The Greatest Movies Ever

Gail Kinn and Jim Piazza's new book, The Greatest Movies Ever: The Ultimate Ranked List Of The 101 Best Films Of All Time!, is an updated of their previous Four-Star Movies, published in 2003. (Each book actually lists 102 films, because The Godfather and The Godfather II appear as a single entry at #1.)

For the new list, seven titles have been removed: Raise The Red Lantern, Saturday Night Fever, Belle De Jour, Thelma & Louise, Airplane!, Terminator II, and The Bridge On The River Kwai. Many titles occupy exactly (or almost exactly) the same positions in the new version, though there are a few dramatic changes: The Manchurian Candidate drops from #23 all the way down to #94, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid drops from #62 to #90, The Graduate drops from #18 to #33, and Sunset Boulevard climbs from #19 to #4.

The authors haven't included any silent films, noting that silent cinema is "too rich to sandwich in with a token choice or two". Of course, the same case could be made for Japanese or French cinema, each of which is indeed represented by less than a handful of titles. A list of 101 greatest films is, by its very nature, a reductivist exercise, so I'm not really convinced by the exclusion of silent movies.

The 101 Greatest Movies are as follows:

1. The Godfather I-II
2. Citizen Kane
3. Casablanca
4. Sunset Boulevard
5. Lawrence Of Arabia
6. North By Northwest
7. The Wizard Of Oz
8. Annie Hall
9. Chinatown
10. Singin' In The Rain
11. Nashville
12. Some Like It Hot
13. All About Eve
14. Psycho
15. Taxi Driver
16. Apocalypse Now
17. On The Waterfront
18. Gone With The Wind
19. To Kill A Mockingbird
20. The Searchers
21. La Dolce Vita
22. Double Indemnity
23. Pan's Labyrinth
24. Vertigo
25. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
26. GoodFellas
27. Jules & Jim
28. Funny Face
29. A Streetcar Named Desire
30. Saving Private Ryan
31. Strangers On A Train
32. It Happened One Night
33. The Graduate
34. It's A Wonderful Life
35. Raging Bull
36. The Best Years Of Our Lives
37. The African Queen
38. Dr Strangelove
39. Blade Runner
40. The Conformist
41. Schindler's List
42. The Lives Of Others
43. Diner
44. City Lights
45. The Deer Hunter
46. 8½
47. Top Hat
48. La Regle Du Jeu
49. 2001: A Space Odyssey
50. Bonnie & Clyde
51. King Kong
52. Star Wars IV: A New Hope
53. The 400 Blows
54. A Night At The Opera
55. My Fair Lady
56. The Night Of The Hunter
57. The Third Man
58. Dr Zhivago
59. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
60. Invasion Of The Body-Snatchers
61. Pinocchio
62. Shadow Of A Doubt
63. Fargo
64. Blue Velvet
65. Jaws
66. The Grapes Of Wrath
67. Do The Right Thing
68. Wild Strawberries
69. Bicycle Thieves
70. Bringing Up Baby
71. Paths Of Glory
72. The Maltese Falcon
73. Pather Panchali
74. The Lady Eve
75. The Last Picture Show
76. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
77. Rosemary's Baby
78. Midnight Cowboy
79. M*A*S*H
80. American Graffiti
81. The Producers
82. Rashomon
83. Cabaret
84. The Bank Dick
85. A Place In The Sun
86. Red River
87. The Conversation
88. Grand Illusion
89. LA Confidential
90. Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid
91. Imitation Of Life
92. Raiders Of The Lost Ark
93. Spartacus
94. The Manchurian Candidate
95. Seven Samurai
96. A Hard Day's Night
97. Atlantic City
98. American Beauty
99. Pulp Fiction
100. The Shawshank Redemption
101. Groundhog Day

Note that The Maltese Falcon is the John Huston version, which is actually a remake of an earlier Roy Del Ruth film. Also, Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece, not the obscure 1939 comedy; and Psycho is the original version.

