Sunday Mirror

Footballer Rio Ferdinand has lost his lawsuit against the Sunday Mirror newspaper. Last year, the Mirror published a kiss-and-tell interview with Carly Storey, in which she revealed her affair with Ferdinand, and he sued them for invasion of privacy. The two-page article by Gary Anderson, headlined "My affair with England captain Rio", was published on 25th April 2010.

A Clockwork Orange

Peter Kramer's A Clockwork Orange is the latest in the Controversies series of monographs on censored films. As in Kramer's 2001: A Space Odyssey book, his research at the Stanley Kubrick Archive has revealed new details about the film's production.

A Clockwork Orange is almost unique in British film censorship, as it was screened privately for the Home Secretary before its public release. Also, Kubrick famously requested that the film be withdrawn from the UK (not because of its violent content, but because his family received death threats).

Midnight In Paris

Woody Allen's latest film, Midnight In Paris, stars Owen Wilson as a struggling writer in a mismatched relationship. Wilson is essentially a substitute for Allen, and imitates (probably subconsciously) some of Allen's mannerisms and speech patterns. Allen has played similar characters in many films, including Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Deconstructing Harry. His last film, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, featured Josh Brolin in an almost identical role.

As in The Purple Rose Of Cairo, there's a Magical Realist twist; in this case, Wilson is transported back to the 1920s every night at midnight, discussing his novel with F Scott Fitzgerald, pitching The Exterminating Angel to Luis Bunuel, and falling in love with Pablo Picasso's muse. There's an attention to detail here that's been missing from most of Allen's recent films, and, even though the plot sometimes feels like Goodnight Sweetheart, the film is romantic and charming. Allen continues his European odyssey, after several films in London and Barcelona.

The Film Book

The Film Book: A Complete Guide To The World Of Cinema is a repackaging of Ronald Bergan's book Film. This new edition comes in a smart tin box, though some of the first edition's content has been removed: there are no appendices, and the directors section has been cut by 50%. Bergan's Top 100 Movies list is the same as in the previous edition.

Umong Pa Meung

Pundhevanop Dhewakul's film Umong Pa Meung transposes Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon to northern Thailand circa 1500. It was filmed in and around Chiang Mai, with some scenes shot in the atmospheric Wat Umong compound. The cast includes several of Thailand's most popular contemporary stars: Ananda Everingham, Mario Maurer, Petthai Wongkumlao, and Chermarn Boonyasak. (Ananda, Chermarn, and Pundhevanop have worked together on several previous films.)

The plot, in which a monk, a woodcutter, and a commoner discuss a perplexing murder trial, is told in a series of flashbacks, each of which presents a different interpretation of the action. All the witnesses agree that a bandit ties a man to a tree and rapes his wife, though their stories diverge when the husband is murdered. The structure, plot, and characters are all familiar from Kurosawa's original masterpiece.

Perhaps to avoid unfavourable comparisons with Kurosawa, Pundhevanop insists that Umong Pa Meung is not a Rashomon remake. He told The Nation newspaper: "do not expect to see what you see in 'Rashomon'. They are totally different". To further minimise the Kurosawa connection, and to add literary and Thai-historical credibility, the film is being marketed as an adaptation of a play by Kukrit Pramoj. Kukrit reworked Rashomon as a theatrical drama, which Pundhevanop subsequently directed on stage.

Despite Pundhevanop's disclaimer, Umong Pa Meung is clearly a Kurosawa remake. Many shots - such as the woodcutter's entry into the forest, the witnesses giving evidence direct-to-camera, and the triangular compositions of the three principal flashback characters - are direct imitations of sequences from Kurosawa's film.

In a rare deviation from Rashomon, Pundhevanop has chosen to depict the judge observing the witnesses in court, thus distancing the audience. Pundhevanop's most substantial additions are the backstories he develops for each of the protagonists: the upbringings of the monk, the wife, and the bandit are presented as flashbacks. He has also modified the commoner character, who is now reduced to a comically grotesque figure.

While remaking one of the world's greatest films may seem sacrilegious, there have already been several Hollywood Kurosawa remakes: The Outrage remade Rashomon and The Magnificent Seven remade Seven Samurai. Rashomon has also been adapted into a Broadway play and an opera.

