26 February 2008
L'Erotisme
Ritualis
(a Black Mass ritual set to Heavy Metal music; directed by Pat Tremblay)
Maldoror: A Pact With Prostitution
(a man meets a prostitute in a cemetery, and kills a grotesque glow-worm [!] with a rock; directed by Nate Archer and Micki Pellerano)
Ass
(as a woman fingers herself, the red-tinted film intercuts rapidly between her face and her buttocks; directed by Usama Alshaibi)
KI
(partially obscured glimpses of a man receiving fellatio; directed by Karl Lemieux)
La Fin De Notre Amour
(an artist and an unidentified woman cut themselves with razors and surgical instruments; directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani)
Extase De Chair Brisee
(a rape-revenge story: a woman kills two masked men with a drill, after they molest her in a park; directed by Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt and Frederick Maheaux)
Baby Doll
(a doll is tied up and fondled, in a bondage fantasy; directed by Serge de Cotret)
The Loneliest Little Boy In The World
(a pig's head is licked and worshipped by a nude woman; directed by Mike Dereniewski)
Paranoid
(a woman films herself with a camcorder as she inserts a dildo; directed by Anna Hanavan)
D'Yeux
(a slide-show of erotic photo-montages featuring body parts and meat; directed by Monk Boucher)
Imperatrix Cornicula
(a woman rubbing herself with feathers, and birds gathering in the sky; directed by Jerome Bertrand)
Almost all of these short films are silent, except for Ritualis (which features slowed-down incantations as dialogue, though would be more effective as a silent film). Maldoror even adds mock-Victorian inter-titles, to add to the silent film aesthetic.
Maldoror's occult symbols evoke Kenneth Anger's treatment of magick, and the film's decaying, abject glow-worm could be a refugee from David Lynch's Eraserhead. It's one of the best films in the anthology.
Another highlight is KI, the only film to cross the borderline into hardcore imagery. Its intentionally degraded and washed-out images resemble Peggy Ahwesh's The Color Of Love, another porn/sex scene rendered semi-abstract by degraded film-stock, though KI is less confrontational than Ahwesh's uncomfortable film.
I also like La Fin De Notre Amour very much. It's filmed as a series of static images (like La Jetee), and, though it's perhaps a bit too stylised (tinted red and blue), it is certainly disturbing.
In my opinion, the weakest films are Ritualis (cliched, verging on self-parody) and, especially, Extase De Chair Brisee. This latter film is like a cross between I Spit On Your Grave and The Driller Killer - in other words, it's an exercise in gratuitous exploitation; the unconvincing acting, costumes, and make-up remove any sense of empathy or engagement, and the camerawork is frequently out of focus.
