Todd Solondz has uttered the “f-word” in Venice. No, not that one … ”Fascist”. Asked at a press conference for his new movie “Life During Wartime” whether he could give an opinion about the current political situation in Italy, he replied:

“I’m smart enough to know that I know so little and I would be very foolish, given whatever I know, to have an opinion in front of you guys. I just hope things work out nicely here. It’s lovely in this wonderful fascist building to take pleasure in this conversation.”

The building he was referring to was the Casino, a Fascist-era structure dating back to near the beginning of the world’s oldest film festival in 1932. Let’s not forget that two years later the Mussolini Cup was introduced at the festival for best foreign and best Italian films. Of course, all that has changed now. Although, at least for Solondz, the past is not forgotten.

So farewell, Big Brother. You have been on British screens every year for the last decade, but 2010 will be your last, unless someone else can be persuaded to pay production company Endemol for a show that has seen its ratings slump.

Channel 4 announced it is ditching the reality TV series, which in its prime enjoyed audiences as big as 10 million Britons but now is viewed by less than two million. Some pundits say it is tired and dull. Others say it never recovered from the 2007 race row when Jade Goody was accused of bullying Indian housemate Shilpa Shetty, prompting tens of thousands of complaints. Justice was seen to be done when Goody was evicted and Shetty went on to win.

Endemol, which makes Big Brother, has not given up just yet, and may seek another broadcaster to buy its ground-breaking show.

Whether the ratings slump is part of a broader disenchantment with reality TV remains to be seen. Certainly talent shows, from Strictly Come Dancing to Britain’s Got Talent, continue to thrive in. But as for Big Brother, will you miss it? Has it passed its sell-by date? Is Channel 4 right to ditch it?

Yes, you read it right.

Coldplay have made a short film to accompany their single “Strawberry Swing” that will be shown in UK cinemas from July 22 as a “supporting act” to Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary “Bruno,” as well as to romance “The Proposal” starring Sandra Bullock. In it, frontman Chris Martin, dressed as an old-style superhero, battles a giant squirrel, whch is drawn entirely in chalk.

You can catch a brief trailer now.

The song will be released as a digital download on Sept. 14 and the short film will be “commercially available” on Aug. 3, according to the band’s record label. It has its premiere on July 20 on www.babelgum.com.

The band, which had the world’s biggest selling album in 2008 with “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends”, starts its UK stadium tour on September 12, kicking off in Manchester and hitting London’s Wembley Stadium on the 18 and 19.

Madonna has won her appeal for the right to adopt a second child from Malawi, after a court overturned an earlier ruling blocking the bid, and the 50-year-old queen of pop is likely to face further criticism for her actions.

Local rights groups in Malawi have complained that Madonna has been given special treatment by the judicial system because of her status and wealth, and many people question whether taking a child from its native environment is necessarily a good thing.

Her divorce last year from Guy Ritchie, which has brought with it decisions over custody of their children, appears not to have concerned Malawi’s supreme court unduly. The Madonna brood already comprises daughter Lourdes, born in 1996, Ritchie’s son Rocco, born in 2000, and David Banda, a boy adopted from Malawi. Malawian Mercy James would make it four.

On Friday, Chief Justice Lovemore Munlo said Madonna had shown an interest in helping Malawi orphans and that four-year-old Mercy would have a better life with the star. Madonna has set up a charity called Raising Malawi which plans to build a school for girls in Chikhota village.

Do you think Malawi’s supreme court was right to overturn the earlier decision, thus allowing the adoption to go ahead?

Susan Boyle has been admitted to a private clinic in London after suffering from exhaustion, and, according to the Sun tabloid, an “emotional breakdown”. After capturing people’s imagination the world over in April with her singing performance on “Britain’s Got Talent”, the 48-year-old Scot’s travails are headline news once again, at least in her home country. Predictably, the blame game has already begun, and following is a list of the main culprits in the whole saga, if press reports, commentators and pundits are to be believed:

1. The press: Some sections of the media, which had a big part in Boyle’s meteoric rise to fame, have apparently relished the chance to knock her off her perch. Those blaming the press point to reports late last week of Boyle throwing tantrums, of her threats to quit the show ahead of Saturday’s final and more generally of her inability to cope with the pressure.

2. The public: Rather like the press, the British public has also been blamed by some for wanting to bring Boyle down a peg or two. They did this in part by failing to vote for her on the night of the final, meaning she failed to win as expected.

3. The show: Should the show’s producers have seen this coming? Family members and others have criticised Britain’s Got Talent, aired on the commercial ITV channel, for not doing enough to support Boyle. According to Piers Morgan, one of the programme’s judges, Boyle had learning difficulties at school, which may have exacerbated the problem.

4. Susan Boyle: Britain’s Got Talent is a hugely successful format and anyone who enters the competition will know that they may be watched by millions of viewers and could become overnight stars. In her defence, however, Boyle’s trajectory has probably been unprecedented in terms of the number of people tuning in to watch her on the Internet and the global reach of that following.

So Susan Boyle DIDN’T win “Britain’s Got Talent”. After the show turned her into a household name in more countries than I could list, the 48-year-old came second in Saturday’s final, surprisingly losing out to street dancers Diversity. Now don’t get me wrong. Diversity were impressive, and the choreography was as good as the execution on the night. It’s just that the momentum behind Boyle, one of the biggest Internet stars in history, was so great that it had been widely assumed she would walk off with the cheque for 100,000 pounds and the headlines on Sunday.