Kurosawa's Rashomon was a modest film, achieving success to the surprise of its producers, though Umong Pa Meung is a self-consciously prestigious production, a lavish widescreen epic. In contrast to Kurosawa's emphasis on the subjective nature of truth, Pundhevanop heightens the melodrama and uses frequent slow-motion to romanticise the action. Mario and Chermarn have appeared together in two previous films - Love Of Siam and Rhatree Reborn - though Chermarn is more famous for (and more suited to) her lakorn (soap-opera) roles, and Umong Pa Meung does sometimes feel like an expensive soap-opera.

Following the relaxation of censorship since Rashomon was first released in 1950, a modern remake could conceivably present the central rape and murder more graphically than Kurosawa was able to. (Kurosawa circumvented such restrictions by representing the rape symbolically, with a dagger dropping into the ground.) However, aside from a briefly gory prologue, Pundhevanop's film remains as chaste as the original. Which begs the question: why remake Rashomon, if not to present its plot more realistically?

The answer, and the reason for the lack of explicit sex or violence, is that Umong Pa Meung is intended as a reflection of the Buddhist 'dharma' philosophy. Carried away by this overt religiosity, the film arguably takes itself too seriously, especially during the monk's extended backstory flashback, with earnest dialogue and an unintentionally camp sensibility.

Gagasmicism

After Carnivalism, Thailand's art scene has coined another new 'ism': Gagasmicism, a multi-media exhibition by Pan-Pan Narkprasert. Pan-Pan's kitsch sculptures are lovingly crafted representations of Lady Gaga as a deity or icon. Gagasmicism opened today at BACC, Bangkok, and will close on 11th October.

Best In Film

Best In Film: The Greatest Movies Of Our Time was broadcast by the American TV network ABC on 22nd March this year. ABC viewers and People magazine readers voted online for the five greatest (English-language) films in each genre:

Comedy

1. Airplane!
2. Monty Python & The Holy Grail
3. Some Like It Hot
4. Young Frankenstein
5. Tootsie

Sci-Fi Film

1. Star Wars IV: A New Hope
2. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
3. Avatar
4. The Matrix
5. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

Musical

1. The Sound Of Music
2. Grease
3. The Wizard Of Oz
4. Singin' In The Rain
5. West Side Story

Action

1. Raiders Of The Lost Ark
2. The Dark Knight
3. The Lord Of The Rings III: The Return Of The King
4. Die Hard
5. Gladiator

Suspense/Thriller

1. The Silence Of The Lambs
2. Jaws
3. Psycho
4. The Shining
5. Pulp Fiction

Animated Film

1. The Lion King
2. Toy Story
3. Beauty & The Beast
4. Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
5. Fantasia

The votes for greatest film overall were:

1. The Wizard Of Oz
2. The Godfather
3. Casablanca
4. Gone With The Wind
5. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial

I'd like to think that Citizen Kane was #6 on that final list, but somehow I doubt it. (Beauty & The Beast is the Disney animated version; Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece not the obscure 1939 comedy; and Psycho is the original version.)

Life On Air

Life On Air: A History Of Radio 4, by David Hendy, is a meticulous and thorough history of BBC Radio 4. I only started listening in the 1990s, so I was most interested in Hendy's final chapter (covering 1997 onwards). The Pleasures chapter, which discusses the station's most popular programmes, is another highlight.

Cinema: The Whole Story

Cinema: The Whole Story, edited by Philip Kemp, is a decade-by-decade survey of international film. Like Film Factfinder, Film, and The Virgin Encyclopedia Of The Movies, it summarises a wide range of film genres and styles accessibly for a general audience. Kemp's book is especially valuable because, with a team of contributing writers including Sight & Sound editor Nick James and Nightmare Movies author Kim Newman, it's more authoritative than most of its predecessors.

Though broadly chronological, the book organises its discussion of each decade thematically, with chapters on cinematic genres, movements, and regions. Each chapter is followed by double-page spreads profiling key films, together with brief biographies of significant directors. There are multiple colour stills on almost every page, though the book's thick-but-narrow format precludes full-page images.

The content is pleasingly comprehensive, though there are a couple of surprising omissions: there is no discussion of documentary films, and little coverage of technological development. The coverage is admirably international in scope, though some countries inevitably receive more space than others: Japanese silent cinema and Italian exploitation films are both neglected. Unfortunately, there is no bibliography, so anyone seeking recommendations for further reading will be disappointed.

