31 October 2009

Screamfest

Screamfest
Funny Games
Michael Haneke's English-language remake of his film Funny Games will be shown in Bangkok tonight as part of the Cineplex cinema chain's Screamfest, to celebrate Halloween.

30 October 2009

Pop Life:
Art in a Material World


Pop Life Pop Life

The catalogue for Tate Modern’s current exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World has been deemed illegal by the Metropolitan Police Service. The Met ordered the removal of Richard Prince’s photograph Spiritual America on the day before the exhibition opened, and the Tate withdrew the catalogue from sale while it sought legal advice.

In a letter to the Tate, the Met confirmed that Spiritual America is “a level 1 indecent image of a child. The possession and distribution of which are criminal offences.” They also cautioned that the catalogue could not be legally sold uncensored: “if the book were to be distributed in its original form (i.e. with the picture of Brooke Shields in it) an offence would be committed under the Protection of Children Act 1978.”

This makes the catalogue one of the few commercially published books that are illegal to possess in the UK. Other titles on this list could conceivably include I last och lust: sexuella bilder förr och nu (‘in vice and lust: sexual images past and present’), by Swedish anti-pornography campaigner Hans Nestius; and William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook, which has been cited in several trials of terrorists and other extremists.

In his catalogue essay, Jack Bankowsky acknowledges that Shields was “decidedly underage” and that “Prince invites us to ogle Brooke Shields in her prepubescent nakedness”. To avoid prosecution, a sticker has now been placed over the offending photograph: “This image has been obscured on legal advice” (p. 123).

The catalogue itself, edited by Bankowsky, Alison M. Gingeras, and Catherine Wood, is an excellent exploration of artists, such as Andy Warhol, who “engaged with mass media and the market and cultivated artistic personas”. Scott Rothkopf’s essay on Jeff Koons’ Made in Heaven series is a particular highlight. There is also an extensive bibliography.

Artificial Intelligence —
From Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg:
The Vision Behind the Film


Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence — From Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg: The Vision Behind the Film, edited by Jan Harlan and Jane M Struthers, is a portfolio of pre-production material from Spielberg’s film AI. It includes several pages from Kubrick’s notebooks, though the bulk of the book is devoted to large reproductions of concept art by Chris Baker.

AI was originally conceived by Kubrick, who worked with Brian Aldiss on a treatment and screenplay based on Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, a short story by Aldiss. Kubrick subsequently collaborated with Bob Shaw, Ian Watson, and Sara Maitland on revised versions of the script, and production was scheduled to start in 1999 after the completion of Eyes Wide Shut.

After Kubrick’s death during the post-production of Eyes Wide Shut, Spielberg was invited to take over the project, and wrote a new screenplay based on Kubrick's notes. The film, directed by Spielberg, was released in 2001.

The book features a foreword by Spielberg that gives a brief summary of his friendship with Kubrick. (Spielberg was more forthcoming in an interview for the Channel 5 documentary Steven and Stanley.) There is an account of AI’s pre-production by Struthers, who works with the Kubrick Archive, though it glosses over Kubrick’s creative differences with his various script collaborators. (Aldiss and Maitland gave their sides of the story in the Channel 4 documentary The Last Movie.)

29 October 2009

El Pais

El Pais
Akhbar Al Youm
The 24th October edition of the Spanish newspaper El Pais was banned from sale in Morocco, as it printed a cartoon by Le Monde cartoonist Plantu which Moroccan authorities considered disrespectful to the national flag. The cartoon originally appeared in Le Monde on 22nd October. El Pais also reprinted Khalid Kadafrom's cartoon from Akhbar Al Youm. (Other foreign publications - Courrier-International and L'Express International - have also been banned in Morocco.)

28 October 2009

Drag Me To Hell

Drag Me To Hell
The hugely enjoyable Drag Me To Hell is Sam Raimi's first horror film since his Evil Dead trilogy. It's a welcome return to supernatural horror, in contrast to the slasher remakes and 'torture porn' which have recently dominated the genre. It even references the silent vampire film Nosferatu, with a demon's hand casting a long shadow similar to Nosferatu's Orlok.