17 February 2008
100 Best Films
Drama
1. The Conversation
2. Strangers On A Train
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Winter Light
5. Dogville
6. Raging Bull
7. The Godfather I-II
8. Double Indemnity
9. Apocalypse Now
10. Chinatown
1. North By Northwest
2. Raiders Of The Lost Ark
3. Manhattan Murder Mystery
4. Heat
5. The 39 Steps
6. Terminator II: Judgment Day
7. Once Upon A Time In The West
8. The Ladykillers
9. The Silence Of The Lambs
10. Die Hard
1. Some Like It Hot
2. Annie Hall
3. Meet The Parents
4. Withnail & I
5. His Girl Friday
6. The Odd Couple
7. Zoolander
8. Stir Crazy
9. Gregory's Girl
10. Tootsie
1. Dimensions Of Dialogue
2. The Jungle Book
3. Spirited Away
4. Toy Story
5. Composition In Blue
6. Grave Of The Fireflies
7. The Secret Adventures Of Tom Thumb
8. Finding Nemo
9. Perfect Blue
10. Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
1. Psycho
2. Frankenstein
3. The Exorcist
4. Night Of The Living Dead
5. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
6. Dead Of Night
7. The Wicker Man
8. The Blair Witch Project
9. Vampyr
10. The Kingdom I-II
1. Before Sunset
2. Head-On
3. I Know Where I'm Going!
4. Brief Encounter
5. The Lady Vanishes
6. The Quiet American
7. Hannah & Her Sisters
8. Bringing Up Baby
9. Days Of Heaven
10. Casablanca
1. Back To The Future
2. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
3. Babe: Pig In The City
4. Freaky Friday
5. Addams Family Values
6. Mean Girls
7. Anne Of Green Gables
8. Clueless
9. Enchanted
10. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit
1. West Side Story
2. The Sound Of Music
3. Cabaret
4. Top Hat
5. Chicago
6. Mary Poppins
7. Singin' In The Rain
8. Nashville
9. Woodstock
10. My Fair Lady
1. American Splendor
2. The Sorrow & The Pity
3. American Movie
4. Touching The Void
5. Capturing The Friedmans
6. Spellbound
7. To Be & To Have
8. Hearts & Minds
9. My Kid Could Paint That
10. Neil Young: Heart Of Gold
1. Battleship Potemkin
2. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
3. The Rules Of The Game
4. Tokyo Story
5. Seven Samurai
6. Pather Panchali
7. Smiles Of A Sumer Night
8. A Man Escaped
9. Andrei Rublev
10. The Colour Of Pomegranates
Dividing the 100 titles into ten rigid categories is asking for trouble. Manhattan Murder Mystery, for example, is listed as a thriller/action film (the third greatest thriller/action film, no less), but it's actually a comedy. Why it's listed at all is a mystery, because it's a pale imitation of Annie Hall. Bringing Up Baby appears in the romance list, even though it's one of the most famous comedies ever made.
The inclusion of so many very recent films is bizarre. Is Enchanted (released last year) really one of the greatest children's films ever made? Is There Will Be Blood (released this year) really one of the best dramas of all time? Is it really necessary for seven of the ten documentaries to be films made after 2001? Emphatically no, in all cases.
Why is world cinema relegated to only ten films, as if it were a genre? Are 90% of the 100 'best films' really English-language? No. The world cinema category whitewashes whole chapters of film history: no German Expressionism, no French New Wave, and no Italian Neorealism.
Oh, and the compilers seem to have forgotten about science-fiction and westerns altogether. D'oh! So there's no place for Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey (no Kubrick films at all, in fact), Metropolis, Stagecoach, The Searchers, or High Noon.
Finally, what about Citizen Kane? I'd like to think that the compilers were making a revisionist statement by omitting it, but I'm more inclined to believe that they simply forgot about it because it doesn't fit into one of their ten categories.
(Note that Frankenstein is, of course, the superior James Whale sound version, not the Thomas Edison silent film; and Psycho is the original version. Also, Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece, not the obscure 1939 comedy.)
11 February 2008
Cumhuriyet
04 February 2008
Fast Food Nation
The exploitation of the American fast food industry is illustrated by the experiences of Mexican immigrants working at a meat-packing factory, a student activist who has a McJob at Mickey's (the fictional company created for the film), and a Mickey's executive who investigates claims of contaminated beef. Though the characters are fictitious, the film concludes with genuine Blood Of The Beasts-style slaughterhouse footage.
The narrative intercuts between a series of concurrent stories, though characters from separate stories never meet (except for one shot in which vehicles from two different segments unknowingly stop beside each other at a traffic light). The structure doesn't quite work, though, because it's too episodic. Characters are introduced, they have one or two major scenes, then they are never seen again, leaving numerous plot points unresolved. This pattern is repeated throughout the film, which has an impressive ensemble cast but no strong central plot line to link everything together.
The Seven-Year Itch
Ewell plays Richard Sherman, a New York publisher whose wife and son go on holiday for the summer. Monroe's un-named character sub-let's the apartment above Sherman's, and he fantasises about seducing her while his wife is away. In the earlier play of the same name, they do have an affair, though in the toned-down film version he is only unfaithful in his imagination. (Some of the fantasy sequences are parodies of popular films, such as From Here To Eternity.)
At the start, the premise is laboured a bit too much, with repeated emphasis on Sherman's regular office job and normal marriage, and several references to the New York wives who apparently all go on summer vacations without their husbands. It seems a bit strained, as if it were attempting to normalise an unrealistic scenario.
There's a bit too much of Ewell, who narrates the story and appears in every scene, though when Monroe appears she is sensational. She has some great lines, such as recognising classical music because "there's no vocal". This film also contains Monroe's most famous scene: standing over a subway grating, her skirt billowing above her waist. (A similar scene was filmed by George S Flemming and Edwin S Porter for What Happened On 23rd Street in 1901.)