Navigating through the book's impressive content can be confusing. The contents page is extremely minimalist: individual chapter titles are listed only at the start of each section, rather than all together at the front of the book. Expanding the contents page to list every chapter would substantially improve the book's organisation; alternatively, the text could be restructured into three distinct sections - chronology, film profiles, and director biographies - instead of mixing them all together.

The Oxford History Of World Cinema remains the gold standard for single-volume cinema histories, though it's less profusely illustrated than Kemp's book. Cinema: The Whole Story can't quite replace The Oxford History, though it will hopefully revive interest in classic and international films for a mainstream audience. Its awful American title is Movies: From The Silent Classics Of The Silver Screen To The Digital & 3D Era.

1001 MoviesYou Must See Before You Die

The 2011 edition of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider, has been released. As in previous editions (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010), changes to the list have been limited to 1% of titles, all from the late 1990s onwards.

A dozen films have been removed, including Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill I (first deleted in 2006, then added again in 2008), Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together, and Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. The twelve replacement titles include True Grit, The Passion Of The Christ (added in 2005, then deleted in 2009), Inception, and Black Swan.

Some Like It Hot

Some Like It Hot — The Funniest Film Ever Made: The Complete Book, Taschen’s tribute to Billy Wilder’s classic comedy, has been reissued to celebrate the publisher’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Some Like It Hot, starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon, is arguably the greatest comedy film ever made; its final line of dialogue—“Nobody’s perfect!”—is one of the most famous moments in cinema.

The book includes an interview with Wilder, and was originally published shortly before his death. This new edition has a slightly smaller format, and comes with a DVD of the film. The original edition featured a reprint of Marilyn Monroe’s annotated script, which is missing from this new edition. It remains a comprehensive tribute to the film, though, with a complete reprint of the shooting script, publicity materials, media clippings, and a Wilder filmography.

Editor Alison Castle has also edited two Kubrick books for Taschen, The Stanley Kubrick Archives and Napoleon, both of which are equally lavish. Her collaborator on Some Like It Hot, Dan Auiler, is the author of Hitchcock’s Notebooks.

19th to 19th

Two new books, 19-19 ภาพ ชีวิต และการต่อสู้ของคนเสื้อแดง จาก 19 กันยา 2549 ถึง 19 พฤษภา 2553 (‘pictures of the life and struggle of the red-shirts from 19th September 2006 to 19th May 2010’) and กรุงเทพฯ (ไม่) มีคนเสิ้อแดง: บันทึกการต่อสู้ของคนเสื้อแดงกรุงเทพฯ (‘Bangkok (no) red shirts: a record of the battle of the red-shirts in Bangkok’) both provide photographic records of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Bangkok from 19th September 2006 (the coup) to 19th May 2010 (the Ratchaprasong massacre). Both are published by left-leaning political journals: 19-19 is from Same Sky Books, and กรุงเทพฯ (ไม่) มีคนเสิ้อแดง is from Read Journal.

The red-shirt anti-coup movement gained momentum in 2007, with an organised campaign opposing the 2007 constitution. On the other hand, the cause was significantly set back in April 2009, when red-shirt groups started violent demonstrations in Din Daeng. Subsequent red-shirt protests near Democracy Monument in early 2010 were peaceful. Much of 19-19 is devoted to the extraordinary events of May 2010, when red-shirt demonstrators were massacred by the army; กรุงเทพฯ (ไม่) มีคนเสิ้อแดง, on the other hand, focuses more on the build-up to the massacre

International Film Festival 2011

Chulalongkorn University's International Film Festival 2011 opened today. This year's highlight is the controversial Greek family drama Dogtooth (previously screened at the 2009 Bangkok International Film Festival), which is scheduled for 5th September.

The Festival runs until 9th September. As in previous years (2008, 2008-2009, 2010), all screenings are free.

Journey Of The Buddha

Journey Of The Buddha, the inaugural exhibition of Bangkok's VR Museum, is a collection of Buddha statuettes (collected by Vichai Raksriaksorn) dating from the 9th century onwards. The icons originate from throughout South-East Asia, though primarily from Thailand's Sukhothai and Ayutthaya periods. The majority of the collection is displayed in darkened corridors with atmospheric red uplighting and ambient music. In contrast, an impressive panorama of more recent Buddha images is positioned around one side of the VR's modernist glass dome.

