Bioscope Theatre

Bioscope magazine will present a preview screening of Michael Haneke's Amour next Tuesday. The film will be shown at Paragon Cineplex, Bangkok, as part of the Bioscope Theatre project. Tickets are free for Bioscope members, though they must be reserved in advance. Amour was shown previously at the Clap! French Film Festival.

Clap! French Film Festival 2013

The Clap! French Film Festival opens in Bangkok next Wednesday. Most screenings will be at SFX Emporium, though there'll be a Valentine's Day outdoor showing of The Artist at Museum Siam. (A Trip To The Moon and Monrak Transistor were screened there in previous years.) The closing film, on 20th February at Emporium, will be Michael Haneke's Amour.

Visual ProjectWoody Allen

Bangkok’s Thailand Creative and Design Center is currently screening a mini season of Woody Allen films as part of its Visual Project series. His classics Annie Hall and Manhattan, and his recent commercial success Midnight in Paris, will be shown on alternate days for the whole of this month.

Forever Young

Fashion photographer Leslie Kee was arrested in Japan today, and has been charged with distributing pornography. His new book Forever Young: Uncensored Edition contains, as the title suggests, uncensored images of male nudity.

The book had been on sale during Kee's current exhibition, which opened on Saturday at the Hiromi Yoshii gallery in Tokyo. Under Japanese law, genital images are illegal, and they are routinely pixelated to avoid obscenity charges.

Encounter Thailand

My third feature for Encounter Thailand magazine, Reeling In The Cliches, was published in December last year (on pages 42-44). The article examines how Thailand has been portrayed by foreign films set in the country.

[Note: Banco A Bangkok OSS 117, Deep River Savages, Teddy Bear, Mammoth, Elephant White, The Detective, and Stealth were omitted for reasons of space; Bangkok Revenge will be reviewed in a later issue.]

My portrait of artist Chris Coles, and three photographs of his paintings, have also been published in the same issue (on pages 34-36). My previous Encounter Thailand features were published in October and November last year.

Operation Dark Heart

Last week, the US Defense Department agreed to partially uncensor Anthony Shaffer's memoir, Operation Dark Heart. When the book was first published, in September 2010, it contained classified information about Shaffer's experience as a military intelligence officer in Afghanistan. To prevent the book's distribution, the Defense Department bought the entire first printing and incinerated all 9,500 copies. It was reprinted two weeks later, with 433 redactions imposed by the Pentagon, 198 of which have now been rescinded. Several dozen copies of the unredacted first printing remain in private ownership, and The New York Times printed a side-by-side comparison of the censored and uncensored editions on 18th September 2010.

Django Unchained

Django Unchained, the new film by Quentin Tarantino, is a revisionist 'spaghetti western' revenge fantasy set in America's antebellum south. Its central character, played by Jamie Foxx, was appropriated from the spaghetti western Django; the title is a combination of Django and Herculese Unchained, another 1960s Italian exploitation film. As usual, Tarantino has assembled an impressive cast, which this time includes Christoph Waltz, Leonard DiCaprio, and Samuel L Jackson.

Tarantino's first film without editor Sally Menkes (who died in 2010), Django Unchained is his longest film to date, a western on an epic scale. It's also his most classically linear narrative. There are landscapes worthy of John Ford; in fact, the search for Django's captured wife parallels the quest for Natalie in Ford's The Searchers.

Quick zooms and close-ups on eyes show the influence of Sergio Leone, and there are numerous references to Leone's westerns, including music from Ennio Morricone. Django emerges from the smoke after a dynamite explosion like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful Of Dollars, and the insult "son of a..." is interrupted before its final word in a reference to The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly.

The film is also self-referential, of course: there's a tense countdown from ten to one, as in Pulp Fiction, and the "tasty beverage" from Pulp Fiction and Death Proof is slightly modified to "tasty refreshment". Tarantino has an indulgent cameo, with an awful Australian accent. (His cameo in Sukiyaki Western Django, also inspired by spaghetti westerns and Django, was even worse.)

Samuel L Jackson, who plays the old house slave Stephen, has appeared in most of Tarantino's previous films: Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill II, and Inglourious Basterds. It's that last film that Django Unchained most resembles: both are revenge fantasies (as are Kill Bill and Death Proof), both contain spaghetti western elements, and both present revisionist interpretations of major historical atrocities, combining dramatic licence with ironic exploitation.

