press censorship laws and citing the misconduct of the News of the World in distant Britain to justify the oppression – thanks for that one, Rupert.

But in China, they're standing by the persecuted dissident artist, Ai Weiwei, as Tania Branigan's eye-catching report – complete with 100 Chinese nudes – confirms.

As always you can see the glass half-full or half empty because it's usually both. We need tighter regulation of both press and the financial sector which holds it to account without smothering its animal spirits, there's a chance now to do both.

And Diamond Bob, find a moment to read about Alfred Nobel, who made even more money than you are doing by inventing dynamite.

It was only a fluke - a newspaper error, would you believe – that one day he read his own obituary and was disconcerted to find that's all he'd be remembered for. That's why we have the Nobel prizes. Think about it, Bob, it's never too late to repent.

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