The most frequent Buddha styles and postures are all represented in the VR collection, with the exception of the emaciated Buddha, a striking example of which can be seen at Wat Umong in Chiang Mai. Thailand's most celebrated Buddha images include the golden Buddha at Wat Traimit and the emerald Buddha at Wat Phra Kaew, both in Bangkok, though the country's most majestic Buddha statues are in the ancient city of Sukhothai. (Buddha has been portrayed less respectfully in popular culture, appearing as a malevolent alien in Gantz.)

The Book Of Skulls

The Book Of Skulls, by Faye Dowling, is a visual survey of the human skull as a design icon, with examples of skull imagery from art, fashion, and graphic design. Damien Hirst's For The Love Of God, a platinum skull decorated with 8,000 diamonds, is the ultimate symbol of artistic commodification and fetishisation, and one of the most expensive works by a living artist, though the terms of its sale remain mysterious.

Gabriel Orozco's Black Kites, a chessboard pattern drawn onto a skull, is not included in Dowling's book, though it's an even more direct example of vanitas or memento mori iconography. It also evokes the Dia de los Muertos and Santa Muerte traditions of Orozco's native Mexico.

Kulo

Kulo, a controversial exhibition accused of blasphemy and subjected to vandalism, has been closed prematurely. The exhibition opened on 17th July at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in Manila, and was originally scheduled to run until 21st August.

Kulo was a group exhibition featuring works by thirty-two artists, though Poleteismo, an installation by Mideo Cruz, was singled out for criticism. Cruz's installation includes crucifixes and icons of Jesus decorated with wooden dildos and a used condom. President Aquino claimed that Cruz's work is offensive to Christians, which over-rides freedom of expression: "there is no freedom that is absolute". Cruz is now facing blasphemy charges.

Poleteismo has been shown in Manila several times before: at the Vargas Museum in 2002, at the Kulay-Diwa gallery in 2005, and at Ateneo de Manila University in 2007. It was profiled on the Telecingko television programme in 2005, and featured in a video directed by Sigfried Barros-Sanchez in 2007.

Courrier-International

The 13th July 2011 issue of Courrier-International has been banned in Morocco. The magazine includes a cartoon of King Mohammed VI, and it was banned for the same reason in 2009. (Other foreign publications - El Pais and L'Express International - have also been banned in Morocco, and the Moroccan newspaper Akhbar Al Youm was closed down in 2009.)

Another Art Book

Another Art Book is a portfolio of artworks commissioned by Another Magazine over the past decade. (The title is similar to Stefan Sagmeister's Another Self-Indulgent Design Monograph.)

Highlights include Ucnt (an irreverent anagram by Jake and Dinos Chapman) and Urine Shroud (a Rorschach blot by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, punning on the Turin Shroud and influenced by Andres Serrano's Piss Christ). The centrepiece, however, is The Stations Of The Cross, David Bailey's glossy photographs of Damien Hirst's passion-of-Christ tableaux, featuring skulls, a cow's head, and lots of blood.

The Tree Of Life

The Tree Of Life, directed by Terrence Malick, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. Malick avoids publicity, works intensely, and emerges every few years with another masterpiece (like Stanley Kubrick, though even more so). His first two films, Badlands and Days Of Heaven, are undisputed classics, with gorgeous magic-hour cinematography. The Tree Of Life looks as stunning as his previous works, though its non-linear, almost abstract narrative is surprisingly experimental.

The film begins with a mother and father's grief at the death of one of their three sons. How he died is never explained; he would be at the right age to fight in the Vietnam war, though Malick's brother committed suicide and the film may therefore be semi-autobiographical. Later scenes of the sons growing up together in Texas in the 1950s may also be autobiographical, as Malick was also raised in Texas.

Like the art film Powers Of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, The Tree Of Life's perspective is both macroscopic and cosmological. Malick shows us the origins of galaxies, stars, and planets, the development of microbial organisms, the evolution of marine creatures, and the reign of the dinosaurs. These sequences are extraordinary and breath-taking, especially on a large cinema screen. They resemble the interplanetary scenes from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the analogue visual effects for both films were developed by Douglas Trumbull.