Django is a slave freed by Christoph Waltz's bounty hunter, Schultz. Waltz (who also starred in Carnage) played a 'Jew hunter' in Inglourious Basterds, and his characters in both films are eloquent, charming polyglots: Schultz speaks English and German, with a few lines of French. Leonardo DiCaprio (Inception/Shutter Island/The Departed/The Aviator) is also excellent in his first bad-guy role, surprisingly menacing as Candie the plantation owner. The plantation, Candyland, is a counterpoint to the romanticised Tara in Gone With The Wind; Tarantino even uses scrolling text in the same style as that Civil War classic.

The performances, direction, and widescreen cinematography are outstanding, though the plot doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Django and Schultz "get into character" (another line from Pulp Fiction) and pose as mandingo dealers to trick Candy into selling them Django's wife, one of Candyland's slaves. (Her name is von Shaft, a reference to Blaxploitation hero John Shaft.) Their scheme increases the film's tension, and produces some terrific set-pieces, though ultimately the elaborate deception was un-necessary: they would have achieved the same result by simply telling Candy the truth from the outset.

Django Unchained is shockingly violent: slaves are tortured and torn apart by dogs, as justification for the bloody revenge of the final massacre. The film has also been criticised for its language: the n-word is used more than 100 times. (Tarantino also used it, with less frequency, in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown.)

Incidentally, Django Unchained was filmed in 35mm. Tarantino - along with Christopher Nolan (who filmed The Dark Knight Rises in 70mm IMAX) and Paul Thomas Anderson (who filmed The Master in 70mm) - is one of the few contemporary directors who remain committed to celluloid filming and exhibition.

The Wonderful, Horrible LifeOf Leni Riefenstahl

Ray Muller's three-hour documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl profiles the director of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph Of The Will. Muller addresses the persistent accusations of Nazism made against Riefenstahl, though he also explores her entire life's work.

Riefenstahl's film career began when she starred in The Holy Mountain, by Arnold Fanck. This silent film, set on a mountainside, was one of several 'Bergfilme' ('mountain films'), a genre created by Fanck. Riefenstahl became a star, though her image was adventurous and athletic, in contrast to Marlene Dietrich's predatory sexuality. In a more significant contrast between the two icons, Dietrich emigrated to Hollywood after Hitler's rise to power, though Riefenstahl remained in Germany and directed Triumph Of The Will, a documentary film of Hitler's 1934 Nuremberg rally.

Triumph Of The Will is a masterpiece of editing and visual composition. Like The Birth Of A Nation, however, it's a masterpiece with an unredeemable reputation: it was commissioned by Hitler, and used as propaganda by the Nazi Party. Riefenstahl herself visited Hitler regularly, until as late as 1944, and sent him a congratulatory telegram after his invasion of Paris. In Muller's documentary, she revisits the rally venue, and admits that she regrets making the film, though she doesn't accept any responsibility for the political power of her work.

Olympia, Riefenstahl's documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, provoked accusations of an obsessively Fascist aesthetic. Her documentary, released in two parts, celebrates the beauty of the athletic body. She would face similar accusations when she photographed the Nuba tribe in Sudan. Tellingly, in Muller's documentary, she explains that she was attracted to the Nuba as a subject because of the muscularity of the tribespeople.

Riefenstahl, who was ninety when the documentary was filmed (and 101 when she died), was also an expert diver, and for Muller's film she posed underwater with a giant stingray. Muller's title - The Wonderful, Horrible Life - captures the contradictions in Riefenstahl's work: a skilled documentarian and photographer, who was permanently associated with a brutal dictator.

In the final sequence, Muller gives her a last opportunity to apologise for her political associations. The documentary ends with her characteristically assertive answer: "I was never anti-semitic and I never joined the Nazi Party... So where does my guilt lie?".

Hitchcock

Hitchcock, directed by Sacha Gervasi, was one of two films made last year about Alfred Hitchcock. (Toby Jones starred in the other Hitchcock biopic, The Girl.) Hitchcock dramatises the filming of Psycho, whereas The Girl covered the making of The Birds and Marnie.

Hitchcock ends with a shot of a bird on the director's shoulder, effectively setting up The Girl as a sequel. Hitchcock is generally a much more sympathetic portrayal of the 'master of suspense' than The Girl: Anthony Hopkins plays him as a director fighting for artistic integrity and (in a sub-plot presumably invented by the script-writer) jealous of his wife Alma's interest in another man.

