25 March 2009

‘Finland Plot’


Democracy Monument

Former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra sued political columnist Pramote Nakornthap for libel after Pramote alleged that Thaksin was involved in a republican scheme known as 'the Finland Plot'. The allegations were made in a series of five articles written by Pramote, published in the Manager Daily (ผู้จัดการรายวัน) newspaper on 17th–25th May 2006.

Manager is one of the publications owned by People’s Alliance for Democracy leader Sondhi Limthongkul, and Pramote’s articles were part of a campaign to discredit Thaksin by questioning his loyalty to the monarchy. Today, the Criminal Court gave Pramote a one-year prison sentence, suspended for two years, after finding him guilty of libel.

21 March 2009

Six Degrees Of Separation

Six Degrees Of Separation
Diseases & A Hundred Year Period
Kiosk at Bangkok's TCDC presents a festival of short Thai films called Six Degrees Of Separation, every Saturday until 11th April. Each week, a different director introduces a retrospective of their most notable films.

Sompot Chidgasornpongse appeared tonight, and showed four films: To Infinity & Beyond (people watching the sky, played twice: first with data about space missions, then repeated as a parable about prioritisation), Physical Therapy (a very short, almost abstract study of a desert landscape, in 16mm), Yesterday (a hand-held semi-documentary following a group of Thai students in California, influenced by Dogme), and Diseases & A Hundred Year Period.

The latter film features censored scenes from Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes & A Century. It premiered with Physical Therapy and Yesterday at the 12th Thai Short Film & Video Festival last year; it was also shown recently at the Filmvirus thirteenth anniversary exhibition.

17 March 2009

Mondo Cane

Mondo Cane
Mondo Cane, directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti, features sensationalist documentary footage set to an inappropriately thunderous musical score. The clips compiled by Jacopetti present African and Asian societies as 'primitive' and 'savage'; the narrator even refers to a tribe from New Guinea as "barbarians".

Jacopetti uses juxtapositions for shock effect, such as cutting from a close-up of a model's cleavage to a tribeswoman suckling a pig, and a shot of pet dogs in America followed by footage of an Asian dog-meat restaurant. The film is exploitative, with its National Geographic-style nudity and animal-slaughter, and it's also misleading. For example, a beached turtle is seen flapping its flippers in obvious distress, though apparently, according to the narrator, the 'delusional' creature believes it is swimming in the ocean.

Clearly unable to source sufficient shocking material, Jacopetti pads the film out with long, dull sequences showing mildly intoxicated Germans and retired American tourists. The film was, however, an inexplicable success, and it instigated the long-lasting mondo documentary sub-genre (as discussed in the books Sweet & Savage and Killing For Culture).

Subsequent mondo films repeated Jacopetti's formula of exotic tribal rituals, incongruous music, exploitative nudity and violence, and condescending narration. Of course, each film was more explicit than the last, with the sub-genre eventually specialising in (both genuine and simulated) footage of human death. Jacopetti himself directed several further mondo films, including the graphic Africa Addio, the filming of which was critiqued in the horror film Cannibal Holocaust.

09 March 2009

Making Waves

Making Waves
Making Waves: New Cinemas Of The 1960s is Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's account of cinema's various New Wave movements, including those of Britain, France, Germany, Brazil, and Czechoslovakia. The book's focus is almost exclusively European, thus there is no discussion of New Hollywood or the new cinemas of Japan, Yugoslavia, or Hungary. Nowell-Smith is the editor of the excellent The Oxford History Of World Cinema.

A chapter on censorship includes Dusan Makavejev and Vilgot Sjoman - yet not Andy Warhol's Flesh, which was confiscated by British police. This chapter ends with Salo and Empire Of The Senses, which, though fascinating, really belong to a later era.

There are also concise surveys of film criticism (principally Cahiers Du Cinema) and technology (colour, widescreen, and the zoom lens). Due to the lack of American coverage, critics Jonas Mekas and Andrew Sarris are excluded. A footnote in the latter essay makes the odd assertion that black-and-white productions of the 1960s were "retarded films".

The highlight is the historical section, titled Movements, with chapters on British, French, Czech, and Latin American cinemas which succinctly cover all the bases. This section also includes a less comprehensive chapter on Italian cinema, which omits Mario Bava and Sergio Leone.

