29 May 2020

Daily Mail


Daily Mail

Daily Mail film critic Brian Viner has selected his 100 favourite English-language films, and the list is published in today’s newspaper (p. 47). The lack of foreign-language titles is unsurprising, as the Mail is a mainstream tabloid. More unusual is the omission of critically acclaimed films such as Citizen Kane and Vertigo, as Viner acknowledges: “I’m aware that I’ve left out lots of all-time classics.” The 100 titles are his personal favourites—he clearly enjoys comedies—rather than the greatest films of all time, which is a key distinction. Perhaps inevitably, the top spot goes to The Godfather.

20 May 2020

Team of Five

Team of Five
Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump, published yesterday, reveals how the most recent ex-Presidents and their spouses have adapted to life out of office. Author Kate Anderson Brower interviewed Jimmy Carter and three former First Ladies, though most of the ‘team of five’ didn’t participate.

Brower also spoke to the incumbent, Donald Trump, and the book begins with her Oval Office interview. Trump showed Brower a letter he had received from Kim Jong Un, presumably the same one that he showed to another interviewer, Doug Wead. In both cases, Trump used the document to give the illusion of bringing the interviewers into his confidence: he told Wead that his advisors “don’t want me to give these to you”, and he told Brower that she “was not meant to see this,” though he had already Tweeted the letter months earlier.

15 May 2020

Sunset Boulevard (blu-ray)

Sunset Boulevard
Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Sunset Boulevard was first released on blu-ray by Paramount in 2012. The disc included a newly-discovered deleted scene, in which lyricists Ray Livingston and Ray Evans sing one of their own compositions, The Paramount Don’t Want Me Blues. The song was cut from the film—and replaced with Buttons and Bows—because the studio considered it too much of an inside joke, though plenty more inside jokes survived the edit.

13 May 2020

Il Re di Bangkok


Il Re di Bangkok Il Re di Bangkok

The graphic novel Il Re di Bangkok (‘the king of Bangkok’), was published in Italian last year, and has now been translated into Thai. The book was written by Claudio Sopranzetti and Chiara Natalucci, with illustrations by Sara Fabbri. (The Thai edition has been self-censored—on pp. 93, 157, and 205—though the Italian edition is unexpurgated.)

The title character, Nok, is a blind lottery-ticket vendor from Isaan who travels to Bangkok for a better life. Economic migration from upcountry to the capital is commonplace, and was a standard theme of politically-conscious writers and directors in the mid-1970s. Nok becomes increasingly politically engaged during his time in Bangkok, as he lives through the 1992 ‘Black May’ massacre, the ‘tom yum kung’ economic crisis, the rise and fall of Thaksin Shinawatra, the 2006 coup, and the red-shirt protests. The book ends as the red-shirts are massacred by the military, an event that took place exactly a decade ago.

For its Thai publication, Il Re di Bangkok was retitled ตาสว่าง (ta sawang), a term describing the sense of political awakening experienced by Nok. Several of the Thai filmmakers interviewed for the forthcoming book Thai Cinema Uncensored have explained their own feelings of newfound political enlightenment: Pen-ek Ratanaruang (“somebody like me, who five years ago had no interest in politics at all”), Yuthlert Sippapak (“I never gave a shit about politics. But right now, it’s too much”), Chulayarnnon Siriphol (“I turned to be interested in the political situation”), Thunska Pansittivorakul (“I started to learn about politics”), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“I was politically naïve”), and Nontawat Numbenchapol (“I was a teenager, a young man not interested in politics so much”) all discussed their personal experiences of ta sawang.

07 May 2020

Cannibal Ferox (blu-ray)

Cannibal Ferox
Eaten Alive!
The short-lived Italian cannibal horror subgenre was one of the most controversial chapters in the history of exploitation cinema. Umberto Lenzi directed the film that launched the cycle, Man from Deep River (Il paese del sesso selvaggio), though Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust is the only example of any real cinematic interest. Despite its exploitation origins, Cannibal Holocaust provided a multi-layered critique of mondo filmmaking, and it directly influenced The Blair Witch Project and other ‘found footage’ horror films.

