
Saturday, 30 April 2011
Voice Of Taksin

Friday, 29 April 2011
Digiplay


Digiplay also includes a selection of old games consoles representing the history of video games. There are playable versions of many games, including the first-ever computer game, Spacewar; the original console game, Pong; and an interactive/virtual-reality game, Kinectimals.
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Modern Architecture A-Z

Significant modern and contemporary architects, including masters such as Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry, are profiled. There are gorgeous full-page photographs of iconic buildings such as the Eiffel Tower (Paris), the Chrysler Building (New York), and the Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao). The Encyclopedia Of Architecture, edited by Joseph A Wilkes, is a five-volume encyclopedia that also includes biographies of key architects.
Photographers A-Z

Each photographer's work is illustrated with (sometimes rather small) reproductions from one of their published monographs. The selected artists range from masters such as Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Bresson to leading contemporary photographers such as Andreas Gursky and Sebastiao Salgado. For more historical context, see A World History Of Photography, Photography: A Cultural History, and The Focal Encyclopedia Of Photography.
Saturday, 23 April 2011
Conversations With Scorsese

Many of the anecdotes are familiar from previous Scorsese interviews, and there are no personal revelations. (Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls has more explosive details about Scorsese's drug use.) Scorsese is more candid than usual, however: describing the delayed release of Shutter Island, he says it felt like "somebody just has a baseball bat and hits you in the chest". He is surprisingly dismissive of Shutter Island, in fact ("I want to leave Shutter Island"), and critical of the constraints imposed by the studio system during the making of Gangs Of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed.
The book also includes a detailed filmography of Scorsese's work as director, actor, and producer. Schickel's previous interviews with film directors include The Men Who Made The Movies (a documentary series and book) and Woody Allen: A Life In Film (a documentary and book).
Friday, 15 April 2011
Scream IV

With Williamson (who also wrote the excellent The Faculty) back on board, Scream IV should have reinvigorated the series. However, there's nothing original here, merely the same old phone calls (once clever, now formulaic) and villain-unmaskings (inviting unwelcome Scooby Doo comparisons). The body count is extremely high, though the large cast and frequent killings mean that characters are given very little back-story, so it's hard to become emotionally involved in their fates. Also, there is little suspense, and each victim is dispatched so quickly, thus the film is never really scary.
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
The Film Theory Reader

Monday, 11 April 2011
The Typographic Desk Reference

Fortunately not another conventional font catalogue, TDR instead devotes more space to the minutiae of typography, complete with diagrams and examples. This material is usually covered only in brief glossaries, so TDR's meticulous coverage is exceptional. (For a detailed account of typographic history, see Daniel Updike's Printing Types and Lewis Blackwell's 20th-Century Type; in both cases, the first and second editions are superior to the third.)
...Isms
Understanding Architecture

Like Understanding Art, the book presents a logical and concise historical summary. The book was subsequently reprinted under the less succinct subtitle Understanding Architectural Styles.
...Isms
Understanding Cinema

Unlike art, cinema is more suited to classification by genre than by ism, though Film Isms (written by Ronald Bergan, co-author of 501 Must-See Movies) takes "an 'ismatic' viewpoint" that awkwardly converts genres into isms, coining such bizarre neologisms as 'Horrorism', 'Film Noirism', 'New Wavism', etc. These incongruous labels are unfortunate distractions, obfuscating rather than simplifying their subject-matter, and are thus counter-productive in a book that purports to provide a concise and accessible summary of film history. Also, Bergan's definition of Orientalism is simply incorrect, and the appendices are too short to be useful.
Finally, the book's title punctuation is unclear. Film Isms... appears on the cover and title page, while Film...Isms appears on the spine and flaps. ...Isms: Understanding Cinema would be more consistent with the other titles in the series. Bergan's previous book Film is a better beginner's guide to cinema history, and 1,000 Films To Change Your Life is a better thematic guide to great films.
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
Nightmare Movies

Newman is the ultimate horror expert, and Nightmare Movies is his magnum opus. In the updated version, he discusses serial-killer films (notably The Silence Of The Lambs), the proliferation of vampires in cinema and on TV, postmodernism (Scream) and Hollywood's current obsession with remakes, J-Horror ghost films (Ringu), 'torture porn' (Hostel), virtual-reality SF (The Matrix), and zombie horror. The last two categories also serve as an update of his apocalypse-cinema book Millennium Movies. He previously summarised contemporary horror trends in Horror, which he co-edited.
Newman is also a contributor to 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, Contemporary American Cinema, Fear Without Frontiers, 100 European Horror Films, The Oxford History Of World Cinema, and the Aururm Film Encyclopedia: Horror. He has written for various magazines, including Premiere, Sight & Sound, and Empire. He also appears in the supplements to DVDs of Video Nasties, Double Indemnity, Notorious, Suspiria, and The Old Dark House. I saw him introduce a screening of Zombie Holocaust at the ICA, London.
Monday, 4 April 2011
A Voix Nue
Last month, the French radio station France Culture broadcast five episodes of A Voix Nue, directed by Manoushak Fashahi and featuring Stanley Kubrick. Each episode, transmitted daily from 21st to 25th March, was an extract from interviews with Kubrick recorded by film critic Michel Ciment.
Ciment interviewed Kubrick in 1975, 1980, and 1987, and they discussed Kubrick's films Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket. The interviews were originally published in the French newspaper L'Express, and subsequently in Ciment's book Kubrick: The Definitive Edition.
Ciment interviewed Kubrick in 1975, 1980, and 1987, and they discussed Kubrick's films Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket. The interviews were originally published in the French newspaper L'Express, and subsequently in Ciment's book Kubrick: The Definitive Edition.
Saturday, 2 April 2011
Obsessive Compulsive


The exhibition includes ตัวใครตัวมันนะโยม, a painting of naked monks fighting and having sex, with a monk's saffron robe appliqued to the canvas. This characteristically provocative work is as controversial as Anupong Chantorn's painting Moral Boundary, in which naked monks were painted onto a monk's robe.
La Fete 2011



La Fete, like the recent French Open Air Cinema Festival, is organised by Alliance Francaise. Pen-ek's other films are Fun-Bar Karaoke, 6ixtynin9, Last Life In The Universe, Invisible Waves (shown at the 2006 Bangkok International Film Festival), Ploy (shown at the 2007 Bangkok International Film Festival), and Nymph (shown at the 2009 Bangkok International Film Festival; also released in a director's cut version). He has directed several short films, including a segment of Sawasdee Bangkok.