12th Thai Short Film & Video Festival

The 12th Thai Short Film & Video Festival opened on 29th August at the new Bangkok Art & Culture Centre, running until 14th September. Last year's 11th Festival provided an opportunity for Thai filmmakers to respond to the 2006 military coup, and featured several marquee-name directors.

This year's event began with Sompot Chidgasornpongse's film Diseases & A Hundred Year Period. Sompot was an assistant director on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes & A Century, and his new film is a reaction to the Thai censorship of Apichatpong's work.

ชิมไปบ่นไป(‘cooking while grumbling’)

The Constitutional Court announced today that Samak Sundaravej—Prime Minister, and leader of the governing People Power Party—’must be dismissed from office with effective immediate effect. The court ruled that he had violated the constitution by hosting a cookery show, ชิมไปบ่นไป (‘tasting while grumbling’), on TV earlier this year. The constitution forbids a serving prime minister from receiving private income; it also stipulates that the entire cabinet must resign following the PM’s disqualification.

Samak had been under pressure to resign for over a week, following the People’s Alliance for Democracy’s continued occupation of Government House. However, he had repeatedly refused to step down, arguing that an elected PM should not give in to mob rule. The Election Commission of Thailand voted unanimously to recommend the dissolution of the PPP last week. Their decision was based on the Supreme Court’s conviction of PPP deputy leader Yongyuth Tiyaphairat, following an investigation into vote-buying during the 2007 general election. The Constitutional Court has yet to rule on the PPP’s fate, though the court’s dissolution of Thai Rak Thai last year does not bode well for the PPP, given that the PPP is essentially a reincarnation of Thai Rak Thai.

Ken Adam Designs The Movies

Ken Adam Designs The Movies: James Bond & Beyond is a new book by Ken Adam and Christopher Frayling, featuring reproductions of Adam's sketches and other pre-production art from the various films he has designed. It's an excellent companion to their previous book, which was an extended interview accompanied by a smaller selection of images.

Adam worked for Stanley Kubrick on Dr Strangelove and Barry Lyndon, and the earlier book quotes a letter sent to Adam by Kubrick after Adam initially refused to work on Barry Lyndon. Ken Adam Designs The Movies includes a copy of the letter, at the back of the book.

Bangkok Post Sunday

The Bangkok Post today relaunched its Sunday edition, substantially expanding its pagination. In contrast, today's edition of The Sunday Nation is extremely thin: only eighteen pages in total, with virtually no advertising at all.

The Nation does at least include national news now, which it had dropped following the launch of the Daily Xpress. The Xpress itself is now twenty pages shorter than it used to be (and is seemingly no longer published on Sundays, replaced by The Sunday Nation).

Sukiyaki Western Django

Sukiyaki Western Django was directed by Takashi Miike, the prolific Japanese horror/exploitation filmmaker most famous for the unsettling Audition and the extremely violent gangster film Ichi The Killer. Django, an early 'spaghetti western', provided the inspiration for Sukiyaki Western Django, and indeed Miike's film is technically a Django prequel.

In a prologue with a painted backdrop resembling Tears Of The Black Tiger, we learn about the Genpei War, a conflict between rival Genji and Taira gangs. Then, in an isolated town, the descendants of the rival groups prepare for a showdown, with one side in white and the other in red. I was reminded of the current political situation in Bangkok: two sides and two colours (anti-government, in yellow; pro-government, in red) facing each other in a violent confrontation.

The lead character is a lone cowboy (clearly inspired by Clint Eastwood's character in A Fistful Of Dollars, itself derived from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo) who arrives in town, proves he is quick on the draw, then puts an end to the feud between the two gangs by defeating both of them (just as Eastwood's character does). The stoical cowboy's role is not substantial, though, as he mostly bides his time until the final duel. Arguably more central to the story is a silent young boy whose mother and father belonged to different gangs.