Whereas Toby Jones in The Girl was noticeably shorter than Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkins has a more suitable stature. In contrast, Jones gave an uncanny vocal impersonation, whereas Hopkins sometimes slips back into his own accent. In one sequence, when he's narrating the script while Marion Crane is driving, Hopkins goes into Hannibal Lecter mode, as if he were psychoanalysing Clarice Starling.

Helen Mirren, playing Alma Hitchcock, is an excellent actress (especially in The Queen), though she is far too tall for this role. (Imelda Staunton, in The Girl, had a remarkable physical resemblance to the real Mrs Hitchcock.) James D'Arcy, playing Anthony Perkins, gives a practically perfect performance, almost indistinguishable from Perkins himself.

Hitchcock was based on Stephen Rebello's comprehensive book Alfred Hitchcock & The Making Of Psycho. (Other books about Psycho include The Moment Of Psycho and Psycho In The Shower.) The production of Psycho is dramatised reasonably accurately, though - presumably for copyright reasons - Psycho's dialogue is always paraphrased.

To add dramatic tension, several nightmarish fantasy sequences show the director becoming obsessed with the serial killer Ed Gein. These are not necessary, and they undermine the film's credibility, though they're fortunately quite brief.

Hitchcock is one of several fictionalised films about the making of real films, including My Week With Marilyn, Gods & Monsters, Ed Wood, RKO281, and Shadow Of The Vampire. Laurent Bouzereau's documentary The Making Of Psycho goes into more depth about Psycho's production, but Hitchcock is extremely entertaining and great fun. It demonstrates one of the director's famous maxims: films should be slices of cake, not slices of life.

Pop Culture Exhibition

Pop Culture Exhibition, a celebration of Pop Art, opened in The Ideaopolis, part of the newly renovated Siam Center mall in Bangkok last Friday. It will close on 3rd March. A handful of artworks by Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein are included, notably Warhol's screenprints of Marilyn and Mao.

This small, kitsch exhibition focuses on the icons (or cliches) of American Pop, including an oversized replica of a Campbell's soup can; the exhibition itself is held inside a two-story Brillo box replica. British Pop pioneers, such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Peter Blake, are not represented (though Hamilton and Blake are at least name-checked).

2013

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has released a new short film online, titled 2013. The film, less than a minute long, features solarised, double-exposed footage of a ghostly man walking in a forest. Apichatpong's previous online short films are Cactus River, Ashes, For Alexis, Phantoms Of Nabua, Mobile Men, and Prosperity For 2008.

The Sun

A High Court judge in the UK has granted an injunction preventing The Sun from publishing potentially embarrassing photographs of Ned Rocknroll. The photos were taken by James Pope at a party in July 2010, and posted on Pope's Facebook page.

The Sun downloaded them at the beginning of the year, and planned to print them on 4th January. Rocknroll sought an injunction before their publication, which was granted yesterday.

La Vie De Mahomet

Tomorrow, Charlie Hebdo will publish La Vie De Mahomet: Les Debuts d'Un Prophete, a comic-book biography of Mohammed by Stephane Charbonnier and Zineb el Rhazoui. This will be the fifth time that the newspaper has printed provocative images of Mohammed: its first Mohammed cartoon was published in 2002, followed by a 2006 Mohammed cover, a Charia Hebdo edition 'guest-edited' by Mohammed in 2011, and a naked Mohammed caricature last September (criticising the protests against Innocence Of Muslims).

Mohammed cartoons first caused controversy when a dozen of them were published by Jyllands-Posten in 2005. Since then, many other newspapers and magazines have also printed Mohammed caricatures: Weekendavisen, France Soir, The Guardian, Philadelphia Daily News, Le Monde, Liberation, Het Nieuwsblad, The Daily Tar Heel, Akron Beacon Journal, The Strand, Nana, Gorodskiye Vesti, Adresseavisen, Uke-Adressa, and Harper's. The International Herald Tribune published Mohammed cartoons in both 2006 and 2012.

Equally provocative drawings of Mohammed as a dog were exhibited in 2007. The short film Fitna also includes a Mohammed cartoon, and there was an Everybody Draw Mohammed Day! event in 2010.