A nude photograph of Monroe had been published by Playboy the year before the film was released, and in an interesting parallel, Monroe's character had also previously posed for a cheesecake photo. In an even more blatant in-joke, Sherman, discussing Monroe's character, says "Maybe it's Marilyn Monroe"!
29 January 2008
A Coup For The Rich
28 January 2008
To Catch A Thief
Cary Grant, one of Hitchcock's favourite actors, plays John Robie, a cat burglar who has retired to the French coast. Grace Kelly, probably Hitchcock's favourite actress, plays Frances Stevens, who falls in love with him. Robie is that archetypal Hitchcock figure, the persecuted innocent: he gave up burglary years before, though he is framed for a spate of recent jewellery thefts. To prove his innocence, he must catch the real burglar himself. The final revelation of the burglar's identity is hardly a surprise, and the whole plot is rather flimsy.
There are some amusing double-entendres, including Kelly asking Grant if he wants "leg or breast" (she's talking about pieces of chicken). Apparently, these moments were improvised by Kelly and Grant. Interestingly, Grant's character explains that he travelled around Europe performing in a circus during his youth - which is exactly what Grant did in his own youth. Grant is always a superbly suave actor, though he was better in Hitchcock's North By Northwest and Notorious. In this film his skin is alarmingly dark; his tan actually makes it difficult to recognise his face in some scenes.
26 January 2008
Artspace Germany
Paik is regarded as the father of video art: in 1965, he and Andy Warhol, working independently, were the first artists to incorporate video footage into their work. Two of Paik's iconic video sculptures, constructed from TV monitors, are included in this exhibition: Internet Resident and Candle TV.
Kosuth's work demonstrates the principles of semiotics, with a real object exhibited alongside a photograph and dictionary definition of the object. Kosuth first demonstrated this concept in 1965, with a real chair, a photograph of the chair, and a written definition of 'chair' presented side-by-side. In this exhibition, the same principle is applied to a frying pan (One & Three Pans).
Artspace Germany is showing at PSG (Silpakorn University) from 6th-27th February.
19 January 2008
“Joining the government won’t be a problem...”
Before the election, candidates and factions were grouping and regrouping on a daily basis, with seemingly no consideration of party ideology whatsoever. In the end, every other political party except the Democrats has joined in a PPP coalition. The final coalition partners, Puea Paendin and Chart Thai, announced their membership yesterday, after more than two weeks of negotiations; they had used the mourning period following the death of Princess Galyani to buy themselves more time. Chart Thai’s leader Banharn Silpaarcha announced that “joining the government won’t be a problem”.
The Supreme Court yesterday dismissed six cases against the PPP and the Election Commission of Thailand. The New Aspiration Party had alleged that the Commission was not authorised to organise absentee ballots and advanced voting before the election. Democrat candidate Chaiwat Sinsuwong claimed that the PPP was not legally allowed to contest the election, as it is a TRT nominee, Samak is a Thaksin proxy, and PPP candidates distributed Thaksin VCDs. All of these complaints have been dismissed by the Supreme Court. (The Democrats had earlier asked Chaiwat to withdraw his allegations, and he has now resigned from the party.)
The PPP’s last obstacle was Yongyuth Tiyaphairat, one of the party’s deputy leaders. He was among many PPP candidates accused of vote-buying, and he has been under ECT investigation. The ECT must endorse at least 95% of MPs before a new parliamentary term can begin. Thus, the ECT were under pressure to complete their vote-buying investigations as soon as possible. Fearing demonstrations from PPP supporters, the ECT delegated the Yongyuth investigation to a sub-committee. Then, when Yongyuth was invited to view the evidence against him (an incriminating VCD), he missed the appointment. However, Yongyuth has now received ECT endorsement. Indeed, the ECT rushed to endorse some twenty-nine candidates yesterday, in order to meet the deadline. (Previously, candidates had been endorsed in dribs and drabs, averaging three per day.)
17 January 2008
Japanese Film Festival 2008
The 1950s were indeed a golden age for Japanese film (as, previously, were the 1920s), with Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon introducing international audiences to Japanese cinema for the first time. However, the cinema of Japan does not begin and end with Kurosawa. The Japanese Film Festival emphasises the lesser-known directors of Japanese cinema's second golden age.