07 March 2009

Deep Storage Art Project

Deep Storage Art Project
certificate
blood samples
Kristian von Hornsleth launched his Deep Storage Art Project in Bangkok this evening, at Gallery Soulflower. The Project involves collecting blood samples from volunteers and storing the samples inside a large sculpture which will be lowered onto the sea bed in the Mariana Trench (the deepest location on the planet's surface). Blood donors receive a certificate marked with blood and signed by the artist, and there will be a further opportunity for donation next Saturday evening.

06 March 2009

Saboteur

Saboteur
Saboteur is archetypal Alfred Hitchcock: an innocent man caught up in counter-espionage and on the run from the authorities. Hitchcock had used almost exactly the same plot in his earlier (and better) British thriller The 39 Steps, and he would return to it again for North By Northwest.

Saboteur's leading man, Robert Cummings, doesn't quite have the charm of Robert Donat (The 39 Steps) or Cary Grant (North By Northwest). The supporting cast, however, includes a plethora of fascinating characters, such as a truck driver who looks like (but isn't) James Cagney, a kindly blind hermit (perhaps influenced by a sequence from The Bride Of Frankenstein), and even a group of circus freaks. As usual with Hitchcock, the villains are the most interesting figures, and Saboteur's spymaster, played by Otto Kruger, is as suave as those of The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, and Notorious.

The film is bookended by two impressive action sequences: a factory fire, with black smoke ominously filling the screen (the eponymous saboteur is an arsonist); and a climactic scene set at the top of the Statue of Liberty (a precursor of the Mount Rushmore chase scene in North By Northwest). But in between those two sequences, there are too many unexplained plot holes (methods of escape and reunion are conveniently omitted) and too much overtly patriotic speechifying (as Saboteur was made during World War II).

05 March 2009

The Trouble With Harry

The Trouble With Harry
Alfred Hitchcock's black comedy The Trouble With Harry begins right away with the discovery of Harry's corpse in a wood. The body is found by a poacher, who assumes that he shot Harry by mistake and buries him to conceal the crime. But Harry is soon disinterred, and the poacher is vindicated. Then, a spinster reveals that she knocked Harry unconscious when he attacked her, and he is buried again to protect her modesty. The characters, including Harry's estranged widow, take all this in their stride, treating Harry's corpse merely as an inconvenience, with no sense of guilt, abjection, or even shock. They are all assisted by a local artist, Sam Marlowe, whose name is a cross between film noir detectives Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) and Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep).

The film is full of bright, verdant autumn landscapes, a counterpoint to the macabre subject-matter. It's not a murder mystery, and has no suspense, making it a rather atypical Hitchcock film (though it's notable as his first collaboration with composer Bernard Herrmann). The setting, a village in Vermont, is almost equivalent to Royston Vasey (the fictional location of The League Of Gentlemen), with an insular population who seem to exist outside of conventional moral codes. The villagers discuss sex (the poacher crossing the spinster's "threshold"; whispered references to a "double bed") and death (Harry's repeated interments and exhumations) with a surprising frankness, and, in common with many Hitchcock characters, they seem to distrust the law.

In an unexpected 'happily ever after' ending, a passing millionaire grants wishes to all of the principal characters. It makes no sense at all, though it's surely deliberately unrealistic, perhaps even a Hitchcockian fairy-tale. As such, it's similar in tone to some of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television dramas and Roald Dahl's Tales Of The Unexpected short stories.

19 February 2009

Phantoms Of Nabua

Phantoms Of Nabua
Phantoms Of Nabua
Phantoms Of Nabua is a new short film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, for Animate Projects (as is Jane and Louise Wilson's Unfolding The Aryan Papers). Apichatpong's film is part of an art installation titled Primitive, which also includes another short film, A Letter To Uncle Boonmee. Phantoms Of Nabua was filmed at night in the Thai town of Nabua, illuminated by a series of ethereal light sources including flashes of lightning, a burning football, and a film projector.

Recently, another new film by Apichatpong, Mobile Men, was also distributed online, and his Prosperity For 2008 was given an online release last year. He is best known as the director of Syndromes & A Century.

18 February 2009

Mobile Men

Mobile Men
Mobile Men is a new short film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, his contribution to a series titled Stories On Human Rights. The film features a group of Burmese migrant labourers in a pickup truck, and shows them asserting their masculinity by flexing their muscles and displaying their tattoos. Mobile Men is available online; Apichatpong has also distributed other works online, including Prosperity For 2008 and several forthcoming Animate Projects films.