Cannibal Ferox eschewed the structural sophistication of Cannibal Holocaust in favour of ritualised, explicit violence. As Kim Newman wrote in Nightmare Movies: “Lenzi takes the form about as far as it can go in the direction of gratuitous violence”. Both films contain scenes of genuine animal killings, and both were included on the ‘video nasties’ list in the UK, though Newman calls Cannibal Ferox “the nastiest of the nasties”.

The deluxe blu-ray edition of Cannibal Ferox released by Grindhouse in 2015 features approximately twenty seconds of newly-discovered footage. This extra material, which has no soundtrack, includes additional shots of a pig being killed. (As a vegetarian, scenes like this are hard to watch.) The blu-ray supplements include a feature-length documentary, Eaten Alive! The Rise and Fall of the Italian Cannibal Film, directed by Calum Waddell, featuring interviews with Lenzi, Deodato, and Newman.

04 May 2020

No Filter

No Filter
Which is the most harmful social media platform? Facebook’s attention-grabbing and data-mining is unprecedented, and it hosted anti-Rohingya propaganda with devastating consequences. Fake news spread by WhatsApp group chats has led to mob killings in India. But Instagram has an arguably more pernicious cultural impact, and—as Sarah Frier writes in No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram— it’s changing our entire way of life.

Cafés, galleries, and tourist attractions have become mere selfie backdrops, visited to be photographed at rather than experienced. As Frier notes, savvy businesses capitalise on this by changing “the way they design their spaces and how they market their products, adjusting their strategies to cater to the new visual way we communicate, to be worthy of photographing for Instagram.”

Instagram’s square frame is like the pool that captivated Narcissus. Instagram influencers post daily semi-naked selfies, and Instagram is a world of endless vacations, flawless bodies, and ideal homes. As Frier writes, “Instagram has made us not only more expressive but also more self-conscious and performative.” Whereas traditional advertising is aspirational, the picture-perfect lifestyles self-promoted on Instagram are absolutely unattainable.

Instagram’s founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, initially resisted commercialisation, though after Facebook bought the company they began running ads to placate Mark Zuckerberg. But most advertising on Instagram is more insidious and ambiguous: what Frier calls “this thriving new economy of influence. As Instagram grew, so did the set of people willing to take money in exchange for posting about their outfits, vacations, or beauty routines, choosing their “favorite” brands with financial incentive to do so.”

Zuckerberg’s cooperation with the book extended only to a two-sentence email, though Frier did interview Systrom and Krieger. Zuckerberg comes across as the villain of the piece, though this may be because his perspective is missing. Once under the Facebook umbrella, Instagram was pressured to increase revenue. When it achieved this, by crossing previous red lines on user privacy and design integrity, it was regarded by Zuckerberg as an internal threat to be subjugated. (Inevitably, Systrom and Krieger resigned in 2018, just as the founders of other Facebook acquisitions—WhatsApp and Oculus—had done earlier that year.)

In the UK, No Filter is subtitled The Inside Story of How Instagram Transformed Business, Celebrity and Our Culture. In her preface, Frier describes the book as “an effort to bring you the definitive inside story of Instagram.” That effort was certainly successful, and No Filter stands alongside Facebook: The Inside Story, The Facebook Effect, and Hatching Twitter as an essential account of the creation and consequences of social media.

28 April 2020

Moments of Silence:
The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976 Massacre in Bangkok


Moments of Silence

Thongchai Winichakul’s Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976 Massacre in Bangkok, published this month, is equal parts memoir and academic analysis. Thongchai, one of Thailand’s leading historians, is a survivor of the 6th October massacre, and the book begins with his personal account of that day and its aftermath. The massacre was swept under the carpet for decades and, in fact, it’s primarily due to Thongchai’s efforts that it’s still commemorated at all: he organised an exhibition marking the twentieth anniversary in 1996. This book now serves as a permanent reminder of the inexplicably savage event.

