17 August 2012

The MDNA Tour

The MDNA Tour
The MDNA Tour
Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right Front National party, has filed a lawsuit against Madonna after the singer depicted her as a Nazi at a concert in Paris. During The MDNA Tour, a video of Nobody Knows Me plays as an interlude, and the video includes a split-second sequence in which a swastika is shown on Le Pen's forehead.

After the tour opened in June, Le Pen announced that she would sue if Madonna included the swastika in her French concerts. When the tour reached Paris on 14th July, the swastika was present (prompting a loud cheer from the crowd), and Le Pen sued Madonna for defamation. When Madonna played the video at her next French stadium show, in Nice on 21st August, she changed the swastika to a question mark, though the swastika has been included in all of her concerts outside France.

The question mark at the Nice concert is a rare example of Madonna censoring any aspect of her live shows. Scottish police had warned her against using prop guns during her MDNA Tour performance of Gang Bang, though her Edinburgh show on 21st June included the guns. Similarly, the behind-the-scenes documentary Truth or Dare shows Madonna defying police in Canada during her 1990 Blond Ambition Tour in 1990.

14 August 2012

Ashes

Ashes
Lomokino
Ashes, a new short film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, features Apichatpong's dog, King Kong, and various farm animals. It will open the 16th Thai Short Film & Video Festival on 16th August.

It has no dialogue, though there is a voice-over describing "a dream within a dream" (Inception?). There is also footage of a protest against Thailand's lèse-majesté law, kaleidoscopic light patterns, jungle scenes, and a horizontal split-screen sequence. It ends with a pyrotechnical display at a funeral ceremony. The film was made for the Mubi website, and is Apichatpong's second online partnership (after his Animate Projects collaboration in 2009).

Ashes was filmed with a LomoKino, a hand-cranked camera that records short film clips on consumer 35mm film rolls. It's like a return to the Lumiere brothers' Cinematographe, which similarly captured only a minute of footage per roll. The lo-tech LomoKino also resembles the PXL (PixelVision) camera from the 1980s, which recorded video footage onto regular audio cassettes. There is even a special Mubi edition of the LomoKino available to buy, branded with Apichatpong's signature.

Apichatpong is now most famous for his feature films, such as Tropical Malady, Syndromes & A Century, and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, though he has also directed many short films and videos in addition to Ashes. These include Prosperity For 2008, Vampire, Luminous People, Mobile Men, Phantoms Of Nabua, For Alexis, A Letter To Uncle Boonmee, and the Primitive project. He has hosted two retrospectives of his short films in Bangkok: Apichatpong On Video Works and Indy Spirit Project.

16th Thai Short Film & Video Festival

16th Thai Short Film & Video Festival
Ashes
The 16th Thai Short Film & Video Festival starts at BACC this Thursday, and runs until 26th August. The Festival will open with the Thai premiere of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new short film, Ashes.

The Thai Short Film & Video Festival is Thailand's oldest film festival. The 11th Festival was at Bangkok's now-closed EGV Grand Discovery cinema, though the 12th, 13th, and all subsequent festivals have been hosted by BACC.

12 August 2012

The Unfinished Revolution

The Unfinished Revolution
Philip Gould's book The Unfinished Revolution: How The Modernisers Saved The Labour Party has been substantially expanded, and now has a new subtitle: How New Labour Changed British Politics For Ever. The new version reprints the original edition and supplements it with an entirely new second part (similar in organisation, though not in subject, to the expanded edition of Nightmare Movies).

The new section covers Labour's three terms in government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (though Andrew Rawnsley dealt with the same period more objectively in Servants Of The People and The End Of The Party). Blair has written an extensive foreword to Gould's book, arguing that Brown "took an Old Labour way out of the financial crisis"; advocating a return to the New Labour agenda, Blair even uses that old phrase from the Bill Clinton era, 'the Third Way', which is hardly likely to inspire a revival of Labour's fortunes.

09 August 2012

Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible

Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible
Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible, written by Sophie Lovell and published by Phaidon, profiles one of the world's most famous industrial designers. Dieter Rams, who was head of design at Braun for over thirty years, designed hundreds of consumer products, including the ET66 calculator, the iconic white SK4 record player, and the aluminium T1000 world-band transistor radio.

The book includes a foreword by Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief designer, who is the nearest equivalent to Rams in contemporary industrial design. Working with Steve Jobs, Ive produced a series of consumer-technology devices (including the iMac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad) that conformed to the "ten principles of good design" that Rams formulated.

Rams felt that successful design should be innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, honest, unobtrusive, long-lasting, thorough, environmentally friendly, and should involve "as little design as possible". That last maxim, adapted from Mies van der Rohe's 'less is more', became the title of Lovell's book.

In her preface, Lovell writes that Rams told her: "Why on earth do we need another book about me?" Thus, while there are occasional quotes footnoted as "Rams, in conversation with the author", Rams clearly didn't give Lovell a formal interview. There are, however, plenty of glossy photos fetishising beautiful radios, clocks, and other objects from the past fifty years.