13 February 2009

Art Of Animation

Art Of Animation
Snow White
Disneyland in Hong Kong includes a permanent exhibition of Disney concept art, including sketches and maquettes from films such as Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Toy Story II, and Cars. The exhibition, titled Art Of Animation, opened last year.

05 February 2009

Hemat

Hemat
The editor of Hemat, a weekly Iranian satirical magazine, has been arrested. The magazine had published a spoof film poster featuring images of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his potential electoral rivals.

04 February 2009

โปรแกรมหนังสั้นไทยคัดสรร

Filmvirus
Diseases & A Hundred Year Period
โปรแกรมหนังสั้นไทยคัดสรร, a show at Bangkok's Jamjuree Art Gallery to celebrate the thirteenth anniversary of DK Filmhouse, includes short films selected by two Thai bloggers, Jit Phokaew (Madeleine de Scudery) and Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa (Filmsick). Sompot Chidgasornpongse's film Diseases & A Hundred Year Period (inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes & A Century, and first shown at the 12th Thai Short Film & Video Festival last year) will be screened on 6th February.

Unfolding The Aryan Papers

Unfolding The Aryan Papers
In the early 1990s, Stanley Kubrick was planning to make a film about the Holocaust, titled Aryan Papers. Kubrick wrote the screenplay, adapted from Louis Begley's novel Wartime Lies, and cast Johanna Ter Steege in the lead role. However, when Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List went into production, Aryan Papers was abandoned, as Kubrick and/or the studio feared that audiences would have Holocaust-fatigue after Spielberg's film. (The same situation occurred in the early 1970s, when Kubrick could not secure funding for his Napoleon biopic after the release of Waterloo, and he suffered at the box-office in 1987 when Platoon was released before his own Vietnam war film, Full Metal Jacket.)

A new short film, Unfolding The Aryan Papers by Jane and Louise Wilson, features pre-production photographs of Johanna Ter Steege (costume tests, photographed by Kubrick, from the Stanley Kubrick Archive) and new film footage of the actress shot by the Wilsons. The exhibition will be showing at the British Film Institute (in London) and online (Animate Projects), from 13th February to 19th April.

31 January 2009

Quote of the day...


Quote of the day

Q: “So, does that mean the more than 2,300 websites that were banned were all done so by court order, and that the ICT has not preemptively or illegally banned any websites?”
A: “Yes. But it takes time to get court orders, so we may delete certain content deemed inappropriate before we go through the process.”

Bangkok Post

The Computer Crime Act allows the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology to block websites only after successfully applying for a court order. Interviewed by Voranai Vanijaka in today’s Bangkok Post, ICT Minister Ranongrak Suwanchawee initially denied preemptively blocking websites, though she then immediately contradicted herself, and admitted to violating the Computer Crime Act. (In a previous quote of the day, a Ministry of Culture official patronised Thai filmgoers.)

29 January 2009

San-Dan-Ka

San-Dan-Ka
A new butoh dance performance titled San-Dan-Ka, directed by Teerawat Mulvilai, will begin today at the Democrazy Theatre Studio in Bangkok. The performance was inspired by Anupong Chantorn's painting representing monks as crows. The final performance will be on 8th February.

21 January 2009

Verisimilitude

Verisimilitude
Harry Nicolaides, the Australian author of the novel Verisimilitude, has been sentenced to three years in jail, on a charge of lèse-majesté. The sentence was reduced from six years because he pleaded guilty; Verisimilitude was self-published, and Nicolaides reportedly sold only a handful of copies. An official announcement banning distribution of the book was published in the Royal Gazette.

The lèse-majesté charge relates to a single paragraph (the second paragraph on page 115), though Nicolaides courted controversy by excerpting this paragraph in the press release he issued to promote the book. The passage in question has been published in various Australian newspapers (The Australian, 5th September 2008; The Age, 10th September 2008; The Sydney Morning Herald, 16th December 2008; The Canberra Times, today). It was also quoted yesterday by The Scotsman newspaper in Scotland.

02 January 2009

Dirty Words

Dirty Words
Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia Of Sex, edited by Ellen Sussman, consists of almost 100 chapters, each of which discusses a different 'dirty' word. The chapters are more anecdotal than literary, but it's great that a serious book on this subject has been published, especially with an uncensored cover.