Miike has put a Japanese twist on the Italian spaghetti western genre, a genre which was itself partly inspired by Japanese cinema - A Fistful Of Dollars was an unofficial Yojimbo remake. There have been similar attempts from other countries, the closest equivalent to Miike's being the Japanese 'noodle western' Tampopo. From India came the 'curry western' Sholay, and the Spanish film 800 bullets has been called a 'marmitako western'. This year, the South Korean The Good, The Bad, & The Weird was marketed as a 'kimchi western'. There are also 'borsch westerns' from Russia, 'Spätzle westerns' from Germany, 'kartoffel westerns' from Denmark, 'boureka westerns' from Isreal, 'camembert westerns' from France, and 'paella westerns' from Spain.

Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino makes an amusing cameo appearance in the prologue, wearing a poncho in another echo of Clint Eastwood; when we return to his character near the end of the film, however, he has become a ridiculous old man in a wheelchair. Other characters are equally implausible. Neither gang leader is remotely menacing: one rolls his eyes, cowers behind his men, and recites Shakespeare very badly; the other has the weak-looking, lithe physique of Russell Brand. The most absurd character is the sheriff, who becomes severely schizophrenic in an unsuccessful attempt at slapstick comedy.

The film's dialogue is delivered in English, though the actors are largely Japanese, and their thick accents make many of their lines incomprehensible. There is stunning cinematography in several sequences, notably the prologue with its artificial backdrop and a couple of scenes with stylised blue lighting, though the characters and dialogue make it hard to take the film seriously. (The version released in Japan is twenty minutes longer.)

Sticky & Sweet Tour

Madonna's Sticky & Sweet Tour began earlier this month. Although the set list inevitably concentrates on her latest album, Hard Candy, there's also a surprising amount of classic songs (including superlative performances of Into The Groove and Like A Prayer). The show is divided into four themed sections: 'pimp', 'old school', 'gypsy', and 'rave'. Vocally, Madonna sounds great, though her costumes are quite eccentric.

The full set list is: The Sweet Machine, Candy Shop, Beat Goes On, Human Nature, Vogue, Die Another Day, Into The Groove, Heartbeat, Borderline, She's Not Me, Music, Rain, Devil Wouldn't Recognize You, Spanish Lesson, Miles Away, La Isla Bonita, You Must Love Me, Get Stupid, 4 Minutes, Like A Prayer, Ray Of Light, Hung Up, and Give It 2 Me.

This Area Is Under Quarantine

A new documentary by Thai filmmaker Thunska Pansittivorakul, This Area Is Under Quarantine (บริเวณนี้อยู่ภายใต้การกักกัน), was screened at Makhampom Studio, Bangkok, last night. (All of his previous films were shown at a retrospective in April.) Before the premiere of this new feature-length documentary, there were screenings of his recent short films Action! (which premiered at the 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, and is currently showing as part of the 4th Project 6) and Middle-Earth (มัชฌิมโลก; which premiered at the 11th Thai Short Film and Video Festival), and his music video Blinded Spot. Most of the photographs from Thunska’s recent Life Show exhibition were also displayed, though the more explicit ones were missing.

Thunska has always made highly provocative films, and This Area Is Under Quarantine is no exception. Its first half resembles his short films Life Show (เปลือยชีวิต) and Chemistry (ปฏิกิริยา), with two gay men being interviewed about their past relationships. (They later have sex with each other, filmed in close-up with a constantly moving camera, recalling Thunska’s short film Sigh/เมืองร้าง.)

One of the men mentions that he is Muslim, which unexpectedly veers the discussion towards the notorious incident at Tak Bai in 2004 when seventy-eight Muslim men suffocated while held captive by the Thai army. Video footage of the Tak Bai incident is included, and Thaksin Shinawatra, who was Thailand’s Prime Minister at the time, is directly criticised in the film (albeit four years after the event).

More contentiously, photographs of Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, who were hanged in Iran in 2005, are also included, with the suggestion that they were executed because they had consensual sex with each other. In fact, human rights organisations have since concluded that they raped a thirteen-year-old boy, and thus their reputation as gay martyrs is inappropriate.