The dinosaur sequence (influenced, as are so many other CGI dinosaurs, by Jurassic Park) is arguably a prequel to 2001's 'Dawn of Man' segment; whereas Kubrick used pre-historic apes to illustrate our capacity for violence, Malick's dinosaurs represent nascent compassion, as one dinosaur spares the life of another. The hallucinatory dreamscapes of 2001 - and, less profoundly, Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void and Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain - may be The Tree Of Life's only parallels in commercial cinema; few other films are as ambitious (or audacious).

After the dinosaurs are obliterated by a meteorite, paving the way for human evolution, Malick returns to the three sons growing up in Texas. Scenes from their childhoods, remembered by one of the sons as an adult, present an idyllic existence punctuated by occasional moments of unsettling incongruity (a man suffering a seizure; a burning house) and magical-realist fantasy (the mother levitating, and laying in a glass coffin like Sleeping Beauty). These scenes are presented impressionistically, like snapshots from a photograph album, out of sequence and often without dialogue, leaving many events unexplained.

There is an unavoidably religious element to the film: it opens with a quotation from the Book of Job, and concludes with a family reunion on a heavenly beach. A purely abstract light pattern seen at the start and end of the film may thus represent a divine presence. I was put off by the religiosity, and the pretentious whispered voice-over, though more importantly I was captivated by the scope of the narrative.

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is another of Woody Allen's late-period London films (after Match Point, Scoop, and Cassandra's Dream). Again, the main characters are writers and artists; more unusually, they all seem to be alcoholics.

Anthony Hopkins is excellent in an unflattering role, his character's mid-life crisis resulting in acute humiliation. Naomi Watts plays the unsympathetic lead female character, shouting "I need my own gallery!" at her husband and "You imbecile! I need that money!" at her mother; as in Sex & The City II, the 'problems' being dealt with are so upper-middle-class. The various plot strands are leading up to some potentially awkward moments, though Allen leaves them unresolved and instead finishes on a happy ending.

The Terrorists

Thunska Pansittivorakul’s The Terrorists (ผู้ก่อการร้าย) is his most political film to date, a direct and personal response to last year’s massacre in Bangkok. With his previous political work, This Area Is Under Quarantine (บริเวณนี้อยู่ภายใต้การกักกัน), Thunska waited four years before criticising Thaksin Shinawatra for the Tak Bai incident, though The Terrorists is an immediate, courageous, and necessary condemnation of the government. (This month, Abhisit Vejjajiva conceded defeat to Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck, though The Terrorists was made long before the election.)

The Terrorists begins with scenes of Thai fishermen; later, it features footage shot at an aquarium. The symbolic value of these sequences is revealed when a Thai monk is quoted equating killing Communists with catching fish. This strategy was also employed in Rwanda, where Tutsis were compared to cockroaches; it represents a dehumanisation of political opponents, in order to justify the massacre of civilians. The film’s title itself refers to a similar propaganda tactic, Abhisit and Suthep Thaugsuban’s demonisation of red-shirt protesters as terrorists in order to turn public opinion against them.

Documentary footage of the protests, providing yet more evidence that the Thai army shot and killed unarmed pro-democracy protesters, is also included. Despite the existence of such evidence, no one in the army has yet been held accountable for the massacre; the film ends with a pertinent rhetorical question: “who do you think has the power to order the soldiers?” Footage of the 1976 Thammasat University massacre is also included, demonstrating that history will keep repeating itself if we don’t prevent it.

Thunska’s trademark sexual content is also present: after the opening credits, a bound man is stripped naked and abused; later, in an echo of Thunska’s short film Middle-Earth (มัชฌิมโลก), a nude man is filmed while sleeping. Most provocatively, Thunska also combines explicit sex with political violence: footage of a man masturbating is accompanied by captions describing the Thammasat massacre.

The Terrorists was screened at the Dialogic exhibition yesterday, alongside Thunska’s short film KI SS. He has also directed the semi-autobiographical documentary Reincarnate (จุติ), and his early short films were screened at a retrospective in 2008 (Inside Out, Outside In).

Dialogic

The group exhibition Dialogic at BACC encourages visitors to interact with its exhibits: there is a large recreation area, a media zone, a hut to sit in, even (after Tracey Emin) a bed to sleep in. The exhibits are (tangential and indirect) responses to fundamental activities such as eating, excreting, and dying; the atmosphere is informal and laid-back.