In his chapter on one of the words (yes, that one), Jonathan Wilson quotes a paragraph verbatim from my website without any attribution. The editor has already confirmed that I'll be referenced properly when the book is reprinted.

21 December 2008

The Dark Knight (IMAX 70mm)


The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s sequel to Batman Begins, stars Christian Bale as Batman and Heath Ledger as the Joker. This ultra-noir Batman, from the director of Memento, is nothing like the camp 1960s TV series, and is even darker than Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns.

Six sequences, including the incredible truck-flip (achieved without CGI), were filmed in IMAX 70mm format. With an aspect ratio of 1.43:1, these scenes occupy the full IMAX screen, though the majority of the film was shot on 35mm and is framed at 2.4:1.

19 December 2008

Perishable Beauty

Perishable Beauty
Algordanza
Perishable Beauty, running from 28th November 2008 until 22nd February 2009) at Bangkok's TCDC, is an exhibition exploring the transience of physical perfection (also the theme of The Way Of All Flesh, by Midas Dekkers). The exhibition's installation is stunning, though the exhibits themselves are less substantial.

A banqueting table laden with rotting food, sealed in an air-tight tank and growing mouldier every day, is the most impressive exhibit. There is also a diamond created from human ashes, produced commercially by Algordanza. Other displays, relying on TV clips, photographs, and everyday objects, are underwhelming.

Although the Perishable Beauty poster is seemingly inspired by Orlan, her work is not included in the exhibition. Also, the exhibition is filled with dead flowers yet Otto Berchem is not represented. (His sculpture Deadheading was shown in Bangkok two years ago, at The Suspended Moment.) Indeed, the exhibition is more suited to a museum than to TCDC, as it's educational rather than artistic.

Save The Film

Save The Film
The Thai Film Archive (in Salaya, near Bangkok) is hosting an event called Save The Film tomorrow afternoon. Two of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's recent films will be shown: Luminous People (which premiered at Traces Of Siamese Smile) and Morakot (which was previously screened at Tomyam Pladib).

15 December 2008

“It’s over, boss...”


Democracy Monument

Democrat leader Abhisit Vejjajiva has won this morning’s parliamentary vote, and has thus become Thailand’s new prime minister. Abhisit’s coalition partners resisted lucrative offers from Puea Thai, perhaps after behind-the-scenes pressure from the army and Democrat deputy leader Suthep Thaugsuban. Following the People Power Party’s dissolution, a key PPP faction led by Newin Chidchob shifted its allegiance to the Democrats, after Newin telephoned Thaksin Shinawatra to say: “It’s over, boss.”

12 December 2008

International Film Festival 2008-2009

International Film Festival 2008-2009
California Dreamin'
Chulalongkorn University's International Film Festival has returned, running from today until 6th February 2009 in Bangkok. The main attraction at the previous festival was Four Months, Three Weeks, & Two Days, and this time the highlight is another Romanian film, California Dreamin' (showing on 23rd January 2009). All screenings are free.

Illustration

Illustration
Illustration: A Visual History, by Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, features a chronological account of the history of commercial illustrations from Victorian caricatures to digital art, via pulp novels, psychedelic posters, and satirical cartoons. It includes representative examples of magazine covers, advertisements, comics, and typography.

11 December 2008

An Interview With Muhammed

Jan Peter Balkenende, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, has released a statement condemning a short film titled An Interview With Muhammed. In the film (directed by Ehsan Jami, who screened it at a press conference in the Dutch parliament on 9th December), an actor wearing a Mohammed mask gives his views on contemporary Islam. Balkenende announced: "The Dutch government... regrets the fact that Mr Jami's film deeply offends the feelings of many Muslims".

02 December 2008

“The Court had no other option...”


Democracy Monument

This afternoon, the Constitutional Court announced its verdict in the vote-buying and fraud cases against three ruling coalition parties. All three parties (Chart Thai, Matchima Thipataya, and the People Power Party) were found guilty, and are thus automatically dissolved. Their executives, including PPP leader and Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat, are now banned from politics for the next five years.

Somchai, Thaksin Shinawatra’s brother-in-law, had been PM for only three months. He was appointed following the disqualification of Samak Sundaravej earlier this year. Samak’s removal emboldened the People’s Alliance for Democracy, who had been occupying Government House. On 5th and 6th October, the PAD also blockaded parliament, though they were dispersed by riot police on 7th October. One protester was killed by an exploding tear gas cannister; Queen Sirikit presided over her funeral on 13th October, in an apparent signal of support for the royalist PAD.