There were a few technical glitches at last night’s sold-out screening. The film will be shown again at the same venue on 1st September.

Life With My Sister Madonna

Life With My Sister Madonna is an account by Christopher Ciccone of his relationship with Madonna, written by Ciccone with Wendy Leigh. Ciccone briefly recounts their childhood and their early days in New York, challenging the self-mythologising accounts of the period that Madonna has given in interviews. For instance, the story of how she arrived in New York with $35, and a taxi driver dropped her off in Times Square, is - surprise, surprise - not true.

The book's main focus is on his professional relationship with his sister. Over the years, she has employed him as an interior designer and stage director, and he writes at length about his demeaning chores and paltry compensation. It's hard to feel much sympathy though, because he also complains when she doesn't hire him.

He is evidently jealous of the men in her life, and he makes it clear that he can't stand her husband, Guy Ritchie. His personal offence at the wedding speech of Ritchie's best man seems like a massive over-reaction. Also, for some strange reason, he is surprised that Ritchie wants to approve the decor of their home rather than giving Ciccone carte blanche to design it however he likes.

There's nothing really revelatory about Madonna in this book. Yes, she seems selfish and controlling, but we knew that already. Where are the details about Sean Penn tying her to a chair all night?

The Empire Top 500

Empire magazine has launched a survey to find the 500 greatest films of all time. Voting is open until 5th September, and the results will be published at the end of next month.

Flashback '76

The group exhibition Flashback '76 commemorates the 1976 Thammasat University massacre. The exhibition includes Manit Sriwanichpoom's photo series Died On 6th October 1976; Manit soaked autopsy photographs of the victims of the massacre in blood, to reinforce the violence of the event. They were created to express Manit's incredulity when Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej told CNN that only one person died in the massacre. The exhibition also includes Vasan Sitthiket's video Delete Our History, Now! (อำนาจ/การลบทิ้ง), which comments on the state's whitewashing of the 6th October incident.

The 1976 massacre was previously the subject of Manit's Horror In Pink series, shown at From Message To Media. (That series was made in response to Samak being elected governor of Bangkok in 2000 by an electorate that had seemingly forgotten his role as an agitator in the buildup to the massacre.) Flashback '76, at the Pridi Banomyong Institute in Bangkok, opened on 2nd August, and will close on Saturday.

Halliwell's Film Guide 2008

The twenty-third edition of Halliwell's Film Guide, now retitled Halliwell's Film, Video, & DVD Guide 2008, is edited by David Gritten and was published last year. Gritten took over from John Walker, who had edited the Guide since Leslie Halliwell's death in 1989.

Leslie Halliwell was famous for his dislike of modern cinema, refusing to give his maximum four stars to any film made after Bonnie & Clyde. His capsule reviews would damn many films with faint praise, and it's quite fun to look up your favourite films to read the criticisms which accompany even the highest-rated titles. The Seventh Seal, for instance, is a "minor classic", and Annie Hall was successful for "no good reason". Too often, a film's narrative structure is unfairly criticised; for example, Citizen Kane has "gaps in the narrative", Jaws is "slackly narrated", Dr Strangelove has an "untidy narrative", and so on.

In his stint as editor, John Walker rewrote some of the most acerbic reviews and revised many of the star ratings. At the last minute, he requested that his name be removed from this latest edition, hence the sticker bearing David Gritten's name covering Walker's.

Gritten has improved the Guide's layout, with blue text for each film title and a line between each entry. The star ratings are now much more generous than in Halliwell's day - perhaps too generous. The latest edition reviews more than 24,000 films, which is more than most other guides though less than the 27,000 in the current edition of VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever. VideoHound only includes films available on VHS or DVD, however, so while it does feature DTV titles missing from Halliwell's, it doesn't cover any titles which were released theatrically but not on video. For that reason, Halliwell's is still necessary.

Unspeak

'Unspeak' is a label coined by Steven Poole to describe loaded words which are often used euphemistically in neutral senses. It's also the title of Poole's book on the same topic.