Forty-six people were killed on 6th October, when militia groups and state forces stormed Thammasat University, though there has been no accountability and the attackers have never been prosecuted. Instead, the massacre remains officially whitewashed, conspicuously absent from the national history curriculum. As Thongchai explains, “the silence about the massacre speaks loudly about Thai society in ways that go beyond the incident itself: about truth and justice, how Thai society copes with conflict and its ugly past, about ideas of reconciliation, the culture of impunity, and rights, and about the rule of law in the country.”

Thongchai has interviewed relatives of the victims, including Jinda and Lim Thongsin, whose son Jaruphong was killed. The chapter on the Thongsin family’s long search for closure is truly heartbreaking. He also sought out some of the perpetrators, such as General Uthan Sandivongse (in charge of anti-Communist radio propaganda, and described in the book as the “most infamous propagandist in modern Thai history”). Thongchai’s encounters with “the Wolf who devoured the Lamb” recall the documentary The Look of Silence, in which a survivor of the Indonesian Communist purge confronts those responsible for the atrocities.

Moments of Silence is also notable as the first commercial book to reproduce the incendiary Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) front page that sparked the massacre. (The front page was included in an art book published last year, though it was given only to participants in a research study.)

27 April 2020

Cultures at War

Cultures at War
Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia, edited by Tony Day and Maya H.T. Liem, was published in 2010. The anthology includes ten essays that examine how Southeast Asian popular culture embraced independence and modernity in response to Cold War ideologies and geopolitics.

The cover depicts Mitr Chaibancha as the Red Eagle, and in one chapter Rachel V. Harrison discusses the character’s political subtext. In Mitr’s final film, he vanquishes a Red Eagle imposter—“his heroic guise has been commandeered by leftists”—and is transformed into the Golden Eagle, “epitomizing Thailand’s Cold War struggle with the communist enemy.”

Other Thai films of the Cold War era featured more pernicious anti-Communist messages. Harrison’s essay includes a close reading of หนักแผ่นดิน (‘scum of the earth’), a notorious propaganda film that glorifies the royalist paramilitary Village Scout movement.

Thailand’s anti-Communist purge ultimately led to the ‘red barrel’ killings and the 6th October 1976 massacre. The Moonhunter (14 ตุลา สงครามประชาชน) and Pirab (พิราบ) dramatise the decisions of radical students to join the Communist insurgency. Santikhiri Sonata (สันติคีรี โซนาตา), A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (จดหมายถึงลุงบุญมี), Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ), and the exhibition Anatomy of Silence (กายวิภาคของความเงียบ) interrogate northern Thailand’s violent anti-Communist legacy.

22 April 2020

Apichatpong Weerasethakul


Thai Cinema Uncensored

Apichatpong Weerasethakul explains why he was targeted by Thailand’s film censors: “Maybe they wanted some money, under the table”. (This is an extract from an interview in Thai Cinema Uncensored, which will be published later this year.)

Pen-ek Ratanaruang


Thai Cinema Uncensored

Pen-ek Ratanaruang discusses the problem of self-censorship and the sensitive footage he couldn’t risk showing to the censors: “We’ll just have to bury it in the ground somewhere!” (This is an extract from an interview in Thai Cinema Uncensored, which will be published later this year.)

Yuthlert Sippapak


Thai Cinema Uncensored

Yuthlert Sippapak explains his battle with the Thai military over the film Fatherland (ปิตุภูมิ): “They don’t want the truth. I want the truth.” (This is an extract from an interview in Thai Cinema Uncensored, which will be published later this year.)

21 April 2020

Kubrick by Kubrick

Kubrick by Kubrick
Grégory Monro’s documentary Kubrick by Kubrick (Kubrick par Kubrick) premiered on the French Arte channel on 12th April. The film is largely comprised of audio clips from Kubrick interviews recorded by Michel Ciment in 1975, 1980, and 1987, and begins with Kubrick’s admission that “I’ve never found it meaningful, or even possible, to talk about film aesthetics in terms of my own films. I also don’t particularly enjoy the interviews.” Most of his thirteen films are covered, with three exceptions (Killer’s Kiss, The Killing, and Lolita).