The head of the nine judges defended today’s decision, saying: “The Court had no other option”. The judgement marks the third guilty verdict against parties affiliated with Thaksin, after Samak’s disqualification and the dissolution of Thai Rak Thai. Today’s decision seems designed to placate the PAD, and it has already been described as a judicial coup.

01 December 2008

People’s Alliance for Democracy


Democracy Monument

The good news: today will be the final day of the People’s Alliance for Democracy’s occupation of Government House. The bad news: the protesters will go directly from Government House to join the PAD’s blockades of Suvarnabhumi and Don Mueang airports. Both airports have been declared emergency zones.

Meanwhile, with Suvarnabhumi closed for a whole week due to the demonstrators, there has still been no serious attempt by the police to remove the PAD. The Prime Minister is in hiding, and army chief Anupong Paochinda has called on him to resign (in an interview with Channel 3 on 16th October). Under normal circumstances, Anupong would surely be dismissed for insubordination, though sacking him could provoke another coup.

In what it called a ‘final war’, the PAD occupied Government House for three months, completely unopposed by the police. On 26th August, one of the PAD’s core leaders, Sondhi Limthongkul, gave an interview to the Bangkok Post newspaper in which he dared the army to launch a coup (“soldiers today are cowards”) and positioned himself as the protector of the monarchy (“If we don’t do it, the monarchy might collapse”).

Despite its name, the PAD’s policies are undemocratic. Sondhi has called for a ‘new politics’ that would result in only 30% of MPs being elected, with the other 70% being appointed.

24 November 2008

New Sermon

Police have removed photographs by the Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik from an exhibition in Paris. The images, part of a retrospective exhibition titled New Sermon, were confiscated on 28th October after police visited the exhibition at the FIAC art fair.

21 November 2008

Astonishment & Power

Astonishment & Power
Astonishment & Power
The ArtGorillas gallery in Bangkok is currently showing Astonishment & Power, an exhibition of paintings and photographs by Bogomir Krajnc. The exhibition includes abstract collages (painted over newspapers and old prints), and photographs of dead animals (including a bird's head, used as the exhibition's poster image). There is even a painting with an animal skull stuck onto it. Astonishment & Power opened on 10th November, and runs until the end of the month.

20 November 2008

100 Films
Pour Une Cinematheque Ideale

100 Films Pour Une Cinematheque Ideale Les 100 Plus Beaux Films De L'Histoire Du Cinema
Cahiers Du Cinema, the highly respected French film magazine, has published a book listing 100 films necessary for a perfect cinema programme. The book, by Claude-Jean Philippe, is titled 100 Films Pour Une Cinematheque Ideale. A Parisian cinema, the Reflet Medicis, will indeed be screening the 100 films, in a season called Les 100 Plus Beaux Films De L'Histoire Du Cinema, running from yesterday until 6th July 2009.

The 100 films were chosen by a panel of seventy-eight film critics. The list is ranked according to the proportion of votes each film received, as follows:

48/78 (61%)
  • Citizen Kane
47/78 (60%)
  • The Night Of The Hunter
  • The Rules Of The Game
46/78 (59%)
  • Sunrise
43/78 (55%)
  • L'Atalante
40/78 (51%)
  • M
39/78 (50%)
  • Singin' In The Rain
35/78 (45%)
  • Vertigo
34/78 (44%)
  • Les Enfants Du Paradis
  • The Searchers
  • Greed
33/78 (42%)
  • Rio Bravo
  • To Be Or Not To Be
29/78 (37%)
  • Tokyo Story
28/78 (36%)
  • Le Mepris
27/78 (35%)
  • Ugetsu Monogatari
  • City Lights
  • The General
  • Nosferatu
  • The Music Room
26/78 (33%)
  • Freaks
  • Johnny Guitar
  • La Maman & La Putain
25/78 (32%)
  • The Great Dictator
  • The Leopard
  • Hiroshima Mon Amour
  • Pandora's Box
  • North By Northwest
  • Pickpocket
24/78 (31%)
  • Casque D'Or
  • The Barefoot Contessa
  • Mme De...
  • Le Plaisir
  • The Deer Hunter
23/78 (29%)
  • L'Avventura
  • Battleship Potemkin
  • Notorious
  • Ivan The Terrible I-II
  • The Godfather
  • Touch Of Evil
  • The Wind
22/78 (28%)
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • Fanny & Alexander
21/78 (27%)
  • The Crowd