'Surgical strike', for example, is used in war reporting to describe a military attack in which only the specific target is destroyed, with no damage to civilians or surrounding infrastructure. 'Surgical' suggests a fine degree of precision, just as a medical surgeon performs delicate surgical procedures. Furthermore, during medical surgery the patient is anaesthetised, thus 'surgical strike' implies painlessness. Finally, military action is linguistically equated with the removal of disease, thus giving it positive associations. By describing military operations as 'surgical strikes', politicians are therefore communicating a subtle ideological message, which is unthinkingly repeated by journalists who adopt the same terminology in their war reporting.

Poole shows how so much political and military discourse utilises metaphors which have been chosen by spin doctors for their ideological implications, and, more worryingly, how these terms have pervasively entered conventional public discourse. Kenneth Burke describes this process, when our selection of terminology limits our perceptions, as 'terministic screening', and Quentin Skinner refers to 'evaluative-descriptive terms', words which are employed objectively despite their subjective origins.

Diary Of The Dead

Diary Of The Dead is the latest in George A Romero's zombie series. (The previous films are: Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn Of The Dead, Day Of The Dead, and Land Of The Dead. The first two are notable for their social commentaries and for their then-unprecedented levels of on-screen gore.)

Like Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project, Diary Of The Dead is a 'mockumentary' comprised of purportedly recovered footage. As in those two earlier films, we are first introduced to the filmmakers and their equipment (taking care to establish the multiple cameras, thus enabling the real filmmaker to justify shot/reverse-shot editing). The same themes - that filming an event makes it more real, and that the camera viewfinder filters reality - are explored in all three films.

Diary Of The Dead's film-within-the-film is titled The Death Of Death. The film's real title, and Romero's name, do not appear until the end credits, though Romero does have a cameo role as a police officer (and there are also cameos by Quentino Tarantino and Wes Craven, as radio reporters).

Funny Games

The Austrian version of Michael Haneke's Funny Games was released in 1997. The film was intended as an endurance test for viewers, and Haneke has called it his only deliberate act of audience provocation. In the film, two articulate, charming, yet sadistic young men torture a bourgeois family. The scenario resembles Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and Haneke returned to the theme with the more subtle Cache in 2006.

This year, Haneke remade Funny Games in Hollywood. The only differences are the language (English) and the cast (led by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth). The script has not been changed, and the same ideas are explored: the total emasculation of the husband/father, the sudden disruption of bourgeois complacency, and the breaking of the fourth wall to render the audience complicit in the action.

The soundtrack, camerawork, and editing are practically identical to the original Funny Games, to an even greater degree than Gus van Sant's Psycho remake. To such an extent, in fact, that the exercise becomes redundant - why don't American viewers simply watch the subtitled original version?

Watts and Roth can't quite hide their natural movie-star charismas, in contrast to the utterly unselfconscious performances of the original actors (Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Muhe). Brady Corbet, as Peter, successfully adopts the mannerisms of Frank Giering, who originally played the character. Michael Pitt, playing Paul, is less chilling than Arno Frisch's original interpretation of the same role.

International Film Festival 2008

The 2008 International Film Festival, organised by Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, opens on 8th August with Four Months, Three Weeks, & Two Days (which premiered in Thailand at the EU Film Festival last year). The Festival runs until 25th August, with free admission to every film.

A History Of Advertising

A History Of Advertising, by Stephane Pincas and Marc Loiseau, presents a history of advertising from 1842 (the founding of the world's first advertising agency, in Philadelphia) to 2006. It was originally published by the advertising agency Publicis and titled Born In 1842.

The emphasis is on images, with each page containing several colour reproductions of posters and stills from TV commercials. This is in contrast to Mark Tungate's Adland, which contains almost no photographs at all. The text in A History Of Advertising amounts to little more than extended picture captions, however, and the advertisements included are all American, British, or (occasionally) European, so the scope is not really international. There is an impressive bibliography, though.