Much more extensive extracts from Ciment’s recordings were broadcast on French radio in 2011, though the material in the documentary has improved sound quality (thanks to noise reduction). Some extracts also appeared in Making Barry Lyndon. Extended interviews with Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock/Truffaut) and Orson Welles (The Lost Tapes of Orson Welles; This Is Orson Welles) have also been released in audio format.

If your main source material is an audio tape, how can you make a visually appealing documentary film? Monro follows the pattern previously adopted by other documentaries built around audio recordings: as in Marlene and Listen to Me Marlon, a tape recorder plays while the camera prowls around a set. In this case, the set is a recreation of the bedroom from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the audio is supplemented with vintage talking-head clips, shown on an old CRT television (just like the TV playing Summer of ’42 in The Shining).

Other Kubrick interview recordings have also been released in recent years. The collector’s edition of The Stanley Kubrick Archives included a CD featuring a 1966 Kubrick interview by Jeremy Bernstein for The New Yorker. A 1987 Kubrick interview by Tim Cahill for Rolling Stone was issued as an episode of The Kubrick Series podcast. Japanese TV producer Jun’ichi Yaoi interviewed Kubrick by telephone in 1980, and VHS video footage of the interview was released online in 2018.

20 April 2020

The Awful Truth

The Awful Truth
In 1933, Cary Grant appeared in supporting roles alongside Mae West in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, but it was The Awful Truth, released four years later, that made him a star. Grant and Irene Dunne (who received top billing) play a mutually distrustful—and mutually unfaithful—married couple who decide to divorce, yet are unable to stop themselves from sabotaging each other’s new romances.

The Awful Truth established the suave persona that would become synonymous with Grant for the remainder of his career. It’s one of the greatest screwball comedies, a subgenre that emphasised farcical action, fast-paced delivery, witty repartee, and battle-of-the-sexes humour.

Leo McCarey’s direction is a notch below that of Howard Hawks, who made the screwball classics Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday (both also starring Grant), though The Awful Truth is a more satisfying film. In Bringing Up Baby, Grant’s character is absent-minded and ineffectual, and the havoc wreaked on him is rather exasperating. His Girl Friday’s frenetic pace is impressive though exhausting. In contrast, The Awful Truth feels more sophisticated, and its satirical swipes at the institution of marriage are as sharp as ever.

The film ends with a touching scene clearly modelled on the Walls of Jericho sequence from the popular romantic comedy It Happened One Night (which is sometimes—incorrectly, I would argue—described as the first screwball comedy). In turn, The Awful Truth’s essential premise—Cary Grant jeopardising his (ex) wife’s engagement to a rube played by Ralph Bellamy—was repeated in His Girl Friday.

19 April 2020

The Criterion Collection
Dr Strangelove

Dr Strangelove
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove was first released by the Criterion Collection on laserdisc, in 1992. That transfer was supervised by Kubrick himself, and he even designed the front cover, though the disc was swiftly withdrawn from sale after Kubrick complained about the unauthorised inclusion of a screenplay draft among the supplementary features. (The draft script opened with a segment titled The Dead Worlds of Antiquity, told from the perspective of an alien civilisation.)

The Criterion laserdisc presented Dr Strangelove “in its original split-format aspect ratio for the first time.” The film alternated between 1.66:1 and 1.33:1, as it had on its original theatrical release. (Criterion’s Lolita laserdisc also featured these alternating ratios.) When Dr Strangelove was released on DVD for the first time, in 1999, the split-format was retained, though all subsequent releases have been matted to 1.66:1. Sadly, the Criterion blu-ray, released in 2016, is also framed at 1.66:1, though it does have an uncompressed mono soundtrack.