The exhibition includes KI SS, a short film by Thunska Pansittivorakul in which footage of two men kissing is followed by the text of Snow White, ending with a photograph of Bangkok's Democracy Monument. Thunska's previous films include the politically and/or sexually provocative Reincarnate and This Area Is Under Quarantine; his new film The Terrorists was screened at Dialogic today, followed by a long Q&A session, as part of the Morbid Symptom film season. (After today, Morbid Symptom resumes on 6th August, and finishes on 17th September; the season is presented by Filmvirus.)

KI SS is accompanied by a collage of images of the 2010 massacre and other state-sanctioned violence, including the 1976 Thammasat massacre (which also inspired Manit Sriwanichpoom's Horror In Pink and Flashback '76), Holocaust victims, numerous other corpses, and even a severed head. Fortunately, these images are uncensored, though BACC did censor similar photographs from last year's Rupture exhibition.

Dialogic runs from 21st July to 25th September. Various books by Sulak Sivaraksa, including his banned ค่อนศตวรรษ ประชาธิปไตยไทย, are available to buy from a stall within the exhibition.

The Information

In The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick (author of Faster) documents the history of mediated communication and calculation, from the first alphabets to contemporary social networks, and their associated technologies. He also explains how the information we exchange is stored, processed, and organised, from Charles Babbage's mechanical 'difference engine' to the modern computer.

Gleick writes in an accessible and anecdotal style, though he doesn't dumb down the science. The book's scope is extremely wide-ranging; personally, I was most fascinated by the chapters on communications technologies (telegraphy and telephony, also covered in A Social History Of The Media), lexicography (documented by Jonathon Green in Chasing The Sun), and memetics (pioneered by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene).

Convergence Culture

Convergence Culture: Where Old & New Media Collide, in its updated and expanded paperback edition, explores audience participation in the 'web 2.0' era. Author Henry Jenkins dismisses the "Black Box Fallacy" that television, telephone, films, games, and the internet will all be streamed to a single set-top box via a fibre-optic 'information superhighway', and argues instead that the media landscape is becoming increasingly multifarious. He also perceives a shift from passive to active media consumption. These trends converge into a new paradigm: the multi-platform, interactive narratives of 'transmedia'.

Smartphones represent a potential technological convergence, though Jenkins focuses on the synergistic convergence of texts and narratives, with multi-national conglomerates cross-promoting their products across a wide media spectrum. He cites The Matrix as an example of this corporate inter-textuality, with the film trilogy The Matrix I-III followed by a cartoon (The Animatrix), a game (Enter The Matrix), and various comics (The Matrix Comics I-II). These additional products are revenue-generating spin-offs, though they also add to the narrative complexity of the Matrix universe, promoting discussion among fans and acting as an advanced form of viral marketing.

Jenkins's main research interest, and the central focus of Convergence Culture, is the participatory nature of audience responses to contemporary media. He highlights the product-placement, sponsorship, and interactivity inherent in 'reality TV' quasi-documentary series such as Survivor. He examines an individual case-study in each chapter, though these are restricted to either reality TV or 'fan-fiction' - neither of which are genres that I'm particularly impressed by. Jenkins is particularly fascinated by fan-fiction - fans writing alternative narratives for existing characters - though to me it seems marginal and derivative. Regular sidebars, in which he discusses broader trends and contexts, are more interesting than the case-studies in the body text.

While the tools of media production are available to many consumers, we do not all utilise them to their full capacities. Most audience members (fortunately) do not write fan-fiction or create 'mashup' video re-edits. More people read blogs than write them. We do, however, interact with our media more than ever: time-shifting television, commenting on websites, voting for reality TV contestants, collaboratively 'crowdsourcing' data, and of course using social networks.

"The most humble day of my life"

Rupert Murdoch gave evidence to a parliamentary select committee yesterday, and began by stating: "This is the most humble day of my life". During the committee session, a spectator pushed a custard pie into Murdoch's face, leading to inevitable "humble pie" headlines in today's news coverage.

Murdoch was responding to allegations that News Of The World journalists systematically hacked into the mobile phones of hundreds of celebrities, politicians, and other public figures. The Guardian's Nick Davies (author of Flat Earth News) has been investigating the scandal for years, and his revelation that the News Of The World hacked the mobile phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler caused public outrage when it was published earlier this month.

In a genuinely jaw-dropping moment, Murdoch's son James announced on 7th July that the News Of The World newspaper would cease publication. Its final issue was published on 10th July, headlined "THANK YOU & GOODBYE". Numerous News International journalists, including NI's former chief executive Rebekah Brooks, are facing criminal charges in relation to phone-hacking and the subsequent corporate cover-up.