The 100 Best Films Of The World

The 100 Best Films Of The World: A Journey Through A Century Of Motion-Picture History, was edited by Manfred Leier. (Leier is not named on the cover or spine, and the introduction is signed simply "The Editor", with Leier identified only on the copyright page.)

The book consists of 100 films, arranged "according to the film director's country of origin". Thus, for example, Psycho (made in Hollywood) is listed in the Europe section, because Alfred Hitchcock was born in England. Oddly, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest appears in the North America list despite Milos Forman being Czech by birth. There are two pages devoted to each of the 100 films, each film represented by plot synopses and glossy stills. The detailed synopses are too spoiler-ridden for those who have not yet seen the films and redundant for those who already have.

North America

• Greed
  
• The General
  
• All Quiet On The Western Front
  
• Gone With The Wind
  
• The Grapes Of Wrath
  
• Citizen Kane
  
• Casablanca
  
• Sunset Boulevard
  
• High Noon
  
• From Here To Eternity
  
• On The Waterfront
  
• Rebel Without A Cause
  
• Some Like It Hot
  
• Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ
  
• Breakfast At Tiffany's
  
• Easy Rider
  
• The Godfather
  
• One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
  
• Star Wars IV: A New Hope
  
• Annie Hall
  
• Saturday Night Fever
  
• ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
  
• Blade Runner
  
• Out Of Africa
  
• Pretty Woman
  
• Pulp Fiction
  
• The Matrix
  
• Lost In Translation
  
• Titanic

Europe

• Belle De Jour
  
• All About My Mother
  
• The Rules Of The Game
  
• Children Of Paradise
  
• The Wages Of Fear
  
• M. Hulot's Holiday
  
• Black Orpheus
  
• Breathless
  
• Last Year At Marienbad
  
• Au Revoir Les Enfants
  
• Amelie
  
• La Strada
  
• La Dolce Vita
  
• Blow-Up
  
• Once Upon A Time In The West
  
• Death In Venice
  
• Last Tango In Paris
  
• Life Is Beautiful
  
• Zorba The Greek
  
• Yol
  
• All Night Long
  
• The Assault
  
• Character
  
• Metropolis
  
• The Blue Angel
  
• M
  
• Ninotchka
  
• The Tin Drum
  
• The Marriage Of Maria Braun
  
• Fitzcarraldo
  
• Wings Of Desire
  
• The Lacemaker
  
• Closely Observed Trains
  
• Kolya
  
• The Shop On Main Street
  
• Mephisto
  
• Time Of The Gypsies
  
• Ashes & Diamonds
  
• Dance Of The Vampires
  
• The Pianist
  
• Names In Marble
  
• Battleship Potemkin
  
• The Cranes Are Flying
  
• Andrei Rublev
  
• Lights In The Dust
  
• Wild Strawberries
  
• Autumn Sonata
  
• As It Is In Heaven
  
• Babette's Feast
  
• Breaking The Waves
  
• City Lights
  
• The Great Dictator
  
• The Third Man
  
• The Bridge On The River Kwai
  
• Psycho
  
• Lawrence Of Arabia
  
• Goldfinger
  
• A Hard Day's Night
  
• Dr Zhivago
  
• A Clockwork Orange
  
• Gandhi

Asia

• The Wind Will Carry Us
  
• Mother India
  
• Monsoon Wedding
  
• Rashomon
  
• Seven Samurai
  
• Raise The Red Lantern
  
• Farewell My Concubine

Australasia

• The Piano
  
• The Lord Of The Rings I-III

The list includes no examples of Neorealism or film noir, and no films by DW Griffith, Martin Scorsese, Howard Hawks, or Yasujiro Ozu. Note that Ben-Hur is the William Wyler remake and Titanic is the James Cameron version. Also, Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece, not the obscure 1939 comedy.