The plot, in which a curse is placed on a bank employee, provides plenty of gory set-pieces, though the tone is always tongue-in-cheek rather than truly horrific. (A director's cut, more violent than the theatrical version, has also been released.) All hell breaks loose for the final confrontation with the demon, and this scene includes a great moment in which a goat becomes possessed. The last-minute twist is actually revealed on the film's poster.

Broken Embraces

Broken Embraces
The central character in Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces is a blind script-writer and former director whose lover, Lena, died after their affair made her husband jealous. The film was screened at the 2009 Bangkok International Film Festival last month, and is now on general release.

Broken Embraces is more consistently restrained than Almodovar's two previous films, Volver and Bad Education, neither of which take their dark themes completely seriously. Broken Embraces does have some comic relief, however: rushes from the film-within-the-film, the melodramatic Chicas & Maletas (which is modelled on Almodovar's frenetic comedy Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown).

Almodovar has described Broken Embraces as a film noir. It does feature typical noir themes, such as jealousy and betrayal, though Lena is no femme fatale, and Almodovar's sets and lighting are only slightly less bright than his usual style.

Penelope Cruz is outstanding as the writer/director's lover, and Blanca Portillo is also particularly effective as his agent. Cruz and Portillo both previously appeared in Volver.

It's hard to feel sorry for the central character, however; he is blind and in mourning, yet he lives in a beautiful apartment, has several assistants, and apparently seduces women on a regular basis. For me, Almodovar's greatest film is still Talk To Her, with its devastating narrative, sympathetic and morally ambiguous characters, and moments of outrageous comedy.

27 October 2009

Filthy English

Filthy English
Filthy English: The How, Why, When, & What Of Everyday Swearing, by Peter Silverton, is yet another guide to the history of 'offensive' language. The book is divided thematically, as are Forbidden Words and Jonathon Green's Slang Down The Ages, as opposed to the word-by-word organisation of Dirty Words, Getting Off At Gateshead, and Hugh Rawson's Dictionary Of Invective. (An Encyclopedia Of Swearing contains entries on themes and individual words.)

Filthy English is useful for its contemporary examples, though it is slightly anecdotal in tone. Silverton has conducted substantial research [he cites my website as an "extensive source"], and he has also interviewed writers and performers about their attitudes to the words he discusses, though there are no footnotes.

20 October 2009

99 Classic Movies
For People In A Hurry

99 Classic Movies For People In A Hurry
99 Classic Movies For People In A Hurry (or, on the title page: 99 Movies For People In A Hurry) condenses each film into a four-frame comic strip. The films are listed in seemingly random order, as follows:
  • The Karate Kid
  • Dirty Dancing
  • Star Wars IV: A New Hope
  • Ghostbusters
  • Back To The Future
  • Raiders Of The Lost Ark
  • Gone With The Wind
  • Fatal Attraction
  • Casablanca
  • Radio Days
  • The Terminator
  • Alien
  • Blade Runner
  • Spartacus
  • The Third Man
  • Citizen Kane
  • Easy Rider
  • Taxi Driver
  • Some Like It Hot
  • Deliverance
  • Bicycle Thieves
  • Cinema Paradiso
  • The Seventh Seal
  • The Great Dictator
  • Lawrence Of Arabia
  • The Shining
  • The Maltese Falcon
  • King Kong
  • The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
  • Jaws
  • Dawn Of The Dead
  • The Creature From The Black Lagoon
  • Showgirls
  • The Mummy
  • A Fish Called Wanda
  • The Breakfast Club
  • Mad Max
  • Die Hard
  • Delicatessen
  • The Searchers
  • Psycho
  • Battleship Potemkin
  • Un Chien Andalou
  • The Misfits
  • The Public Enemy
  • Rocky
  • The Blue Lagoon
  • Wild At Heart
  • Annie
  • The Sound Of Music
  • The African Queen
  • Singin' In The Rain
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • Dr Zhivago
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • Bullitt
  • The Sting
  • Rebel Without A Cause
  • Barbarella
  • The Evil Dead
  • Police Academy
  • The Blues Brothers
  • Yojimbo
  • The Bridge On The River Kwai
  • M. Hulot's Holiday
  • The Guns Of Navarone
  • Seven Samurai
  • The Thing
  • Escape From New York
  • The Testament Of Dr Mabuse
  • Metropolis
  • Enter The Dragon
  • Jailhouse Rock
  • Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
  • Schindler's List
  • Brazil
  • The Wizard Of Oz
  • Bagdad Cafe
  • The Big Blue
  • Scarface
  • The Godfather
  • A Streetcar Named Desire
  • Dr Strangelove
  • Pulp Fiction
  • ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
  • Rosemary's Baby
  • The Exorcist
  • Breakfast At Tiffany's
  • Forrest Gump
  • The Shawshank Redemption
  • GoodFellas
  • Fight Club
  • North By Northwest
  • The Silence Of The Lambs
  • Sunset Boulevard
  • Apocalypse Now
  • Platoon
  • It's A Wonderful Life
  • The Matrix
1980s films such as The Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, and Back To The Future are presumably included purely for their nostalgia value. Note that The Maltese Falcon is the John Huston version and Scarface is the Brian de Palma version. Oddly, Dawn Of The Dead is the Zack Snyder remake rather than the classic George Romero original. Also, Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece, not the obscure 1939 comedy.