Radio Times Guide To Films 2013

The Radio Times Guide To Films 2013, edited by Sue Robinson, contains capsule reviews of 23,068 films. It has up-to-date coverage of mainstream movies, though entries for foreign and independent films are more limited.

After the cancellation of the excellent Time Out Fim Guide, and the termination of Halliwell's Film Guide with the awful Movies That Matter, the Radio Times Guide To Films is now the last remaining annual film guide published in the UK. It's now in its thirteenth edition, though how long it can survive in print, when many other reference books are moving online, remains to be seen.

518 films have been added since last year's edition. They include The Dark Knight Rises ("a superhero franchise unmatched for its mood, menace and quality"), To Rome With Love ("fluffily entertaining"), Prometheus ("asks profound questions about creation and mortality"), The Artist ("this loving pastiche is a sheer delight"), Hugo ("a little indulgent and heavy for kids"), Carnage ("a tightly wound, enjoyably cynical little chamber piece"), and Spy Kids IV ("frenetic and charmless").

The Radio Times Guide To Films had a now-forgotten predecessor: the Radio Times Film & Video Guide, by Derek Winnert. The book was published in 1993 and 1994, though it was withdrawn from sale after a plagiarism lawsuit from the publishers of Halliwell's Film Guide. There is also a comprehensive Radio Times Guide To TV Comedy.

Sohbat

Fourteen academics, including the entire editorial board of the journal Sohbat, are facing blasphemy charges in Pakistan, following complaints that the journal published art promoting homosexuality and defaming the Koran. The controversy relates to an article in the journal's third issue, Shedding The Fig Leaf, in which Aasim Akhtar discussed queer theory in relation to contemporary Pakistani art.

The article was illustrated by two paintings, by Muhammad Ali, of Muslim clerics sitting with semi-naked boys. Quotations from the Koran inscribed on a shrine are visible in the background. The journal, published by the National College of Arts, was withdrawn from circulation in May, and its editorial board was disbanded.

The Girl

The Girl is a BBC/HBO co-production dramatising the making of Alfred Hitchcock's films The Birds and Marnie, and Hitchock's relationship with his leading lady, Tippi Hedren. Toby Jones stars as Hitchcock, and Sienna Miller plays Hedren.

Directed by Julian Jarrold, it premiered on HBO on 20th October and was broadcast on BBC2 on 26th December. It's one of several fictionalised films about the making of real films, including My Week With Marilyn, Gods & Monsters, Ed Wood, RKO281, and Shadow Of The Vampire.

It's not the only Hitchcock biopic this year: Anthony Hopkins also played him, in the film Hitchcock, about the making of Psycho - a film that The Girl refers to both directly and indirectly. The Hopkins film takes some liberties with the facts, suggesting that Hitchcock's wife Alma contemplated adultery, and making tenuous connections between Hitchcock and Ed Gein.

In contrast, The Girl aims for more authenticity. Its screenplay was based on Spellbound By Beauty by Donald Spoto, who also wrote the authoritative The Dark Side Of Genius and The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock. Tippi Hedren herself was a consultant on the project, and we have to rely on her account of what happened on the film sets and in her dressing room.

Hedren's screen test, however, is easy to verify, and its atmosphere is misrepresented in The Girl. The screen test recreated in The Girl presents Hitchcock as a voyeur, making an uncomfortable Hedren kiss an impassive Martin Balsam, played by an older, unattractive actor. In the real screen test, however, Hitchcock can be heard joking with Hedren and Balsam, putting them both at their ease, and Hedren and Balsam - both New Yorkers - have a friendly rapport.

Whether Hitchcock was really guilty of sexual harassment, as The Girl alleges, we will probably never know for sure. Precisely what he said or tried to do remains unclear, though his awkward lunges and advances are plausibly portrayed in The Girl. Presumably he was more forward with Hedren because he felt that he had discovered her, in contrast to the untouchable icons (such as Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman) he had previously worked with.

Toby Jones is too short, though he captures Hitchcock's voice flawlessly. Anthony Hopkins made little attempt at a vocal impersonation, though he had a more appropriate stature. Jones is an increasingly prolific actor: in the past few years, I've seen him in Snow White & The Huntsman, The Hunger Games, The Adventures Of Tintin, My Week With Marilyn, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Captain America, The Rite, Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows I-II, Frost/Nixon, and The Mist.