4th Project 6

Project 6, a film and photography exhibition, will be hosted by Gallery VER, Bangkok, next month. The event will include the short film Action! (premiered at the 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival) by Thunska Pansittivorakul, whose photographic exhibition, Life Show, is currently on display at VER. The 4th Project 6 will open on 15th August (the day Life Show closes), and will run until 30th August.

Gone Yet Still

An installation by Terence Koh, Gone Yet Still, may result in criminal charges against the Baltic art gallery. Koh's work, a statuette of a tumescent Jesus, was shown earlier this year, and, in a private prosecution, a member of the public has accused the gallery of outraging public decency. Baltic came under fire last year for a Nan Goldin photograph, though the image was eventually cleared of obscenity. In 2006, the student magazine The Insurgent published cartoons of Jesus with an erection.

Tumescent Christs have caused artistic controversies before, including a Belgian sculptor's prosecution for blasphemy in 1988. Danish artist Jens Jorgen Thorsen painted a tumescent Christ on the wall of a railway station in 1984. JAM Montoya's 1997 photograph El Ultimo Deseo depicts Christ with an erection. A series of three paintings (Man Of Sorrows, circa 1530) by Maaten van Heemskerck depict Christ in a similar state, as discussed in Leo Steinberg's book The Sexuality Of Christ In Renaissance Art & In Modern Oblivion.

Life Show

Life Show, an exhibition of photographs by Thunska Pansittivorakul, opened today at Gallery VER in Bangkok, and will run until 15th August. (The same venue hosted a retrospective of Thunska's films earlier this year.) The exhibition includes portraits, behind-the-scenes images, and some 'X'-rated shots. Life Show is also the title of one of Thunska's short films, in which an actor discusses his sex-life. Thunska's photos can also be seen, as a slideshow, in his film Endless Story.

News Of The World

Max Mosley, former head of Formula 1, has won a UK legal action against the News Of The World newspaper. Mosley sued the newspaper for breach of privacy after it printed clandestine photographs of him at a sex party. The newspaper also uploaded a short video of the party on its website.

The story was published on 30th March, with a front-page banner headline referring to Mosley's "SICK NAZI ORGY". Mosley accepted that he had participated in an orgy, but insisted that it was a private matter and that it had no Nazi overtones. The High Court judge agreed with him, and awarded him £60,000 in damages, though no injunction was issued.

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes

As part of a Kubrick Season on More4 this month, Jon Ronson presented (and directed) Stanley Kubrick's Boxes on 15th July, a True Stories documentary about Kubrick's archives. Ronson examined the boxes (designed to Kubrick's specifications) containing the director's notes, photographs, and props in situ at Childwickbury Manor, near St Albans, before they were transferred to the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts in London. The programme includes a short Lolita screen test featuring Sue Lyon, and footage filmed by Vivian Kubrick on the set of Full Metal Jacket.

Teeth

Teeth, directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, is a blackly funny horror film about a teenager with a vagina dentata. Once she discovers her 'mutation', she uses it to castrate the various male chauvinists who seem to populate her life. Her brother is a ridiculously over-the-top stereotype, though the other characters are all believable. The central character herself is sympathetic throughout 99% of the film, though her femme fatale smile in the final shot is out of character.

The Art Of Time

Gaysorn, a shopping mall in downtown Bangkok, is hosting an exhibition titled The Art Of Time. The exhibition is designed to promote Gaysorn's range of expensive watches, though of primary interest are works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, and other marquee-name artists.

The centrepiece is a bronze sculpture by Dali, a 3D representation of his melting clock, a motif he first used in his 1931 painting The Persistence Of Memory. The sculpture, which is the only work with a direct link to the exhibition's title, was cast in 1980, in a limited edition of 500. (The over-rated Dali famously signed piles of reproductions, and even blank canvasses, each morning during breakfast, living up to the anagram 'avida dollars' coined by Andre Breton.)

Most of the other works on display are signed prints. The 1963 Picasso linocut, La Dame A La Collerette, for example, was produced in an edition of fifty. The Art Of Time opened yesterday, and will close on 20th July.