The Dark Knight Rises (IMAX 70mm)

The Dark Knight Rises
The Dark Knight Rises is the final film in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, following Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. It contains more IMAX footage than any other Hollywood film, with almost half of the film shot with IMAX cameras, resulting in a spectacular 70mm image that fills the enormous IMAX screen. (The 70mm IMAX scenes are framed at 1.43:1; cropped IMAX digital and regular anamorphic widescreen versions have also been released.)

Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Gary Oldman reprise their roles from the two previous Batman films, and there are two new villains: Bane (Tom Hardy) and Catwoman (Anne Hathaway). [Incidentally, Gary Oldman has become Gary Old Man: the Oldman of The Dark Knight Rises and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy seems far removed from the Oldman of Nil By Mouth or True Romance.] Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who appeared with Hardy and Caine in Inception, also star in The Dark Knight Rises.

The Dark Knight Rises is most interesting as a celebration of analogue film technology at a time of digital transition. Nolan is (alongside Quentin Tarantino) one of the last Hollywood directors to use 35mm film cameras; even Martin Scorsese (Hugo) and Steven Spielberg (Tintin) have now made digital films. Nolan has actively campaigned for the preservation of analogue cameras and projectors, recognising that digital production and exhibition are cheaper yet technically inferior. Nolan is also notable for his use of traditional sets and special effects, minimising the use of CGI.

03 August 2012

The Greatest Films Of All Time

Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound
Yesterday, Sight & Sound magazine announced the result of its decennial film poll: a list of the ten greatest films ever made, selected by film critics from around the world. For film-poll connoisseurs (including myself), Sight & Sound's list is the ur-list, the first and most authoritative guide to classic films.

The poll was originally conducted in 1952 (with Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves at #1); in the second poll, in 1962, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane was #1, and it remained in pole position throughout each subsequent poll. This year, however, Citizen Kane was displaced by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (which came a close second to Kane in the previous list, in 2002).

This year's new entries include The Searchers and The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (both of which skipped a list, appearing in 1992 though not in 2002). Man With A Movie Camera, the other new entry, is the first documentary to appear in a Sight & Sound list. Man With A Movie Camera has replaced another Russian silent classic, Battleship Potemkin, which had appeared on every Sight & Sound list since 1952; the relegation of Battleship Potemkin (to #11) leaves The Rules Of The Game as the only film to have appeared on every list.

Apart from Battleship Potemkin, two other films from the 2002 list are also missing from this year's top ten: Singin' In The Rain drops to #20, and The Godfather (now counted individually, rather than as a joint entry with The Godfather II) falls to #21. Surprisingly, Apocalypse Now (at #14) received more votes than The Godfather, making it Francis Coppola's most acclaimed film.

Sight & Sound's ten greatest films are as follows:

1. Vertigo
2. Citizen Kane
3. Tokyo Story
4. The Rules Of The Game
5. Sunrise
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
7. The Searchers
8. Man With A Movie Camera
9. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
10. 8½

The magazine also surveyed film directors, to produce a separate top ten (with Tokyo Story at #1, and Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey jointly placed at #2). Both lists, and the individual choices of many of the critics and directors, appear in Sight & Sound's current issue.

The ten greatest films will be shown at the BFI Southbank cinema in London, from 1st September to 9th October. The top three will be shown at the UK's National Media Museum in Bradford on 16th September.

Museum of Contemporary Art

Museum of Contemporary Art
Museum of Contemporary Art
Birth-Ageing-Sickness-Death
The Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Bangkok earlier this year. The six-storey Museum is an imposing granite building, and feels appropriately like a Modernist cathedral for art.

MoCA was funded entirely by Boonchai Bencharongkul, founder of the DTAC telecommunications company. Boonchai is also Thailand's leading art patron, approximately equivalent to Charles Saatchi in the UK. Like Saatchi, Boonchai gobbles up new art: with vast financial resources and determination, he doesn't just dominate the local art market, he is the local art market.

Boonchai not only paid for the Museum's construction, he also filled it exclusively with his own art collection, and personally curated each gallery. Highlights include Birth-Ageing-Sickness-Death (a vivid oil triptych of disturbing figures by Kittisak Chanontnart, influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis) and Animal-Man Family (Anupong Chantorn's bronze dogs from his Hope In The Dark exhibition, presumably commissioned by Boonchai).

These are the exceptions, however. The Museum's permanent collection reflects Boonchai's personal taste, and unfortunately his taste is largely traditional. Thus, there is no political art at all, and representation of contemporary life is almost entirely absent. Instead, there are numerous galleries filled with religious and mythological paintings. Also, the collection consists entirely of paintings and bronze sculptures: there is no video art, photography, installation, digital, or new-media art of any kind.

Indeed, much of the collection is not even particularly recent. The ground floor contains works by Silpa Bhirasri from almost 100 years ago, and there's a collection of Victorian-era paintings on the fifth floor. The Museum's name is somewhat misleading, because the art there is largely modern rather than contemporary.

So, MoCA is an impressive building, with an extensive yet traditional art collection. It's like a conservative version of the Saatchi Gallery: a grand showcase for a formidable patron's personal taste.