The blu-ray’s supplementary features include an extraordinary new discovery: an exhibitor’s trailer of highlights from the film, narrated by Kubrick himself (“Please remember, as you watch this, that the material is uncut”). The disc also includes an interview with Mick Broderick, author of the excellent Reconstructing Strangelove. The packaging is equally impressive, with reproductions of the “miniature combination Russian phrasebook and Bible” and the “Plan R” dossier.

15 April 2020

Coronavirus Lockdown


Lockdown

Suthep Thaugsuban and his anti-government protesters launched an unsuccessful ‘Shutdown Bangkok’ campaign in 2014, though the current coronavirus pandemic has led to a global shutdown. Bangkok is under lockdown, and many events in the city have been cancelled. These include a gala screening of A Man Called Tone (โทน) at the Scala cinema, and the สยองขวัญ Uncut (‘horror uncut’) season at Thammasat University. Some films were shown last month at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya, though their screening of Dang Bireley’s and Young Gangsters [sic] (2499 อันธพาลครองเมือง) on 20th March was cancelled. Screenings of Manhattan at the House Samyan cinema, originally scheduled for 28th and 29th March, have been postponed.

13 April 2020

Blond Ambition World Tour


Blond Ambition World Tour

Today marks the 30th anniversary of Madonna’s Blond Ambition World Tour, which began in Japan on 13th April 1990. A defining moment in the history of popular culture, the tour was as much a theatrical presentation as a musical concert. The tour also marked the height of Madonna’s global celebrity, and in the intervening decades, as audiences have become increasingly fragmented, perhaps only Taylor Swift has achieved the same level of name recognition.

Blond Ambition is remembered today largely for its costumes and controversies. Jean-Paul Gaultier designed a corset with a conical bra which, of all Madonna’s many stylistic reincarnations, is arguably her most iconic image. She simulated masturbation during her performance of Like a Virgin, while being fondled by dancers dressed as hermaphrodites, in an extraordinary reinterpretation of her first hit single. When the show was broadcast live on BBC Radio 1, she used the f-word more than a dozen times: “I just wanna say that ‘fuck’ is not a bad word. ‘Fuck’ is a good word...”

The tour is not available on DVD or blu-ray, though the final concert was broadcast live on HBO and released on laserdisc. An earlier concert was filmed by the Spanish TV channel TVE and broadcast throughout Europe. Highlights from the tour, filmed in Paris with multiple 35mm cameras, were included in the groundbreaking behind-the-scenes documentary Truth or Dare (retitled In Bed with Madonna outside the US), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991.

30 March 2020

Facebook: The Inside Story

Facebook: The Inside Story
David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect, published in 2010, remains the definitive history of Facebook’s formative years. But the Facebook of 2020 is very different from that of 2010, and Steven Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story provides an updated account of the social network’s exponential expansion.

As Levy writes in his introduction, “the Facebook reputational meltdown has been epic.” That meltdown arguably began in earnest during the 2016 US election, when pro-Trump fake news was shared on Facebook more often than genuine news stories. In an interview with Kirkpatrick two days after Trump’s victory, Mark Zuckerberg dismissed concerns about the impact of fake news as “a pretty crazy idea.” Interviewed for Levy’s book three years later, Zuckerberg admits that he “might have messed that one up”.

The first half of Levy’s book covers the same ground as Kirkpatrick’s. Like Kirkpatrick, Levy was granted extensive access to Zuckerberg and dozens of other Facebook executives. (Levy also draws on “a seventeen-page chunk” of Zuckerberg’s 2006 journal.) The Facebook Effect’s assessment of the company was scrupulously balanced, though Kirkpatrick has since revised his opinion, telling the Financial Times in 2018 that Facebook represents an “extraordinary threat to democracy on a global scale”.

In Facebook: The Inside Story, Zuckerberg discusses Facebook’s early years in detail, though the chapters on more recent crises have a conspicuous lack of Zuckerberg quotes. The biggest of these PR disasters was the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which Levy calls “the worst catastrophe in the company’s history”.