The schedule includes Gion Bayashi (Saturday) by master director Kenji Mizoguchi, and the historical drama Wild Geese by Shirou Toyoda (Sunday). Also included is The Ghost Of Yotsuya (Sunday), a classic interpretation of Japan's most famous ghost story by its greatest horror director, Nobuo Nakagawa. (The legend of Yotsuya is the Japanese equivalent of the Thai folk tale Mae Nak, on which Nang Nak was based.) There are also two films by Mikio Naruse: Repast (Thursday) and Sound Of The Mountain (Friday). All films will be screened, free of charge, at the Grand EGV cinema, Siam Discovery Center.
12 January 2008
Hostel
Hostel begins with a group of three male backpackers, who are told about an Eastern European hostel full of attractive women. When they arrive at the hostel, they do indeed meet three ladies, though what they don't realise until far too late is that they have been drawn into a honeytrap. The women are prostitutes, hired by a Russian company called Elite Hunting, who bring the men to a derelict factory where they are to be tortured and killed by the company's paying clients. (Elite Hunting was supposedly inspired by a Thai organisation whose website Roth saw.)
The torture scenes are dank, dark, and hard to watch the first time. (I saw the unrated edition, which is slightly longer than the theatrical version.) During subsequent viewings I always have to look away when Josh's ankles split open. Jan Vlasak, who plays a Dutch businessman who uses Elite Hunting's services, gives a chilling, casually sadistic performance.
06 January 2008
Prosperity For 2008
02 January 2008
Seduced
01 January 2008
Jackass II
What surprised me was how scatological many of these activities were - bodily fluids (both human and animal) were required (and ingested) for several stunts. The version I saw was the unrated DVD, and I don't know how much of this material was missing from the theatrical version.
The team are so over-enthusiastic that it's difficult to laugh at them too much, though it is genuinely fascinating in a disgusting kind of way, if only to wonder at how they cleaned up and recuperated afterwards. Also, there's a cameo by director John Waters, whose film Pink Flamingos rivals Jackass II for sheer abjection.
30 December 2007
Casino Royale
Campbell had previously directed Pierce Brosnan as an ultra-suave Bond in GoldenEye. Brosnan's replacement, Daniel Craig, is more reminiscent of Die Hard's John McClain than the traditional James Bond character. (Does he want his Martini shaken or stirred? "Do I look like I give a damn?" is his iconoclastic answer.)
24 December 2007
Adland
Potty Fartwell & Knob
Thus, for example, we learn that there was a man named Jesus Christ who was born in 1940 and died in 2004. My favourite word is given its very own chapter, and the book lists twenty first names and surnames which incorporate it. (Anyone familiar with the English town Scunthorpe will get the general idea; as a personal nomenclature, it appears in even less disguised forms.)
In his introduction, Ash stresses that "wherever possible original documents have been checked" to avoid mistakes, though he also writes that his research involved "access to online material". Exactly how many census records he checked online, and how many he examined in their original versions, is unclear. I'm not convinced that all of the names listed are genuine, as it's too easy for mistakes or spoofs to creep in when records are typed into databases.
23 December 2007
New Works
New Works features twenty-one blocks (Anthropometric Modules) of dried human excrement, collected and moulded by 'dalit' ('untouchable') scavengers in India. Sierra's art raises awareness of the exploitation of low-paid workers, though he has also been accused of exploiting the disadvantaged volunteers who work for him (by paying them nominal sums to perform degrading acts). Indeed, the Indian scavengers received no compensation for their work on his recent sculptures.
21 December 2007
Stanley Kubrick Archive
Live Earth
17 December 2007
Seduced
Every significant field is included: Japanese illustrations from the 18th and 19th centuries, Victorian and early 20th century erotic photography from the Alfred Kinsey collection, outrageous drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, Surrealist images by Man Ray, illustrations for Justine and The Philosophy Of The Boudoir, and the Kama Sutra. There are even late drawings by Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, and an early (self-satisfied) Picasso self-portrait. Sex in contemporary art is represented by collections of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (his most sado-masochistic, homoerotic images), Nobuyoshi Araki (close-up, eroticised images of isolated organs and snails), Jeff Koons (quasi-pornographic self-portraits with Ilona Staller), Thomas Ruff (out-of-focus images appropriated from porn websites), and Nan Goldin.