  • La Jetee
  • Pierrot Le Fou
  • Confessions Of A Cheat
20/78 (26%)
  • Amarcord
  • La Belle & La Bete
  • Some Like It Hot
  • Some Came Running
  • Gertrud
  • King Kong
  • Laura
  • Seven Samurai
19/78 (24%)
  • The 400 Blows
  • La Dolce Vita
  • The Dead
  • Trouble In Paradise
  • It's A Wonderful Life
  • M. Verdoux
  • The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
18/78 (23%)
  • Breathless
  • Apocalypse Now
  • Barry Lyndon
  • Grand Illusion
  • Intolerance
  • Partie De Campagne
  • Playtime
  • Rome: Open City
  • Senso
  • Modern Times
  • van Gogh
17/78 (22%)
  • An Affair To Remember
  • Andrei Rublev
  • The Scarlet Empress
  • Sansho Dayu
  • Talk To Her
  • The Party
  • Tabu
  • The Bandwagon
  • A Star Is Born
  • M. Hulot's Holiday
16/78 (20%)
  • America America
  • El
  • Kiss Me Deadly
  • Once Upon A Time In America
  • Le jour se leve
  • Letter From An Unknown Woman
  • Lola
  • Manhattan
  • Mulholland Drive
  • My Night At Maud's
  • Night & Fog
  • The Gold Rush
  • Scarface
  • Bicycle Thieves
  • Napoleon
It's a pleasant surprise to see two films by Kenji Mizoguchi - Ugetsu Monogatari and Sansho Dayu - as his work rarely appears on top-100 lists. Note that Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece, not the obscure 1939 comedy. Cahiers produced a similar list in 1994, 100 Films Pour Une Videotheque, though that list was restricted to films available on VHS.

18 November 2008

Memento


Memento

Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan, is an example of neo-noir filmmaking, featuring the detective-mystery plot, duplicitous characters, flawed protagonist, femme fatale, and downbeat conclusion typical of film noir. More specifically, Memento is an example of film soleil, a strain of noir (exemplified by Chinatown) that exchanges chiaroscuro for sunshine and swaps the grime of New York for the cleanliness of California.

Leonard Shelby and his wife were attacked in their home by two masked men. During the attack, Shelby killed one of the men, though he sustained a head injury that resulted in anterograde amnesia: he can remember his life before the attack, though he has lost his short-term memory. Consequently, he photographs everyone he meets, writes notes to himself, and even tattoos important information on his body. The film begins with Leonard searching for his wife’s murderer, a man whose initials are JG. He is helped by an amoral cop, Teddy; and he meets a bartender, Natalie, who gives him vital information. Teddy and Natalie both exploit Leonard to a certain degree, as does the only other person he interacts with, a motel clerk.

Leonard exists in a constant state of confusion, unable to remember anything for more than a few minutes, and the film employs a unique narrative structure in order to give the audience the same sense of bewilderment. The story is told in reverse chronological order, with each event followed by the event that chronologically preceded it. Throughout the film, Leonard tracks down clues that lead him to JG, and each new clue is initially a mystery to the audience: we learn of the significance of each event only when its context is revealed by the subsequent scene. (The technique was later used by Gaspar Noé in Irreversible.)

Memento’s narrative positions it alongside the non-linear, fragmented structures of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and other recent films, a trend inspired by the success of Pulp Fiction. With a complex series of clues, an unreliable narrator, and a twist ending, it also recalls The Usual Suspects. The film demands an audience’s attention, since every scene contains a new piece of the puzzle; it’s one of the smartest and most original films of the decade.

13 November 2008

Legendary Movies

Legendary Movies
Legendary Movies, by Paolo d'Agostini, features 140 films arranged chronologically and selected for their artistic, cultural, and commercial significance. It was originally written for the Italian market, as I Grandi Film: Quando Il Cinema Diventa Leggenda, and consequently there is a distinctly Italian bias to the list.

There are plenty of genuinely legendary films in the book, though there are also quite a few popular yet insubstantial (and frankly awful) titles: A Summer Place, The Pink Panther, Mary Poppins, Love Story, Forrest Gump, and Life Is Beautiful. Also, very recent films (such as the Bourne and Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogies) could hardly be described as legendary.