In the last of his seven interview sessions with Levy, Zuckerberg is more candid about his company’s egregious failings: “Some of the bad stuff is very bad and people are understandably very upset about it—if you have nations trying to interfere in elections, if you have the Burmese military trying to spread hate to aid their genocide, how can this be a positive thing?”

29 March 2020

The Birth of a Nation (blu-ray)

The Birth of a Nation
The Birth of a Nation
The Birth of a Nation, the first epic American film, is now rightly regarded as racist propaganda. Even on its original theatrical release, it was condemned as inflammatory. Nevertheless, it’s a historically significant film, and it was released on US blu-ray by Kino in 2011. A UK blu-ray edition, as part of the Eureka! Masters of Cinema Series, followed in 2013. The Birth of a Nation was the very first film to feature an intermission, and the “End of the first part” intertitle was restored for the two blu-ray releases. (It had been missing from previous video versions.)

Blade Runner
(30th Anniversary Collector’s Edition)

Blade Runner
Dangerous Days
The Blade Runner 30th Anniversary Collector’s Edition blu-ray features five (yes, five) versions of the film: the original theatrical release (with the studio-imposed happy ending and narration), the international theatrical cut (with slightly more violence), the director’s cut (with the unicorn dream sequence), The Final Cut (with some CGI enhancement), and the workprint. (For an exhaustive comparison of the different versions, see Future Noir.)

The three-disc blu-ray set also includes the feature-length documentary Dangerous Days, a definitive guide to the making of the film. The set was originally released on DVD in 2007, and was rereleased on blu-ray in 2012 for the film’s 30th anniversary.

The Exorcist (blu-ray)


The Exorcist Raising Hell

Mark Kermode’s The Fear of God is the definitive documentary on the making of The Exorcist. It was first broadcast on BBC2 in 1998, and an extended version (featuring interviews with actress Mercedes McCambridge and censor James Ferman) was released on the BBC iPlayer last year. However, the 2010 blu-ray release of The Exorcist contained a thirty-minute featurette, Raising Hell: Filming The Exorcist, which includes newly-discovered silent 16mm footage shot on the set. For the blu-ray release, Friedkin made some minor tweaks to his extended cut, removing two of the subliminal CGI demon faces he had added to The Version You’ve Never Seen in 2000.

The Criterion Collection
Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead
Night of Anubis
Due to a technical oversight—the omission of a copyright notice in the opening title sequence—George A. Romero’s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead was a public-domain film from the moment it was released. (The law has since changed, and copyright is now granted automatically.) Without copyright protection, the film was distributed on video by all and sundry, in various poor-quality editions.

A restored version was finally released on blu-ray by the Criterion Collection in 2018. The Criterion edition also includes a workprint version of the film, with the alternate title Night of Anubis. (The workprint is silent, though audio from the theatrical version was synched with it.) The blu-ray also features newly-discovered dailies (also silent), and the release was supervised by Romero shortly before his death.

The Criterion Collection
The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick’s stunning The Tree of Life was released on blu-ray by the Criterion Collection in 2018. One disc features the theatrical version, though Malick also created an extended version (fifty minutes longer) especially for the Criterion release. The extended cut has also been reframed, revealing slightly more of the image while retaining the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio.

It Came from Outer Space (blu-ray)

It Came from Outer Space
It Came from Outer Space
Jack Arnold’s classic 1950s sci-fi film It Came from Outer Space was released on blu-ray in the UK in 2016. The disc features both the 3D and conventional 2D versions of the film, though this edition is particularly significant for completists as it includes the original theatrical intermission.

Intermissions are usually associated with epics such as Gone with the Wind, though they were required for all 3D films in order to change reels on both projectors. So, despite its brisk eighty-minute running time, It Came from Outer Space also had an intermission, and this blu-ray release is the first video edition to include it.