Goldin's work, a slide-show of naturalistic images, is the only exhibit to carry an individual 'explicit content' warning, although the Kinsey slideshow is far more graphic; the Goldin warning may be a precautionary reaction to the fuss over her recent Baltic exhibition. There are very few notable omissions, though Warhol would have been better represented by Blue Movie, and Carolee Schneemann's film Fuses should have been included, as should Andres Serrano's History Of Sex photographs.
16 December 2007
30,000 Years Of Art
30,000 Years Of Art spans the entire history of artistic achievement, and features works from around the world. In addition to painting, sculpture, installation, and video, it also includes decorative art: ceramics, textiles, and metalwork. (In contrast, The Art Book is restricted to Western art since the Renaissance, and decorative art is excluded.) Unlike The Art Book, there are no cross-references but there is an index.
Each artist is restricted to a single entry. Some artists are represented by their most famous works, such as Velasquez (Las Meninas), Richard Hamilton (Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?), and Picasso (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon), though others are not: Leonardo's first portrait (Ginevra de' Benci) is included instead of the Mona Lisa, and Michelangelo is represented by his Dying Slave sculpture rather than David or the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
30,000 Years Of Art, weighing almost 6kg with more than 1,000 pages, is an excellent introduction to international art history. The Story Of Art (by EH Gombrich; also published by Phaidon), A World History Of Art (by John Fleming and Hugh Honour), and Art Through The Ages (by Helen Gardner) are the best single-volume art histories.
10 December 2007
The Bridge
Documentary filmmaking has always raised questions about directorial intervention, though in this case the issue is absolutely fundamental. Steel maintains that, any time he saw someone behaving unusually, he called the coastguard, and that he was thus able to prevent six suicide attempts. One of the film's interviewees, a photographer, explains the detachment he feels when looking through a camera viewfinder, and this has also been explored in horror films such as Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project. In The Bridge, the photographer overcame his artistic instinct and intervened to save the life of the suicidal woman he was photographing, and Steel himself is adamant that he did all he could for each of the people whose deaths he filmed.
07 December 2007
1001 Movies
You Must See Before You Die
05 December 2007
Adam & Ewald
03 December 2007
Destination Moon
While Pichel and Pal were perfecting their scrupulous accuracy, they were overtaken by a low-budget exploitation film, Rocketship XM, which was rushed into production and actually released before Destination Moon. Rocketship XM has no production values, but it's far more exciting than Pichel's film. Pal later produced the alien invasion film The War Of The Worlds, one of the most dramatic sci-fi films of the period, but it was the success of Destination Moon that revived the genre at the start of the 1950s.
The Lord of the Rings:
The Fellowship of the Ring
24 November 2007
Seven Works
23 November 2007
Spellbound
Selznick was notorious for his personal supervision of the films he produced, often over-ruling the directors and assuming ultimate creative responsibility. (Gone With The Wind, for example, has one credited director, though two others worked on it at different times and Selznick is effectively the film's auteur.) Hitchcock planned his films down to the last detail in pre-production, and, to avoid post-production changes, he shot only the specific angles that he knew he would use. After his Selznick contract expired, he personally produced every film he subsequently directed. The joke in North By Northwest about Roger O Thornhill's middle initial standing for "Nothing" is a sly dig at Selznick's similar affectation, and, more surprisingly, the murderer in Rear Window bears an uncanny resemblance to Selznick.
One of Hitchcock's favourite actors, Leo G Carroll, appeared in five films for the director besides Spellbound. Ingrid Bergman would later star in Hitchcock's Notorious, one of his greatest films. (Incidentally, one reason why it is so great is that Selznick was preoccupied with writing Duel In The Sun so he didn't interfere in the production.)
Spellbound has rather too much psychobabble; the whole script plays like the last reel of Psycho. Also, the early scenes in which Petersen is misconstrued as frigid and a female patient is treated for nymphomania feel laboured and un-necessary. The two close-up point-of-view shots (drinking drugged milk and suicide by shooting, the latter featuring a flash of red in an otherwise monochrome film) are a bit gimmicky. On the other hand, the music score by Miklos Rozsa is fascinating, featuring the first use of the theremin in any film soundtrack.
The film is probably most famous for its short dream sequence, designed by the over-rated Surrealist artist Salvador Dali and directed (uncredited) by William Cameron Menzies. Dali's concepts borrow heavily from the iconography of his previous paintings, and from his and Luis Bunuel's film Un Chien Andalou.