18 October 2009

Story Of The Scene

Story Of The Scene
Story Of The Scene: The Inside Scoop On Famous Moments In Film, by Roger Clarke, discusses the making of eighty classic film scenes, with a two-page chapter devoted to each film (except Spartacus, which has two chapters). The most interesting chapters are those that concentrate on one specific moment, such as Brandon Lee's death in The Crow, Roman Polanski's cameo in Chinatown, the subway grille in The Seven-Year Itch, and the cockroach-eating in Vampire's Kiss.

Other chapters have less focus, and simply summarise general trivia about each film. In some cases, though, the author has interviewed the directors involved, and this results in a few gems: Park Chan-Wook discussing the octopus-eating scene in Oldboy, and John Boorman describing Stanley Kubrick's fascination with the rape scene in Deliverance.

16 October 2009

The Tate Guide To Modern Art Terms

The Tate Guide To Modern Art Terms
The Tate Guide To Modern Art Terms, by Simon Wilson and Jessica Lack, is an alphabetical guide to art styles, materials, genres, and 'isms' from Impressionism onwards. The illustrations are all black-and-white, and are limited to works from the permanent collections of the various Tate galleries; each entry is succinct, though the scope is comprehensive and there is extensive cross-referencing.

15 October 2009

Dance With The Devil

Dance With The Devil
Ottmar Horl, who was under police investigation last month for displaying a Nazi gnome in Nuremberg, is now displaying 1,200 of them in Straubing. The exhibition, Dance With The Devil, opened today and will close next Monday. It has previously been shown in Belgium and Italy. Last month's police investigation was eventually dropped, as it was determined that the gnome was satirising, rather than promoting, the Nazis.

07 October 2009

Water In Milk Exists

Water In Milk Exists
Water In Milk Exists, directed by Lawrence Weiner, features young (almost exclusively straight and white) couples discussing philosophy and having sex. Hardcore scenes are punctuated by shallow monologues about the natures of reality ("specific or general"?) and structure, including a debate about Mies van der Rohe ("I think he was an architect"). It could be another Shortbus, if it took itself less seriously.

04 October 2009

Akhbar Al Youm

Akhbar Al Youm
The Moroccan newspaper Akhbar Al Youm has been closed down by police, following its publication of a cartoon by Khalid Kadar on 26th September. The cartoon depicts Prince Moulay Ismail against a Moroccan flag background. The cartoonist, and the newspaper's editor, Taoufik Bouachrine, have both been arrested. Previously, Khalid Kadar drew another controversial royal cartoon, in Courrier-International. (L'Express International has also been banned in Morocco.)

01 October 2009

Spiritual America


Spiritual America

A photograph of Brooke Shields has been removed from Tate Modern’s exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World. The image shows Shields, aged ten, wearing make-up and standing nude in a bathtub.

The exhibition opened today in London, and will close on 17th January 2010, though the Shields photograph was removed yesterday following a visit from the Metropolitan Police. The exhibition catalogue has also been withdrawn from sale.

The photo, originally titled The Woman in the Child, was taken in 1975 by Gary Gross for his Little Women exhibition in New York. It was subsequently published in Sugar and Spice (1976), Photo magazine (1978), Index on Censorship magazine (May–June 1996), and American Photo magazine (September–October 2009). It was also part of the Controverses (‘controversies’) exhibition, which has been shown at the Musee de l’Elysee in Lausanne (2008), the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris (2009), and the Botanique in Brussels (2009).