Apocalypse Now (Full Disclosure)

Apocalypse Now: Full Disclosure
The three-disc Full Disclosure edition of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was released on blu-ray in 2010. The box set includes the original theatrical version of Apocalypse Now, the extended Apocalypse Now Redux, and the making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness (though not, of course, the five-hour workprint or the recent Final Cut version). It also features a booklet with material from Coppola’s archive.

This release is most notable for its aspect ratio, it being the first time that the film was ever released in 2.35:1 on any video format. All previous video editions were cropped to 2.0:1—the Univisium ratio retroactively applied by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro—a fate that also befell Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo).

23 March 2020

The Big Goodbye

The Big Goodbye
“It’s set in Chinatown?”
“No. Chinatown is a state of mind.”
“A love state of mind?”
“The detective’s fucked-up state of mind.”

Screenwriter Robert Towne’s pitch to producer Robert Evans perfectly captures the essence of Chinatown. And The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, by Sam Wasson, perfectly captures the making of that extraordinary film. He recounts the on-set tensions between Faye Dunaway and the crew (“They hated her”), a melodramatic play-fight between director Roman Polanski and Jack Nicholson (“They were down to their underwear, screaming at each other”), and the creation of the film’s legendary ending (“a grand crane-up evokes a lost Hollywood—most famously the last shot of Casablanca”).

Wasson’s account is bookended by two notorious scandals in Polanski’s life: the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate; and his conviction for the rape of an underage girl. As with most five-star classics, Chinatown’s production history is broadly familiar from previous memoirs and documentaries, though The Big Goodbye is already being justifiably acclaimed as one of the best making-of books ever written.

22 March 2020

A Curious History of Sex

A Curious History of Sex
A Curious History of Sex, published last month, is a fascinating guide to sexual attitudes and rituals. As author Kate Lister explains in her introduction, the book is not a comprehensive encyclopedia of sex, offering instead “a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless.” Lister provides potted histories of a wide range of often-overlooked sex-related topics, including a chapter on the c-word that’s the most detailed study of the word in print. A Curious History of Sex is impressively scholarly (with eighty pages of notes and references), and has plenty of extraordinary historical illustrations.

Bad Words

Bad Words
Bad Words: Philosophical Perspectives on Slurs (edited by David Sosa), was published in 2018 as part of a series titled Engaging Philosophy. The final chapter, Nice Words for Nasty Things by Laurence R. Horn, takes its title from an infamous definition by lexicographer Francis Grose in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: Grose defined the c-word as “a nasty name for a nasty thing”. In his essay, Horn discusses the euphemisms devised to avoid not only tabooed words themselves but also their otherwise-unrelated homophones: “taboo avoidance occurs more broadly, even in the absence of phonological identity between the taboo and innocent items, the latter of which may suffer a kind of contagion or guilt by association”.

Horn cites an interesting French example, que l’on (‘that one’), which is regarded as more polite than the contraction qu’on due to the latter’s homonymy with con (‘cunt’). He also identifies what is surely the earliest instance of the practice, a comment by Cicero in his treatise on rhetoric, Orator. Cicero writes that the Latin cum nobis (‘with us’) should be rendered as nobiscum, to avoid an obscene juxtaposition (“obscænius concurrerent litterae”). The unspoken reference is to cunno bis (‘into the cunt twice’), which supports the (increasingly contested) etymological connection between cunnus (‘vulva’) and ‘cunt’.

11 March 2020

“WIFE-BEATER DEPP”


The Sun

Johnny Depp is suing The Sun newspaper for defamation, following publication of an article labelling him a wife-beater. The article, the lead story in Dan Wooton’s Bizarre column, appeared on p. 22 of the tabloid on 28th April 2018, headlined “HOW CAN JK ROWLING BE ‘GENUINELY HAPPY’ TO CAST WIFE-BEATER DEPP IN FILM?”

In the article, Wooton criticised author J.K. Rowling after she endorsed Depp’s casting in the film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, adapted from one of her novels. Depp has been accused of assaulting his ex-wife Amber Heard, and he filed a libel suit against her after she wrote about domestic abuse in The Washington Post.