The Legendary Movies are as follows:
  • Cabiria
  • The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari
  • Nosferatu
  • Battleship Potemkin
  • Metropolis
  • The Blue Angel
  • Frankenstein
  • Grand Hotel
  • King Kong
  • It Happened One Night
  • Modern Times
  • Grand Illusion
  • The Wizard Of Oz
  • Ninotchka
  • Stagecoach
  • Gone With The Wind
  • Citizen Kane
  • Casablanca
  • Arsenic & Old Lace
  • Rome: Open City
  • Gilda
  • It's A Wonderful Life
  • Bicycle Thieves
  • The Asphalt Jungle
  • Sunset Boulevard
  • Singin' In The Rain
  • High Noon
  • Don Camillo
  • The Wild One
  • Roman Holiday
  • From Here To Eternity
  • A Star Is Born
  • On The Waterfront
  • Sabrina
  • Seven Samurai
  • Rear Window
  • Rebel Without A Cause
  • & God Created Woman
  • The Ten Commandments
  • The Seventh Seal
  • The Bridge On The River Kwai
  • The Great War
  • Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ
  • Some Like It Hot
  • A Summer Place
  • La Dolce Vita
  • Breathless
  • Two Women
  • Psycho
  • The Magnificent Seven
  • Breakfast At Tiffany's
  • West Side Story
  • Lolita
  • Jules & Jim
  • Lawrence Of Arabia
  • The Pink Panther

  • The Leopard
  • A Fistful Of Dollars
  • Goldfinger
  • Mary Poppins
  • Dr Zhivago
  • A Man & A Woman
  • Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
  • The Dirty Dozen
  • Belle De Jour
  • The Graduate
  • In The Heat Of The Night
  • Romeo & Juliet
  • Planet Of The Apes
  • Bullitt
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • Rosemary's Baby
  • Easy Rider
  • Midnight Cowboy
  • Love Story
  • M*A*S*H
  • Dirty Harry
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • Cabaret
  • The Godfather
  • The Sting
  • American Graffiti
  • The Exorcist
  • Jaws
  • One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
  • Nashville
  • Taxi Driver
  • Rocky
  • In The Realm Of The Senses
  • Saturday Night Fever
  • Star Wars IV: A New Hope
  • Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
  • The Deer Hunter
  • Grease
  • Apocalypse Now
  • Manhattan
  • Alien
  • The Blues Brothers
  • The Shining
  • American Gigolo
  • The Party
  • Raiders Of The Lost Ark
  • Escape From New York
  • First Blood
  • ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
  • Blade Runner
  • Once Upon A Time In America
  • A Nightmare On Elm Street
  • Back To The Future
  • Top Gun
  • 9½ Weeks
  • Wings Of Desire
  • The Last Emperor
  • Rain Man
  • Nikita
  • Pretty Woman
  • Edward Scissorhands
  • Raise The Red Lantern
  • The Silence Of The Lambs
  • Thelma & Louise
  • Basic Instinct
  • Batman Returns
  • Schindler's List
  • Forrest Gump
  • Pulp Fiction
  • Seven
  • Mission: Impossible
  • Life Is Beautiful
  • Titanic
  • The Matrix
  • Gladiator
  • The Lord Of The Rings I-III
  • Amelie
  • Talk To Her
  • Kill Bill I-II
  • The Last Samurai
  • Million Dollar Baby
  • The Bourne Identity/Supremacy/Ultimatum
  • Pirates Of The Caribbean I-III
Note that Ben-Hur, Frankenstein, and The Ten Commandments are all sound films and not the earlier silent versions. Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece, not the obscure 1939 comedy. Also, Titanic is the 1997 James Cameron version (as opposed to the earlier 1943 and 1953 versions). There have been many filmed adaptations of Romeo & Juliet; this one is the 1968 Franco Zeffirelli version.

05 November 2008

LittleBigPlanet

Boulevard De L'Independence
Arab Money
The new PlayStation game LittleBigPlanet has been recalled and modified, to remove a song from its soundtrack. The song, Tapha Niang (from Toumani Diabate's album Boulevard De L'Independance), features quotations from the Koran; fortunately, the album is still available. (A remix of the Busta Rhymes single Arab Money, released this month, also includes lines from the Koran.)