In 1983, Richard Prince rephotographed the 1975 image, retitled it Spiritual America, and exhibited it again in New York. Spiritual America has been published in the Brazilian magazine Item-4 (1996) and in the book Stripped Bare: The Body Revealed in Contemporary Art (2004). It was included in the New Museum exhibition East Village USA in New York (2004), and was the centrepiece of a major Prince retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2007–2008).

Two years ago, another UK gallery also removed a photograph of a naked child (Nan Goldin’s Klara and Edda Belly-Dancing) following police advice, though it was later cleared of obscenity. Photographs of children by Robert Mapplethorpe, Graham Ovenden, Ron Oliver, Will McBride, David Hamilton, Tierney Gearon, and Annelies Strba have previously been investigated by UK police as potentially obscene. In America, the FBI investigated photographers Jacqueline Livingston and Jock Sturges on similar charges, though they were later acquitted.

30 September 2009

2009 Bangkok International Film Festival

2009 Bangkok International Film Festival
Antichrist
Dogtooth
Broken Embraces
Sawasdee Bangkok
Nymph
The 2009 Bangkok International Film Festival (incorporating the Bangkok International Animation Festival 2009) ends today, after six days of screenings at Paragon Cineplex and SF CentralWorld. Today's (unfortunately invitation-only) closing film is Sawasdee Bangkok, a collection of nine short films about Bangkok inspired by Paris, Je T'Aime.

The Festival also included Lars von Trier's provocative Antichrist (25th and 26th September), Giorgos Lanthimos's similarly explicit Dogtooth (26th and 29th September), Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces (28th and 29th September), and Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Nymph (the short version rather than the Cannes version; 27th and 29th September). (Pen-ek's Ploy was screened in 2007, and his Invisible Waves opened the Festival in 2006.) The Festival's poster (Beauty Eternal) has been designed by Wisit Sasanatieng, who also designed the 2008 poster.

24 September 2009

Celebration

Celebration
Celebration: The Video Collection
Celebration, Madonna's third greatest hits album (after The Immaculate Collection and GHV2) features a comprehensive selection of hits from her entire career at Warner. She had been signed to Warner since her debut album in 1983, though Celebration is her final Warner project. (Future albums will be released by Live Nation.) Celebration is also available as a video compilation, Celebration: The Video Collection, an exhaustive videography featuring forty-seven videos (though the nudity in Justify My Love and Erotica is censored).

The double-disc album track-list is: Hung Up, Music, Vogue, Four Minutes, Holiday, Everybody, Like A Virgin, Into The Groove, Like A Prayer, Ray Of Light, Sorry, Express Yourself, Open Your Heart, Borderline, Secret, Erotica, Justify My Love, Revolver, Dress You Up, Material Girl, La Isla Bonita, Papa Don't Preach, Lucky Star, Burning Up, Crazy For You, Who's That Girl, Frozen, Miles Away, Take A Bow, Live To Tell, Beautiful Stranger, Hollywood, Die Another Day, Don't Tell Me, Cherish, and Celebration. A single-disc version is also available, with fewer tracks. It's So Cool is available as a digital bonus track.

The video track-list is: Hung Up, Music, Vogue, Four Minutes, Holiday, Like A Virgin, Into The Groove, Like A Prayer, Ray Of Light, Sorry, Express Yourself, Open Your Heart, Borderline, Secret, Erotica, Justify My Love, Material Girl, La Isla Bonita, Papa Don't Preach, Lucky Star, Burning Up, Crazy For You, Who's That Girl, Frozen, Miles Away, Take A Bow, Beautiful Stranger, Hollywood, Die Another Day, Don't Tell Me, Cherish, Celebration, Deeper And Deeper, I'll Remember, Rain, Secret, Bedtime Stories, I Want You, You'll See, The Power Of Goodbye, American Pie, What It Feels Like For A Girl, Love Profusion, Get Together, Jump, Give It 2 Me, and True Blue.

Antichrist

Antichrist
Antichrist, directed by Lars von Trier, is intentionally provocative, occasionally surreal, and ultimately misogynistic. The director also made The Idiots, which scandalised Cannes in 1999, and Antichrist is another Cannes succes de scandale.