The Sun’s print headline did not include the usual scare-quotes around the word ‘wife-beater’. However, the online version omitted the word altogether. The article remains online, though a note has been added, saying that “the article is the subject of legal proceedings.” Depp attended pre-trial hearings at the High Court in London last month, and the trial itself will begin on 23rd March.

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01 March 2020

"...a blatant false attack
against the Campaign."

The New York Times
Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign has filed a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, accusing it of “a blatant false attack against the Campaign.” The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages “in the millions”, after the newspaper published an op-ed by one of its former editors, Max Frankel.

The article, published on page 27 on 28th March 2019, argued that, before the election, Trump had an implicit quid pro quo agreement with Vladimir Putin: “There was no need for detailed electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy because they had an overarching deal: the quid of help in the campaign against Hillary Clinton for the quo of a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from the Obama administration’s burdensome economic sanctions.”

The suit was filed by Trump’s lawyer Charles Harder, who became famous for bankrupting the gossip website Gawker. Harder also obtained substantial damages from the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, in relation to allegations about Melania Trump. Trump previously threatened the publisher of Fire and Fury with a lawsuit, making the book an instant bestseller.

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สยองขวัญ Uncut

Men Behind the Sun
Mondo Cane
Cannibal Holocaust
Cannibal Ferox
Deep Red
Over the next two months, Filmvirus has programmed a series of extreme horror movies, สยองขวัญ Uncut (‘horror uncut’). The season includes some of the most notorious and explicit films ever made, all of which are being shown in their full uncut versions. All screenings are free, and will take place at Thammasat University’s Pridi Banomyong Library.

Highlights include Men Behind the Sun (黑太阳731) on 15th March, which includes a sequence apparently showing a real autopsy. The original mondo documentary, Mondo Cane, is showing on 22nd March. 29th March has a double bill of Italian video nasties, Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox. (As if to demonstrate the organiser’s commitment to showing each film uncensored, Cannibal Holocaust will be followed by the rarely-seen uncut version of the film-within-a-film The Last Road to Hell.) Dario Argento’s giallo classic Deep Red (Profondo rosso) will be shown on 19th April.

29 February 2020

Thai Film Archive

Dang Bireley's and Young Gangsters
A Streetcar Named Desire
An impressive new library and cinema will open at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya next month. The Archive has always maintained an extensive collection of Thai and English film books, though it was previously housed in a Portakabin. Screenings at the new cinema include A Streetcar Named Desire (featuring one of Marlon Brando’s greatest performances) on 15th March, and the Thai New Wave classic Dang Bireley’s and Young Gangsters [sic] (2499 อันธพาลครองเมือง) on 7th and 20th March. All screenings are free, and the cinema and Cherd Songsri Library are both located in the new Sanbhasatra Building.

23 February 2020

Cult of Identity

Cult of Identity
World of Wrestling
Nathee Monthonwit’s exhibition Cult of Identity opened at BACC on 6th February, and runs until 1st March. Nathee’s cartoon-style digital prints satirise society, politics, and the military. One picture, World of Wrestling (โลกมวยปล้ำ), combines references to the 6th October 1976 massacre and the 2014 coup. The painting shows the folding chair from Neal Ulevich’s infamous photograph of the massacre, with the hanging corpse as a wrestler defeated by a figure representing the military junta.

World Class Cinema

World Class Cinema
The Shining
The Graduate
Jaws
The Housemaid
After The Wizard of Oz and Annie Hall, the Thai Film Archive has announced the next batch of films in this year’s World Class Cinema (ทึ่ง! หนังโลก) programme. Highlights over the next few months include Stanley Kubrick’s horror film The Shining (showing on 15th March), the ‘New Hollywood’ classic The Graduate (19th April), Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Jaws (17th May), and the South Korean ‘golden age’ melodrama The Housemaid (하녀; 16th August).

The Shining was originally scheduled for last year’s World Class Cinema season, though Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was shown instead. All screenings will take place at the Scala cinema in Bangkok.