The supporting cast includes Imelda Staunton, entirely convincing as Alma Hitchcock, in contrast to Helen Mirren's miscast role in the Anthony Hopkins version. Penelope Wilton plays her standard drippy character, ideal in Shaun Of The Dead, though inappropriate for Hitchcock's sharp assistant Peggy Robertson.

المصرى اليوم

A cartoonist working for Egypt's المصرى اليوم‎ newspaper is currently facing blasphemy charges. Doaa El Adl's cartoon, depicting Adam and Eve, was printed yesterday. (Egypt previously banned the graphic novel Metro, in 2009.)

The Hobbit:An Unexpected Journey

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is the first film in a new trilogy directed by Peter Jackson. The films are set in Middle-Earth, like Jackson’s breath-taking Lord of the Rings series (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King), and the Hobbit films are Lord of the Rings prequels.

Whereas the Lord of the Rings films were adapted from three substantial novels, the three Hobbit films are all based on a single 300-page book, and are padded out with additional material. Jackson clearly sees The Hobbit as an epic equal to The Lord of the Rings, though that’s not how J.R.R. Tolkien envisioned it. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was split into two parts to prolong the franchise for an additional year, so the studio was presumably delighted to stretch The Hobbit into a trilogy.

There are cameos from some of the Lord of the Rings cast, notably Andy Serkis playing Gollum, though Ian McKellen as Gandalf is the only returning member of the original Fellowship. The Fellowship’s replacements, a band of dwarves, are mostly unremarkable. The dwarf leader is a pale imitation of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. Martin Freeman, in the lead role as a young Bilbo Baggins, gives an understated, naturalistic performance that’s unlike the rest of the cast. The highlight comes when Bilbo meets Gollum, in an extended two-hander sequence that recaptures some of the Lord of the Rings magic.

The film is most interesting as a technical experiment: it was filmed at forty-eight frames-per-second (known as HFR, or High Frame Rate), twice as fast as the regular frame rate. The faster frame rate eliminates the judder caused by camera panning, and it also produces impressive detail and clarity in the projected image. Higher frame rates were previously attempted by Douglas Trumbull in his ShowScan process, though the technique had never been used for a commercial film until The Hobbit.

The HFR effect is similar to high-definition television, and therefore appears less cinematic. Also, the extra clarity exposes the artificiality of the sets, props, and visual effects. (And there is much more CGI than in The Lord of the Rings.) The sets look like sets; thus, instead of immersing us, as Jackson intended, the forty-eight frames-per-second distance the viewer.

An Unexpected Journey was filmed in HFR 3D, though it’s also screening in 3D, 4DX, IMAX DMX, IMAX DMX 3D, and HFR IMAX DMX 3D versions. If you’re lucky, you can also find it in regular 35mm.

Cinema Diverse

Cinema Diverse, a free season of films organised by Films Forum, opened at BACC on 24th June and closed last night (a week earlier than originally scheduled). The closing film was Wisit Sasanatieng's cult Thai New Wave classic Tears Of The Black Tiger, a 'spaghetti western' influenced by Sergio Leone in a melodramatic, nostalgic lakorn style. The director and cast-members were present for a Q&A after the screening. (Tears Of The Black Tiger has been shown previously at the Thai Film Archive, in 2010 and 2009.)

Wisit's other films are Citizen Dog, The Unseeable, The Red Eagle, the music video เราเป็นคนไทย, the short film Norasinghavatar, and a segment of the anthology film Sawasdee Bangkok. He also designed the posters for the Bangkok International Film Festival in 2008 and 2009, and wrote the script for Nang Nak.

Encounter Thailand

My second feature for Encounter Thailand magazine, Spooking Thailand's Filmgoers, is published in the November issue (on pages 32-34). The article is a preview of the upcoming 10th World Film Festival of Bangkok, including an interview with the Festival's founder, Kriengsak Silakong. My debut Encounter Thailand feature was published in October.

Hollywood's Top Ten

Last year, Hollywood's Top Ten, a show on the cable station ReelzChannel, broadcast two lists of the greatest films ever made: Movies To See Before You Die (2nd November, selected by Richard Roeper) and Best Movies Ever Made (2nd December, voted by the audience).