The (Longer) Long Tail

Chris Anderson originally formulated his 'long tail' theory in a 2004 Wired magazine article. (Anderson is the editor of Wired, making him one of the most influential figures in technology and media.) The article was subsequently expanded into the best-selling book The Long Tail: Why The Future Of Business Is Selling Less Of More. The paperback edition contains an extra chapter (on marketing), thus it's been retitled The (Longer) Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand.

Anderson's thesis is that there is a market for everything. Not a potential market, but an actual one: that anything and everything will be consumed by someone, somewhere. He compares the limited selection of products available at bricks-and-mortar shops (where shelf space is reserved only for popular items) with the seemingly limitless diversity offered by e-commerce retailers. He then proposes a paradigm shift in supply-and-demand: catering to niche markets (the 'long tail' of the sales curve) by selling a wider range of products at lower volumes.

As we've seen in the past, wider distribution channels do not always lead to increased diversity. There may be hundreds of cable television stations, though very few of them offer original programming, so choice is only an illusion. Similarly, multiplex cinemas don't offer a variety of films; instead, they show the same blockbusters on more screens. (For instance: a fourteen-screen cinema in Bangkok showing Transformers on twelve of those screens!) More distribution channels just means more ways to receive the same content, as the new channels are all controlled by oligopolies (such as Hollywood studios, TV/radio networks, and online social networks).

Media conglomerates see increased consumer choice as a potential threat, because it leads to market fragmentation: as the number of cable TV channels increases, for example, audiences for terrestrial networks are decreasing. Anderson invites corporations to embrace this trend, utilising the seemingly limitless bandwidth of digital distribution to produce (or aggregate) an endless variety of sub-genres and specialist-interest products, all of which would eventually find an audience.

This theory works perfectly for digital aggregators such as iTunes: Apple can store millions of tracks on its servers, ready to be downloaded by a global audience. Indeed, Anderson sees the digital-only model as the ultimate future of 'long tail' distribution. It's also a potential model for other media, such as newspapers, films, computer games, and software, in their inexorable (and arguably regrettable) shift towards digital-only distribution; it's not applicable to other industries, though.

The conversion from physical to digital ("a progression from the economics of pure atoms, to a hybrid of bits and atoms, to the ideal domain of pure bits"), and especially the potential for an infinite variety of consumer choices, remain utopian ideals rather than realistic objectives. While digital files can be stored, distributed, and copied at no cost, they still have to be produced in the first place. The notion of transforming information from atoms to bits was predicted and advocated by Nicholas Negroponte in his Wired columns and his book Being Digital; Anderson appropriates Negroponte's concept without acknowledgement.

European Union Film Festival 2011

This year's European Union Film Festival is being held, like last year's Festival, at BACC. The event opened on 7th July, and will close tomorrow. All screenings are free.

The Festival includes Banksy's documentary (or mockumentary) Exit Through The Gift Shop, a profile of fellow graffiti artist Mr Brainwash. It's not clear how much of the documentary is actually true: Mr Brainwash's Warhol-esque self-documentation seems too convenient; his sudden transformation into a conceptual artist (a la Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons), and his absurdly derivative art (inspired by Andy Warhol), are surely satirical rather than factual.

Exit Through The Gift Shop was first shown on 14th July and was screened again today. Banksy, arguably the world's most famous guerrilla artist, also wrote the foreword to Trespass, a history of street art. Mr Brainwash subsequently designed the cover for Madonna's Celebration album, suggesting either that she was in on the joke or (more likely) that she believed the hype.

Que Reste-T-Il De Nos Amours

Que Reste-T-Il De Nos Amours: The Year Before The New Wave Revolution [sic] is a season of films organised by Filmvirus, screening at Thammasat University, Bangkok, between 17th July and 18th September. All screeings are free.

The season showcases some of France's key films from before the New Wave, opening with Abel Gance's epic Napoleon on 17th July. Two Poetic Realist classics are screened on 24th July: Pepe Le Moko by Julien Duvivier, and Le Grand Jeu by Jacques Feyder. The great director Marcel Carne is represented by Port Of Shadows on 31st July. Jean Cocteau's Surrealist fantasy La Belle & La Bete is showing on 14th September.