The film is divided into a series of chapters, and also includes a prologue and epilogue. In the prologue, which is filmed in slow-motion and black-and-white, a man and woman have sex while their son falls to his death. The man, who is a psychotherapist, helps the woman overcome her grief (though his psychobabble is ineffective), and the couple take a trip to their cabin in the woods. The cabin is called Eden; the names of the protagonists are never revealed, though the Biblical reference is clear enough.

The woman is writing a thesis on gynocide (the systematic murder of women). 'Gynocide' was coined by the feminist writer Mary Daly in her excellent book Gyn/Ecology, though Antichrist is arguably an anti-feminist film. Like Eve, the woman becomes increasingly unsympathetic as a character, most obviously when she (unconvincingly) drills a hole through the man's leg. The film's ending suggests that, as in medieval witch trials, feminine evil must be destroyed.

Though most of the film is shot realistically with hand-held cameras and jump-cuts, there are some inexplicable fantasy sequences involving wild animals, notably a ludicrous talking fox who, in the director's voice, says "Chaos reigns!". There are also three close-up inserts which are included purely for shock value, featuring hardcore sex (as in The Idiots) and female circumcision.

22 September 2009

Bodyworlds

Bodyworlds
Bodyworlds, the anatomical exhibition of preserved human corpses organised by Gunther von Hagens, has been touring the world for the past twelve years. Famously, when the exhibition came to London in 2002, von Hagens performed a public autopsy which was later televised.

This year, two corpses posed in mid-coitus were added to the exhibition, though they had to be removed before the exhibition was shown in Cologne (Germany), Augsburg (Germany), and Zurich (Switzerland). (A Bodyworlds imitator, Our Body, was banned in France earlier this year.)

18 September 2009

The 100 Best Films

The 100 Best Films
For the past five days, The Independent newspaper's Life supplement has published a list titled The 100 Best Films compiled by Anthony Quinn. Last year, two other UK newspapers (The Times and The Sunday Telegraph) published similar lists, though Quinn's selection is significantly better. His list is as follows:

1. All About Eve
2. Double Indemnity
3. Singin' In The Rain
4. The Wild Bunch
5. The Lady Eve
6. The Battle Of Algiers
7. Great Expectations
8. Vertigo
9. The Conformist
10. Chinatown
11. Brief Encounter
12. Kind Hearts & Coronets
13. This Is Spinal Tap
14. The Night Of The Hunter
15. To Have & Have Not
16. The Godfather I-II
17. Notorious
18. Sweet Smell Of Success
19. A Man Escaped
20. Citizen Kane
21. The Big Sleep
22. Raging Bull
23. Sherlock Jr
24. The Third Man
25. The Rules Of The Game
26. Fear Eats The Soul
27. Casablanca
28. The Red Shoes
29. Alien
30. The Magnificent Ambersons
31. On The Waterfront
32. Groundhog Day
33. The Apartment
34. The Last Detail
35. Duck Soup
36. L'Enfant Sauvage
37. Manhattan
38. Once Upon A Time In America
39. Breathless
40. Blue Velvet
41. Taxi Driver
42. Oliver!
43. It Happened One Night
44. Nashville
45. L'Atalante
46. Touch Of Evil
47. Gone With The Wind
48. The Conversation
49. Sunset Boulevard
50. Meet Me In St Louis
51. Overlord
52. Ball Of Fire
53. Sullivan's Travels
54. There Will Be Blood
55. LA Confidential
56. His Girl Friday
57. The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith
58. The Fallen Idol
59. The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis
60. Psycho
61. The Life & Death Of Colonel Blimp
62. Toy Story
63. The Dark Mirror
64. Downfall
65. Tokyo Story
66. Rashomon
67. Wild Strawberries
68. Rebecca
69. Aguirre: The Wrath Of God
70. The Lost Weekend
71. Barry Lyndon
72. Smiles Of A Summer Night
73. In A Lonely Place
74. Rumble Fish
75. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
76. The Deer Hunter
77. Rififi
78. The Lives Of Others
79. The Adventures Of Robin Hood
80. Duel
81. Mean Streets
82. The Lusty Men
83. The Searchers
84. The Reckless Moment
85. Ridicule
86. Diner
87. Peeping Tom
88. The Leopard
89. Trainspotting
90. La Kermesse Heroique
91. I Am Cuba
92. Nights Of Cabiria
93. Together
94. Picnic At Hanging Rock
95. Don't Look Now
96. Los Olividados
97. Election
98. Unforgiven
99. The Wages Of Fear
100. Army In The Shadows

Technically, there are 101 films on the list, as The Godfather parts I and II are both listed at #16. It's surprising that films such as The Searchers (#83), Rashomon (#66), Tokyo Story (#65), and Psycho (#60) are in such low positions. It's an extremely international list, though there are only two silent films included. All About Eve is a great film, but is it really the best film ever made?