The Movies To See Before You Die are as follows:

1. The Godfather I-II
2. Citizen Kane
3. The Shawshank Redemption
4. Pulp Fiction
5. The Usual Suspects
6. Breathless
7. Annie Hall
8. It's A Wonderful Life
9. This Is Spinal Tap
10. The Searchers

The Best Movies Ever Made are as follows:

1. The Godfather
2. The Dark Knight
3. Star Wars IV: A New Hope
4. Gone With The Wind
5. The Shawshank Redemption
6. Forrest Gump
7. Casablanca
8. Schindler's List
9. GoodFellas
10. Titanic

Note that, in the audience poll, Titanic is the James Cameron version rather than the earlier British version. Roeper's list contains eleven films, as The Godfather and its sequel share the #1 position.

Interestingly, The Godfather is the #1 film in both lists, though the audience may have been influenced by Roeper's list. The Dark Knight and The Shawshank Redemption are consistently popular modern classics, though Roeper's list is too populist: it has no silent films, and only a single foreign-language film. (I compiled my own list of 10 Essential Films this month.)

The End Of Fun

Russian prosecutors are investigating one of the world's most prestigious museums, the Hermitage in St Petersberg. The museum is currently hosting The End Of Fun, an exhibition by Jake and Dinos Chapman, which opened on 20th October.

The exhibition includes the bronze sculpture Unholy McTrinity, which features a crucified Ronald McDonald. Police apparently received complaints from visitors accusing the artists of blasphemy. The show's centrepiece is a recreation of the Chapman's installation Hell, which was destroyed by a fire in 2004.

Blasphemy charges were previously brought against the Forbidden Art 2006 exhibition in Moscow. S Brent Plate's book Blasphemy discusses other blasphemous art. The End Of Fun will close on 13th January next year.

The Sun

Louis Walsh has been awarded £400,000 in an out-of-court settlement against The Sun newspaper. Walsh had sued The Sun for defamation after it falsely reported that he had groped Leonard Watters at a nightclub. The story, headlined "Louis probed over 'sex attack' on man in loo", was published on 23rd June 2011, and Watters was jailed for six months after he reported the fictitious incident to police.

“It’s extremely regrettable that names may have been very briefly visible...”

Alistair McAlpine has received damages from both ITV and the BBC after he was linked to a rumoured paedophile network. McAlpine was paid £185,000 by the BBC and £125,000 by ITV in libel damages. The BBC’s Director General has resigned as a result of the controversy.

On 2nd November, BBC2’s Newsnight broadcast a report featuring an interview with Steven Messham, who claimed to have been sexually abused as a child. The report did not name McApline as Messham’s abuser, though it did refer to “a prominent Tory politician at the time”.

On ITV1’s This Morning on 8th November, presenter Phillip Schofield claimed to have found a list of alleged paedophiles online, and handed Prime Minister David Cameron “the names on a piece of paper”. The list, which included McAlpine’s name, was visible for a split second while Schofield was holding it.

Newsnight broadcast an apology on 9th November: “Mr Messham has tonight made a statement that makes clear he wrongly identified his abuser and has apologised. We also apologise unreservedly for having broadcast this report.” This Morning broadcast an apology on the same day: “It’s extremely regrettable that names may have been very briefly visible as a result of a misjudged camera angle”.

BBC Director General George Entwistle was interviewed by John Humphrys on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 10th November. Entwistle said that the Newsnight report was not brought to his attention until the day after it was broadcast, and he had not read news about it on Twitter or in the press.

An incredulous Humphrys replied: “You’ve no natural curiosity? You wait for someone to come along to you and say, ‘Excuse me, Mr Director General, but this is happening and you may be interested’, you don’t look for yourself, you don’t do what everybody else in the country does: read newspapers, listen to everything that’s going on”. Entwistle resigned later that day.

Corpus Christi

The production team responsible for staging Terrence McNally's play Corpus Christi in Greece have been charged with blasphemy. The play presents a homoerotic interpretation of the life of Jesus and his disciples. It was first performed in New York in 1998, was scheduled to open at the Hytirio theatre in Athens last month, though the premiere was postponed due to violent protests organised by right-wing political groups. The director of Corpus Christi's Greek adaptation, Laertis Vasiliou, and the play's cast, now face charges of blasphemy.

The play is set in Texas, and was performed there in 2001. It was staged in London the year before. More recently, it was revived in New York in 2008, and even performed at a church in Cameron Park, California, in 2009. Its script was published in 1999.