[Previously, a song featuring Koran quotes was removed from Joey Boy's album The Greatest Beats in Thailand. Also, Lebanese performer Marcel Khalife's song Ana Yousef, Ya Abi (1995) was accused of blasphemy due to its Koran quotation. MF Husain, who painted the controversial Mother India, also quoted from the Koran in his song Noor-Un-Ala in 2004.]

audio

04 November 2008

Stanley Kubrick:
Essays On His Films & Legacy

Stanley Kubrick: Essays On His Films & Legacy
Stanley Kubrick: Essays On His Films & Legacy is a new compendium of Kubrickian scholarship, edited by Gary D Rhodes. At first glance, it closely resembles Depth Of Field, a previous collection of essays on Kubrick, with individual analyses of his major films, excluding Dr Strangelove, and several chapters devoted to Eyes Wide Shut.

The contributors to Depth Of Field (Diane Johnson, Vincent LoBrutto, Frederic Raphael, Jonathan Rosenbaum, et al.) were less academic, though arguably more authoritative. The contributors to Rhodes's book all have university teaching positions, yet none of them has previously published any work on Kubrick.

In his introduction, Rhodes inexplicably praises the first essay as a "monumental examination of Kubrick's photography for Look magazine". Unfortunately, the essay is a missed opportunity: instead of providing a detailed analysis or survey of Kubrick's Look photography, the author (Philippe Mather) spends page after page on photojournalism textbooks and sociological theories. Also, Mather's Look sources are all secondary, seemingly limited to Drama & Shadows and LoBrutto's biography.

Other disappointing essays include overly descriptive articles on Kubrick's documentaries (by Marina Burke) and Killer's Kiss (by Tony Williams), both of which feature extensive plot summaries and only limited analysis. Then there is Eric Eaton's dry, theoretical study of Paths Of Glory: he examines the film's "conceptualization of at least two fundamental, polarized properties: (1) abstraction-concretion; and (2) the opposition of the powerful cultural forces emanating from the two states toward the concrete world of"... zzzzzzzzz.

Thankfully, there are also some more engaging essays: Hugh S Manon explores Kubrick's contributions to film noir, Reynold Humphries examines the politics of Spartacus, and Homay King analyses the camerawork of Barry Lyndon. There are three interesting approaches to Eyes Wide Shut: gender, by Lindiwe Dovey; carnival, by Miriam Jordan and Julian Jason Haladyn; and phenomenology, by Phillip Sipiora. (Dovey does, however, make a glaring error, writing that Eyes Wide Shut "is the only film in which Kubrick acts as an extra". In fact, Kubrick is not an extra in Eyes Wide Shut, though he does briefly appear in five of his earlier films.)

The book's final chapter, by Robert JE Simpson, deals with Kubrick's personal reputation and public image, discussing the media representations of Kubrick that have appeared since his death (including Raphael's book, Eyes Wide Open; Colour Me Kubrick; and the Stanley Kubrick Archive, in London). This is the book's most original chapter, and contains valuable information on texts that many people may be unaware of.

6th World Film Festival of Bangkok

6th World Film Festival of Bangkok
Jubilee
Manthan
Bhumika
The 6th World Film Festival of Bangkok was held at Paragon Cineplex from 24th October to 2nd November. It featured retrospectives of directors Derek Jarman (including his Punk film Jubilee on 26th October) and Shyam Benegal (including his Middle Cinema films Manthan on 27th and 30th October, and Bhumika on 26th and 31st October). The Festival was on a slightly smaller scale than last year, with no peripheral events.

L'Express International

L'Express L'Express International
L'Express International, the global edition of the French weekly magazine L'Express, has self-censored a portrait of Mohammed used on the cover of the current issue. The French edition is uncensored. Even obscuring Mohammed's face did not stop Morocco from banning the international edition.

Forbidden Words

Forbidden Words
Forbidden Words: Taboo & The Censoring Of Language, by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, is an analysis of social and cultural linguistic suppression.

The authors take an inclusive approach, finding space not only for swear words and profanities but also for political correctness, proscriptive usage, and jargon. Each chapter begins with an abstract, though an introduction outlining the various areas of enquiry might be a useful addition, given the wide scope of the book.

The first chapter explores the origins of social taboos and literary censorship, material which will be familiar to many readers. More interesting is the next chapter, which discusses euphemistic language; here, the authors coin a new term, 'orthophemism', to describe literal vocabulary which is neither euphemistic nor dysphemistic.

The bulk of the book is a series of thematic chapters describing linguistic taboos against sex, bodily fluids, food, disease, and death. (My website is cited as a reference in one chapter.)