Adresseavisen

Adresseavisen, Denmark's oldest newspaper, caused considerable controversy after it published a cartoon of Mohammed last month. The cartoon, by Jan O Henriksen, shows a suicide bomber, with his genitals exposed, wearing a t-shirt proclaiming "I am Mohammed and no-one dares to publish me!".

After the image was published, on 3rd June, the editor and cartoonist attempted to deflect criticism by saying that it depicted merely an Islamic man claiming to act in the name of Mohammed. However, the caricature's t-shirt slogan is unambiguous, and the cartoon is one of the most gratuitously provocative Mohammed caricatures published in the mainstream media.

Another Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, caused international protests after it printed twelve Mohammed cartoons in 2005. This prompted many other European newspapers to publish additional Mohammed caricatures, in solidarity with the Danish cartoonists and in defence of free speech.

Subversion

Subversion, by Duncan Reekie, is the first book to explore not only avant-garde art cinema and filmmaking collectives but the entire history of underground films, from the 1920s onwards. The book is a strange combination of dry theoretical discussion and personal polemic.

Amos Vogel's Film As A Subversive Art, with its frame-enlargements from hundreds of obscure films, remains an essential study of underground cinema. Subversion does not quite live up to its subtitle (The Definitive History Of Underground Cinema), but it does provide an opportunity to consider underground films within their historical contexts.

Decorative Arts

Decorative Arts: Style & Design From Classical To Contemporary is an illustrated guide to glassware, metalware, ceramics, furniture, and textiles. The author, Judith Miller, has written numerous antiques price-guides, though Decorative Arts is intended as an historical introduction.

Like Miller's other guides, Decorative Arts is published by Dorling Kindersley. I'm not particularly a fan of DK, as I explained last year. However, I can't argue with the 3,000 glossy illustrations in Decorative Arts, nor with its wide historical scope (from pre-history to the present day). There are more detailed decorative arts dictionaries and encyclopedias available, though Miller's book provides a fascinating overview of the subject.

Flat Earth News

Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, paints an unpleasant picture of contemporary journalism. It's subtitled An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion, & Propaganda In The Global Media.

Davies criticises journalists for their reliance on wire stories and press-releases (what he calls 'churnalism'), and for never letting the facts get in the way of a good story. The Daily Mail, a reactionary UK tabloid, is one of the main targets: Davies criticises the racist scaremongering and distortion in the Mail's immigration coverage.

Newspaper sensationalism and distortion is nothing new, of course. Press baron William Randolph Hearst (the model for Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane) once reputedly told a photographer: "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war" (a line which was paraphrased in Kane). Famously, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a fictional newspaper editor explains: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend".

Davies was initially inspired by the news media's unquestioning acceptance of government spin regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. As a pretext for war, the UK and US governments both claimed that Saddam Hussain possessed WMDs and even nuclear weapons, warning that he could deploy them against the West at any time. The BBC reported that some of these claims were inserted at the request of UK spin doctors, and after the invasion of Iraq, the WMD threat was exposed as a gross exaggeration. (Alastair Campbell wrote about his involvement with this issue in his diary, published last year; Davies claims that Campbell's criticism of the errors in the BBC's coverage was a smokescreen to cover the errors in the government's dossiers.)

A World History Of Architecture

The second edition of A World History Of Architecture, by Michael Fazio, Marian Moffett, and Lawrence Wodehouse, has been published by Laurence King. (In America, it has been retitled Buildings Across Time: An Introduction To World Architecture.) The book presents a global history of architecture from Stonehenge to the early 21st century. Like Graphic Design: A New History, it's another in the publisher's impressive collection of historical surveys of various artistic fields.

The ultimate authority on architectural history is Banister Fletcher's A History Of Architecture, edited by Dan Cruickshank, currently in its twentieth edition. Fletcher's volume has an almost incredible 4,000 illustrations, while Fazio et al. provide a 'mere' 700. However, Fletcher's text is less accessible, and less affordable.