Jesus has previously been portrayed as gay in Fernando Bayona's photographic series Circus Christi, Matthias von Fistenberg's film Passio, Ed D Louie's film He, James Kirkup's poem The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name, Enrique Chagoya's lithograph The Misadventures Of The Romantic Cannibals, and Johnny Correa's illustration Resurrection (in The Insurgent). Also, in Jerry Springer: The Opera, Jesus admits: "Actually, I am a bit gay". Kittredge Cherry's book Art That Dares examines other homoerotic representations of Jesus.

Mekong Hotel

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest film, Mekong Hotel, opened the 10th World Film Festival of Bangkok earlier this month. Like Apichatpong's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, his short films A Letter To Uncle Boonmee and Phantoms Of Nabua, and his Primitive installation, it was filmed near the Mekong river on the Thai-Laos border.

The film stars two of Apichatpong's most frequent collaborators, Jenjira Pongpas and Sakda Kaewbuadee, who previously appeared together in the short films Luminous People, Morakot, The Anthem, and My Mother's Garden. The actors play partly fictionalised versions of themselves: the film is set near Jenjira's actual home, and she discusses her real-life memories and future plans. The documentary tone is set by the opening scene, in which Apichatpong auditions composer Chai Dhatana - a sequence later that was later expanded into a short film, Sakda.

Like Apichatpong's earlier short film Morakot, the eponymous Mekong hotel is a haunted guesthouse. A 'pob' spirit possesses each of the characters, briefly turning them into cannibals. Several of Apichatpong's previous films, notably Tropical Malady and Uncle Boonmee, have also featured spirits, though here the ghosts are surprisingly corporeal. Jenjira's character, for example, is revealed to be 600 years old, though she is portrayed as realistically as the similar 'ghost' in Pedro Almodovar's Volver.

As in Uncle Boonmee, the sense of magical realism is uncanny (in the Freudian sense) and sometimes comical. The characters seem to exist in several parallel universes: Sakda (who starred in Syndromes & A Century) plays at least three different people (a young man seducing his female neighbour, an old man with a different name, and a young gay man), though outwardly he always looks exactly the same. Again, this recalls Uncle Boonmee, in which Sakda and Jenjira have an out-of-body experience.

Mekong Hotel looks entirely naturalistic, with medium-shots, long takes, and no camera movement (inspired by Yazujiro Ozu?). The dialogue sequences are punctuated by long-shots of the river and its surrounding landscape, accompanied by Chai's guitar soundtrack.

Encounter Thailand

My debut feature for Encounter Thailand magazine, Thai Movie Censorship, was published in the October issue (on pages 38-39). The article examines films cut and banned in Thailand, discussing Syndromes & A Century, Insects In The Backyard, Shakespeare Must Die, and This Area Is Under Quarantine, including an interview with director Thunska Pansittivorakul.

Bangkok Design Festival 2012

The theme of this year's Bangkok Design Festival is Art In The City. The 2012 Festival is bookended by screenings of Alison Klayman's documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, at SF World (CentralWorld): the film will be shown on the opening day (today) and on the closing day (28th November, with a introduction by the director). [Tickets for both screenings are already sold out.] Also as part of the Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art will host a guided Design Tour on 17th and 18th November.

ASEAN Horror Film Festival

Chulalongkorn University's ASEAN Horror Film Festival begins today in Bangkok. The Festival includes outdoor screenings of horror movies from the ASEAN region, ending on Friday with Wisit Sasanatieng's The Unseeable.

100 Ideas That Changed Photography

100 Ideas That Changed Photography is part of the 100 Ideas That Changed... series, published by Laurence King. It was written by Mary Warner Marien, author of the excellent Photography: A Cultural History from the same publisher.

Marien follows the same format as 100 Ideas That Changed Film, an earlier entry in the series: 100 chapters, each with a single page of text accompanied by a full-page photograph. There are chapters devoted to a variety of camera types, photographic mediums, and genres, most of which are analogue rather than digital. There are also entries for different methods of photographic distribution, such as postcards, tabloids, and photo-sharing.

The book feels like an expanded version of The Visual Dictionary Of Photography, or a concise version of The Focal Encyclopedia Of Photography. The emphasis is on technology more than the art of the medium (in contrast to Photographers A-Z). A World History Of Photography (Naomi Rosemblum), The History Of Photography (Beaumont Newhall), and The History Of Photography (Helmut Gernsheim) have more historical context, though 100 Ideas That Changed Photography is useful as an overview of the subject.

