It appears as if 23-year-old, London born singer Adele has the Midas touch at the moment. Her album has been at number one for so long that it saw off both the end of the world and Cheryl Cole’s US X-Factor career. She’s performed at the Brits to universal acclaim and she’s captured the hearts and minds of both sides of the Atlantic.

But turning everything you touch to gold isn’t so great when the Tax man comes knocking it seems.

Adele has kicked up a right storm, after whining about the fact that she had to pay around £4,000,000 in tax after the runaway success of her debut album, 19, in formerly relevant music mag, Q. She said that:

“When I got my tax bill in from 19, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire.”

Which is a lovely sentiment. Although the worrying thing is that, being from Tottenham, she could probably get her hands on a gun pretty quickly, if those bastards at Revenue and Customs didn’t keep taking all her money that is.

And what are Cameron and Clegg going to do with this massive windfall anyway, well, if you ask Adele, nothing that’s going to make her life any easier:

“I can’t use public transport any more. Trains are always late, most state schools are shit, and I’ve gotta give you, like, four million quid – are you having a laugh?”

Of course they aren’t having a laugh Adele. They’re the Government; they don’t know how to laugh.

£4,000,000 is a ludicrous amount of money for the UK Government to be demanding though, after all, how is Adele meant to dine on nothing but the finest beluga caviar or quaff the finest Champagne’s money can buy… or buy several million kebabs and a bottle of Lambrini from Abra Kebabra?

The answer is with the other £4,000,000 that was left untouched by HMRC.

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George Clooney, they say, is the perfect movie star. He's handsome, charming, socially aware, a critical darling and lightly self-deprecating.

Trouble is, nobody goes to see any of his movies. You may have thought that this instalment of the weekend box office would be all about Leatherheads, the knockabout screwball sports comedy that George Clooney stars in and directs.

But no - Leatherheads lost out at the weekend box office to last week's US weekend box office number one 21. George Clooney, then – officially not as good as shit films about maths that nobody could possibly come close to liking.

It's with sadness that we report that Leatherheads – the aggressively-promoted movie directed by George Clooney and starring Clooney, Renee Zellweger and the bloke from The Office – couldn't beat 21 at the weekend box office, even though 21 lost almost 40% of its audience from last week and is clearly rubbish.

But, hey, George Clooney's allowed a rare commercial flop now and again. We'll just put Leatherheads alongside The Good German, Good Night, And Good Luck, Intolerable Cruelty, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, Solaris and Predator: The Concert and move on. Here's this week's US weekend box office top five…

1 – 21 (Not to be confused with similarly numerical movie The Number 23, although God knows it'd be nice if Jim Carrey staggered in halfway through 21 and stabbed everyone to bits) $15,100,000

2 - Leatherheads (Perhaps Leatherheads suffered from not having enough mentions about the war in Darfur in it. Note to George Clooney – try boosting the DVD potential by inserting a bit in the middle where you turn to face the camera and say "But what about Darfur?") $13,485,000

3 - Nim's Island (Knowing nothing about Nim's Island, we watched the trailer to find out more. And, hey, it's a Jodie Foster film about a woman trying to protect a child. Who'd have thought?) $13,000,000

4 - Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! (The moral of Horton Hears A Who, of course, is that a person is a person no matter how small. Even if they're not a person and they live on a piece of some dust. Remember that, it's important) $9,100,000

5 - The Ruins (Another film about how Americans shouldn't really every go abroad. But because scorpions crawl inside their bodies and not because they sit on the tube and shout about not being able to see a station called Buckingham Palace like you thought) $7,840,000

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Weekend Box Office – Box Office Mojo 

Kevin Spacey is a well-respected theatrical artistic director. This is mostly because all the films he's made lately have been cack.

It's true – look at K-Pax, Pay It Forward, The Shipping News, Fred Claus. Kevin Spacey can't even make a Superman movie these days without everyone thinking it's a bag of stupid donkey pubes.

But, hey, look at this – Kevin Spacey is in 21, and 21 is the number one movie at the US weekend box office this week. And 21's success is definitely because Kevin Spacey is in it, not because loads of attractive young folk hint at scenes of graphic rumpy-pumpy in the trailer. No sirree.

21 is the number one movie at the US weekend box office, and it's surprising not just because it's a vaguely successful Kevin Spacey movie. We're surprised that 21 is the top movie at the weekend box office because it's a movie about card games – an internal pursuit that's notoriously difficult to get right cinematically. And we're pretty sure that it's the cards that made people go and see 21. Because it definitely couldn't be the constant insinuation that you'll get to see Kate Bosworth's sweater-potatoes. Here's the US weekend box office top five…

1 - 21 (Honestly, we're stumped as to why 21 has been such a box office draw. We've seen Casino Royale, after all, so we know that movie card games only work when there's a bearded French policeman whispering a patronising step-by-step commentary about what's going on during the games. And we refuse to watch 21 until one of those has been digitally inserted) $23,700,000

2 - Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! (Riding high in the weekend box office for the third week running, Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! is now officially the second most successful movie about an elephant that can hear dust after that dream we had once when we were off our shit on over the counter decongestant medication) $17,425,000

3 - Superhero Movie (Forget that it's a critically-massacred, badly thought-out, oddly-timed 15th-generation retread of Scary Movie, the poor performance of Superhero Movie means that its producers have to face the ultimate humiliation – it hasn't even done as well as Meet The Spartans. People have thrown themselves off bridges for less) $9,510,000

4 - Tyler Perry's Meet The Browns (This is a shock – a Tyler Perry movie that hasn't crashed in at the top of the weekend box office. Perhaps the wheels have fallen off the 'black actor dressed as an elderly woman' trend. If that's true then it spells certain financial ruin for Tyler Perry. On the other hand, though, it means that Big Momma's House 3 is less likely to happen, so we're probably OK with it on balance) $7,760,000

5 - Drillbit Taylor (So the first post-suicide attempt Owen Wilson movie has been a bit of a flop. Still, now he's back on his feet we're sure his next film will propel him to the top of the Hollywood pile agai… what? It's going to be a romantic comedy? About a dog? Co-starring Jennifer Aniston? Dear lord, hasn't the man suffered enough already?) $5,800,000

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Weekend Box Office – Box Office Mojo