It was not to be, but this is unlikely to be the end of the road for Boyle. A lucrative recording contract is surely only days away as labels, notably Simon Cowell’s very own Syco, seek to trade in on her global fame, fine voice and anti-celebrity appeal. Some might feel that losing out to Diversity could be a blessing in disguise for a woman who has struggled to cope with the demands her instant celebrity has brought. She threatened to walk out of the show, had an altercation with journalists and reports said she had to be taken to a “safe house” in the days leading to the final to escape the limelight. Perhaps coming second will give her a little space and time to recover from what judge Cowell rightly called “a weird seven weeks”.

Kylie Minogue’s music may not be to everyone’s taste, but she put on an impressive show late last night at a charity bash in Cannes. Sponsored by Chopard, the party suffered the same fate as other soirees at the film festival this year – the A-list was unusually short. That said, it was fun for the hundreds of mere mortals who did turn up.

In the blissfully uncrowded VIP area the Dom Perignon flowed freely all night, or at least until about 2 a.m. but by then it didn’t matter too much. Colleagues of mine who will remain nameless were quaffing from large tumblers — a crime against champagne if you ask me, but then, they didn’t seem to care what I thought.

And 40-year-old Kylie got the dancing going with a slick set for the Miracle Africa International Foundation Charity.

On her way in, the former TV star told Reuters she was keen to get back to work behind the camera.

“I definitely wouldn’t mind going back to my roots for a little bit and doing some acting. If I find the right project I will go into that with everything I’ve got.”

Barring a little unnecessary pushing and shoving by some over-zealous bouncers, it was feel-good all the way, and a perfect way to start winding things up at this year’s Cannes. Back to the hotel at 4 a.m. and up this morning for a couple of double espressos and some more movies. The curtain falls on Sunday night … we’re nearly there.

If Danish director Lars von Trier was out to create a stir with his movie “Antichrist”, he got what he came for in Cannes. After a charged press screening where the movie, in competition at the film festival, was jeered, laughed at and loudly booed, the reviews are in, and unsurprisingly, most of them are, well, diabolical.

Faced with a hostile question during a press conference, the director who won the Palme d’Or in Cannes with “Dancer in the Dark” in 2000, took exception, and said he did not make his film for the press sitting before him or, for that matter, for an audience at all. That only served to wind some members of the press up further, begging the question why he made the film at all.

The explanation appears to be to help von Trier get over a bout of depression. The result is a horror starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple who struggle to overcome the grief of losing their young son. What Gainsbourg’s increasingly deranged character does to her husband, and then to herself is hard for a family-friendly blog page to describe. Suffice it to say that many of the 1,000 people watching groaned and turned away.

Critics have attacked the film for being gratuitously violent and sexual, pretentious and misogynistic. But it also has a handful of reviewers who defended it, saying it is one of the few films in Cannes this year that dared to be different.

Just for good measure, von Trier-the-provocateur told reporters he believed he was the world’s best director. I couldn’t work out if he was joking or not.

The first film has been shown at Cannes and it is already a hit, which will come as welcome relief in the general climate of economic crisis that has surrounded the start of the festival.

Disney/Pixar’s “Up”, the story of retired balloon salesman Carl Fredricksen, thrown together with a keen but clumsy boy scout called Russell, has been hailed as “arguably the funniest Pixar effort ever” by The Hollywood Reporter and as a “tremendous film” by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.

Director Pete Docter said he was inspired by film-makers of an earlier era like Frank Capra and “Up’s” debt to old movies is obvious.

Three dimensional digital effects give a remarkable visual depth to the adventure of the gruff old widower and the zealous young stowaway who float away to South America in a house borne aloft under a string of balloons. As the pair swing precariously through the clouds above the jungle green or flee a bounding pack of dogs, the 3D effects add a dazzling dimension to the tale. But beneath it all, the film is an old fashioned story of love and redemption in the classic Hollywood manner that would have done the old master proud. “Walt Disney always said that for every laugh there has to be a tear,” said producer and Pixar boss John Lasseter. Many a tear certainly seemed to be creeping out from under the special 3D goggles at the press screening and it was faintly disconcerting to see so many hardened reporters blubbing silently away as the credits rolled.

None of that will hurt of course and amid all the gloomy talk of recession and cancelled parties, “Up” added an undoubted “feel good” element at Cannes that will doubtless translate into huge commercial success. “Boxoffice-wise, the sky’s the limit for ‘Up.’” , The Hollywood Reporter, for one, opined.
Four years in the making, “Up” was conceived well before subprime mortgages, a collapsing financial system and ever-mounting jobless rolls became the stuff of daily headlines.

But its echoes of the sentimental comedies that audiences turned to for comfort and entertainment in the troubled decades of the 1930s and 1940s, seem oddly appropriate in an economy facing its worst crisis since the Great Depression.

The Cannes film festival lineup just announced has a familiar ring to it, with several past winners vying for that nice gold-coloured leaf grandly called the Palme d’Or in 2009. Quentin Tarantino (who won in 1994) unveils the oddly spelled “Inglourious Basterds”, his World War Two caper starring Brad Pitt. Ken Loach (2006) and Jane Campion (1993) are also in the running in the main competition lineup as is Lars von Trier (2000).

Grabbing just as much limelight on the French Riviera, though, will be Terry Gilliam and his “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”, the late Heath Ledger’s last movie with stars Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell stepping in to complete his role.

Finally hoping to break his Cannes duck will be another favourite on the palm-lined Croisette waterfront, Spain’s Pedro Almodovar who once again teams up with Penelope Cruz in “Broken Embraces”. He was favourite to take the top prize in 2006 with “Volver”, and ended up calling the billing as frontrunner a “curse”. Could it be Pedro for Palme d’Or this time?