The Godfather:The Official Motion Picture Archives

The Godfather: The Official Motion Picture Archives, by Peter Cowie, examines the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Godfather. It’s less than 100 pages long, though it includes removable facsimiles of various documents related to the film’s production and marketing.

The book’s chapters are fairly superficial. Fortunately, the detachable documents, including brochures and posters, are more impressive than the text. Cowie’s earlier account, The Godfather Book, is a more in-depth study of the film, and The Annotated Godfather is also more substantial. (Unlike those two earlier works, this new book contains no contribution from Coppola.)

The Empire Of Death

For thousands of years, human remains have been preserved in charnel houses and ossuaries. Originally, these sites were simply a more practical alternative to burial: a body would be interred only temporarily, and, after decomposition, the remaining skeleton would be placed in an ossuary or charnel, thus reducing the demand for graveyard space.

The Empire Of Death: A Cultural History Of Ossuaries & Charnel Houses, by Paul Koudounaris, is the first full-length study of these macabre places. In his introduction, Koudounaris briefly outlines cultural attitudes towards death, citing Mary Douglas, Julia Kristeva, Norbert Elias, and Mikhail Bahktin (though not Georges Bataille).

In chapters with evocative titles such as The Triumph Of Death, Koudounaris presents an international history of charnels and ossuaries. His survey includes charnels with piles of disarticulated skeletons (such as St Catherine's monastery in Sinai, Egypt), decorative skulls displayed in European churches (notably Rome's Capuchin Crypt), and underground tableaux of clothed, mummified bodies (most famously, the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Italy).

There are countless skeletons displayed in each ossuary, with rows of neatly-aligned skulls filling entire walls. The Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic, for example, is a chapel decorated with thousands of skulls and bones, including an enormous skeletal chandelier.

The book (published by Thames & Hudson) is beautifully printed, resembling an old Bible with its gold-embossed covers and manuscript-style typography. This is appropriate given its emphasis on Christian ossuaries and charnels. (The text excludes pre-Christian traditions, such as the Mayan and Aztec tzompantli.) There are extensive notes, and numerous full-page images photographed by the author.

Sync Talk

Thunska Pansittivorakul will give a presentation on Creative Politics this Thursday, at the second Sync Talk session. The event will take place at the Asian Knowledge Institute, Bangkok. Thunska has directed numerous short films (most recently, 2060) and several features including This Area Is Under Quarantine, Reincarnate, and The Terrorists.

A History Of The Movies In Four Parts

Today's edition of the Wall Street Journal features A History Of The Movies In Four Parts, a guide to "four landmark films" selected by David Thomson. (Thomson's book Have You Seen...? has a list of 1,000 films.) The four films profiled in today's concise article (in the Weekend Journal supplement) are M, Psycho (the subject of Thomson's book The Moment Of Psycho), Sunrise, and The Truman Show.

Design Nation

Design Nation, a festival of music, performance, film, and visual art, opened at the Pridi Banomyong Institute in Bangkok on 29th September, with a screening of Carl Dreyer's silent classic The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. The festival ran until yesterday.

Last night, Design Nation closed with an evening of four film screenings. A Retelling Of Dystopia I (by Nopadol Boonyai) and II (by Teerawat Mulvilai) are edited versions of 1970s action movies with comical live dubbing (as in What's New Pussycat?). The Island Of Utopias (by Pramote Sangsorn) features a poor man searching through the rubble of a collapsed building. Finally, Thunska Pansittivorakul's 2060 is an extract from his forthcoming feature Supernatural.

2060, set forty-eight years in the future, features three men reciting the rules of citizenship (respecting the nation, religion, and monarchy), and discussing a birthday speech by "the Leader". There are echoes of George Orwell's 1984, though it's also a comment on contemporary Thailand. Cutaways to posters of Communist dictators highlight the power of propaganda and cult of personality.

The film ends with direct criticism of the Thai military, featuring photographs from the October 1976 massacre and condemning two former generals (the sanctimonious Chamlong Srimuang and the unrepentant Pallop Pinmanee). Thunska has previously directed numerous short films, and his features include This Area Is Under Quarantine, Reincarnate, and The Terrorists.