Both the US and the British authorities insist that they have no obligation to do so - and, if this is correct, that should surely change. Who can forget the wicked stepmother in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or the jaw-dropping violence of Japanese manga?. His flagship tax credit scheme wrongly handed out £2bn last year - and that sum now has to be recovered. Tax receipts are beginning to fall below expectations, as the global economy slows. Concerns over public sector productivity have prompted the Office for National Statistics to devise a new independent method of measuring it.
All of this could damage not only the Chancellor's reputation but his chances of succeeding Tony Blair as Prime Minister.Mr Brown is said to be fond of remarking: "There are only two sorts of chancellors - those who fail and those who get out just in time." The most pressing task he now faces is to ensure he does not fall into the wrong category.. Of making lists there is no end. But even by contemporary standards the British Film Institute's decision to draw up a list of the 10 films every child should see by the time they're 14 shows some courage, if not cheek. Everyone knows that the essential ingredient for a children's work is that it should be unacceptable to adults, which is why the publisher of Harry Potter ensured that the books were condemned by the Pope and why the chief use of film censorship categories is to tell children what to try to see on the sly. Full marks for the BFI for trying, however. Film is as much part of culture as books and plays and should be taken seriously. Any list like theirs that includes Robert Mitchum's terrifying performance as a murderous preacher in The Night of the Hunter and Lukas Moodysson's film of lesbianism and adolescence, Show Me Love (originally titled Fucking Amal but renamed for the Anglo-Saxon markets) is nothing if not courageous.The danger here is to make a list by adults of films about children, such as Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups or De Sica's Bicycle Thief rather than "for children".
If education about children is what you want, better to go with Vigo's Zero de Conduit, Brooks's Lord of the Flies or Rene Clement's painful masterpiece of war seen through children's eyes, Jeux Interdit.But surely it is the magic of cinema that children (and adults) need, and for that you should include the great silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and the anarchic wonder of cartoons. When he left four years later, after the Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, over 500,000 American troops were deployed there. But the end of 1968 he was back in Washington, discredited emblem of a misconceived war which, it was then already evident, could never be won by military means alone. Along with the then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Westmoreland personified the US failure in Vietnam. But this is the most lurid, simplistic film on the list: and ugh, those scary flying monkeys.. We would pick up the soldier and put him through the hypothermic process, giving him a much greater chance of survival."Even more futuristic sounding, the Pentagon recently awarded $12m (£7m) in grants to develop an unmanned "trauma pod" that would turn a drone (unmanned aerial vehicle) into an air ambulance.