10 September 2009

Bangkok International Animation Festival 2009

Bangkok International Animation Festival 2009
Ponyo
The Bangkok International Animation Festival 2009 will take place from 25th-30th September at Paragon Cineplex and SF CentralWorld, in partnership with the 2009 Bangkok International Film Festival. Ponyo, released in Bangkok recently, will be screened again at the Festival.

08 September 2009

1001 Movies
You Must See Before You Die

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
The 2009 edition of Steven Jay Schneider's 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die has now been released. As in the 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005 versions, the changes are limited to the most recent films. Ten titles have been deleted, including The Passion Of The Christ, Meet The Parents, and The Queen; the most interesting of the ten additions is The Good, The Bad, & The Weird, a South Korean tribute to 'spaghetti westerns'.

PDF

06 September 2009

Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea

Ponyo
Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea is the latest film by master Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. The title character (loosely based on The Little Mermaid) is a fish who longs to be human after falling in love with Sosuke, the boy who catches her. Miyazaki's films all appeal to both children and adults, and Ponyo is no exception, though (like his earlier My Neighbour Totoro) it's aimed at a younger audience than some of his more recent works.

Miyazaki begins the film with a clear warning about marine pollution, depicting the sea and coastline littered with rubbish. Also notable is the portrayal of Sosuke's mother, Lisa; her frustration when she is late for work, and when her husband is late home, is surprisingly realistic, given the otherwise innocent nature of the film.

As in many of Miyazaki's films, there are magical elements which are never fully explained. Ponyo's father, for example, is a kind of Captain Nemo figure, a wizard who lives underwater; her mother is a sea goddess. At the end of the film, the wizard appears to rejuvenate a group of elderly people in a magical water-bubble, in an odd and surely unintentional echo of the film Cocoon.

05 September 2009

For Alexis

For Alexis
Apichatpong Weerasethakul has directed a short film, For Alexis, as a tribute to the murdered film critic Alexis Tioseco, which is available online. Apichatpong has previously released other short films online, including Phantoms Of Nabua, Mobile Men, and Prosperity For 2008.

29 August 2009

"Using all forms of violence..."

MICT
An audio clip in which Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva appears to call for the suppression of the red-shirt demonstrators "using all forms of violence" has been blocked by the Ministry of Information, Communication, and Technology. Thai sites that previously streamed it (including Matichon and Thai Insider) have now deleted it.

The tape was edited to misrepresent Abhisit, using extracts from his 19th and 26th April Confidence In Thailand TV programmes. According to the Democrats, it was originally distributed via email by an employee of SC Asset (a company owned by Thaksin's younger sister). It was apparently sent to Pheu Thai (the political party Thaksin controls) on 26th August. It has since been broadcast by ASTV and D-Station.

video

27 August 2009

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds
Inglourious Basterds [sic] is the new film by Quentin Tarantino, slightly re-edited (and two minutes longer) following its premiere at Cannes earlier this year. For more than a decade, Tarantino had been telling interviewers that he was planning a 'guys on a mission' film, and he had apparently been writing the script for much of that time. The result is a World War II revenge fantasy in a 'spaghetti western' style. (The opening caption, "Once upon a time", indicates the fantasy element; it's also a spaghetti western tribute, as are the many Ennio Morricone music cues.) The title is an intentional (though unexplained) mis-spelling of The Inglorious Bastards, the American release title of a 1978 Italian exploitation film.

So, Tarantino is again paying homage to 1970s genre cinema (after Blaxploitation in Jackie Brown, rape-revenge in Death Proof, and 'chop socky' in Kill Bill), though here he's also paying tribute to the cinema in general. The 'basterds' of the title, a group of Jewish-American vigilantes intent on killing Nazi soldiers led by top-billed Brad Pitt with a Southern drawl, are not really the main focus of the film. The crux of the plot actually involves a scheme to kill Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Third Reich officers, by sending a former film critic and an actress to blow up a Parisian cinema. Coincidentally, the cinema's owner also plans to burn it down, by setting fire to inflammable nitrate film prints. Thus, cinema literally saves the world.

Christoph Waltz has received substantial praise for his performance as SS Colonel Landa. His character is arguably more significant than Pitt's, and he certainly gives the film's greatest performance. Speaking French, English, German, and Italian, he charms his suspects with effortless charisma. The film is composed of a series of chapters, each containing one or more long dialogue scenes; those featuring the cordial yet ruthless Landa are the most tense, amusing, and captivating. Like Samuel L Jackson and Harvey Keitel in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Waltz's precise delivery and verbal dexterity steal the show. (Jackson and Keitel have voice-over cameos in this film, as does Tarantino himself.)

24 August 2009

Getting Off At Gateshead

Getting Off At Gateshead
Getting Off At Gateshead: The Dirtiest Words & Phrases In English From Ass-End To Zig-Zag, by lexicographer Jonathon Green, is divided into twenty-six alphabetical chapters, with each chapter devoted to a particular word. (Chapter three is the most interesting.) Brief etymologies and literary citations are provided, followed by synonyms and derivatives. The content is not all that different from Green's earlier Slang Down The Ages, and several other works, all produced by extracting thematic lists of words from Green's comprehensive slang dictionary (published in 1998, revised in 2005, and updated in 2008).

21 August 2009

13th Thai Short Film & Video Festival

13th Thai Short Film & Video Festival
The 13th Thai Short Film & Video Festival closes this Sunday (and opened on 13th August). Each year, a short film to promote the Festival is played before every programme, and this year's film (Man Who Eat An Egg) was directed by Thunska Pansittivorakul, who filmed it in a recreation of Thomas Edison's primitive Black Maria studio. (The Black Maria replica was on show earlier this year, at the Cine-Bananas event; Thunska's Middle-Earth was screened at the 11th Festival.) Like the 12th Festival, this year's event takes place at the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre.

Discovering Orson Welles

Discovering Orson Welles
Discovering Orson Welles is a compilation of articles about Welles by Jonathan Rosenbaum. There are a few essays and film criticism pieces, though many articles are less substantial: book reviews, notes, and other ephemera. In fact, what's most interesting here are not Rosenbaum's comments on Welles but rather his comments on other Welles books. He also presents a useful survey of the various versions of every Welles film, and discusses his contribution to the restoration of Touch Of Evil.

Rosenbaum's annotations are too "autobiographical in nature", and he tends to "spin out" his single meeting with Welles - both of which he acknowledges in his introduction. Despite this, however, Rosenbaum is the ideal Welles scholar, more objective and meticulous than acolytes such as Barbara Leaming or Peter Bogdanovich. Also, his criticisms of both Pauline Kael and David Thomson are very welcome.

Spaghetti Westerns

Spaghetti Westerns
This is the third edition of Christopher Frayling's classic study of Italian westerns, subtitled Cowboys & Europeans From Karl May To Sergio Leone. Though Frayling did not coin the term 'spaghetti western', his book did popularise and destigmatise it.

Although the original Spaghetti Westerns was written almost thirty years ago, neither subsequent edition has revised or expanded the text, with the only additions being new prefaces and a brief introduction by the editor, film historian Jeffrey Richards. Even the errata and typographical errors remain uncorrected, though they are at least listed in the prefaces.

The book is essential as the first substantial, academic analysis of spaghetti westerns. It's also vital for anyone interested in the western genre, or in genre cinema in general. Frayling has since written two books with production designer Ken Adam: an extended interview, and a design monograph. He also wrote a biography of Sergio Leone (Something To Do With Death) and a monograph on Leone's films (Once Upon A Time In Italy).

Ganapati

Ganapati
Ganapati, an exhibition at Kerkar Art Complex in India, is causing controversy as it features irreverent drawings of the Hindu god Ganesha. The artist, Subodh Kerkar, has been threatened with violence, and complaints have been made to the police. He has been warned by the police not to "hurt religious feelings". The exhibition opened yesterday and will close at the end of the month.

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