01 August 2012

Great Movies

Great Movies
Great Movies: 100 Years Of Cinema, by Andrew Heritage, is a guide to 100 classic films divided into ten genres. The films are listed chronologically within each section. Two pages are devoted to each film; there are plenty of glossy colour photos, though the text does little more than summarise each film's plot.

There is no western category, so High Noon and The Searchers appear in the Action/Adventure section and Once Upon A Time In The West is in the Historical section. Some of the other classifications are also rather odd: Pulp Fiction is listed under Comedy rather than Thriller/Crime, and Dr Strangelove is in the War section rather than the Comedy section. The author admits that the final category, Drama, is "an opportunity, within limited space, to attempt to include any movies that simply didn't fit into the preceding nine genre categories" (hardly an ideal solution).

The book also includes brief articles on significant film movements, such as the French New Wave, documentaries, realism, and underground cinema. However, these should really have been included in the main 100 list instead of being relegated to supplementary sections.

There are a few mistakes regarding technical details: the prologue to The Wizard Of Oz is described as "sepia black and white" (they are two different formats), there is a reference to "Blu-ray Avatar" (Blu-ray is not a theatrical format), a photo of a 35mm camera has a "digital camera" caption, and Inception is used as an example of "digital special effects" (visual effects are digital, special effects are analogue; Inception is notable for its analogue special effects). A famous line from Taxi Driver, "You talkin' to me?", is twice misquoted as "Are you looking at me?".

There is a brief bibliography, though it's rather outdated as it consists almost entirely of annual film guides that are no longer being published (Halliwell's, Time Out, etc.). It even cites the "invaluable Filmgoer's Companion", a book which was superseded long ago by Ephraim Katz's Film Encyclopedia.

The Great Movies are as follows:

Comedy
  • The Gold Rush
  • The General
  • A Night At The Opera
  • Bringing Up Baby
  • Kind Hearts & Coronets
  • M. Hulot's Holiday
  • Some Like It Hot
  • Manhattan
  • Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown
  • Pulp Fiction
Action/Adventure
  • The Thief Of Bagdad
  • The Adventures Of Robin Hood
  • High Noon
  • The Wages Of Fear
  • The Searchers
  • Goldfinger
  • Raiders Of The Lost Ark
  • The Terminator
  • Die Hard
  • Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl
Romance/Melodrama
  • The Blue Angel
  • Anna Karenina
  • Gone With The Wind
  • Casablanca
  • Sundet Boulevard
  • The African Queen
  • Written On The Wind
  • Breakfast At Tiffany's
  • Pretty Woman
  • Thelma & Louise
Musicals
  • The Jazz Singer
  • Gold Diggers Of 1933
  • Top Hat
  • Singin' In The Rain
  • Oklahoma!
  • Jailhouse Rock
  • West Side Story
  • The Sound Of Music
  • Grease
  • Moulin Rouge!
Thrillers/Crime
  • The Big Sleep
  • Rififi
  • The Night Of The Hunter
  • North By Northwest
  • Bonnie & Clyde
  • Point Blank
  • The Godfather
  • Jaws
  • Taxi Driver
  • The Silence Of The Lambs
Historical
  • Intolerance
  • Napoleon
  • Alexander Nevsky
  • Lola Montes
  • The Ten Commandments
  • Spartacus
  • Lawrence Of Arabia
  • Once Upon A Time In The West
  • The Wild Bunch
  • Schindler's List
War
  • All Quiet On The Western Front
  • Henry V
  • The Red Badge Of Courage
  • The Dam Busters
  • The Great Escape
  • Dr Strangelove
  • Lacombe, Lucien
  • Apocalypse Now
  • Ran
  • Saving Private Ryan
Family
  • Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
  • Way Out West
  • The Wizard Of Oz
  • It's A Wonderful Life
  • Star Wars IV: A New Hope
  • ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
  • Home Alone
  • The Lion King
  • Toy Story
  • The Lord Of The Rings I: The Fellowship Of The Ring
Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Horror
  • Nosferatu
  • Metropolis
  • King Kong
  • The Bride Of Frankenstein
  • La Belle & La Bete
  • Invasion Of The Body Snatchers
  • Psycho
  • Night Of The Living Dead
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • The Matrix
Drama
  • Greed
  • Pandora's Box
  • The Rules Of The Game
  • Citizen Kane
  • Les Enfants Du Paradis
  • On The Waterfront
  • Easy Rider
  • Last Tango In Paris
  • Raging Bull
  • American Beauty
(Note that Some Like It Hot is the Billy Wilder version rather than the 1939 comedy of the same name. Also, The Ten Commandments is Cecil B de Mille's sound version, not his earlier silent version.)

27 July 2012

To Rome With Love

Designing Media
To Rome With Love, this year's Woody Allen film, is the latest in his European odyssey, after his recent excursions to London (Match Point, Scoop, Cassandra's Dream), Barcelona (Vicky Christina Barcelona), and Paris (Midnight In Paris). After the unexpected success of Midnight In Paris, there were unusually high expectations for To Rome With Love, and the result is certainly above average for a late-period Allen comedy.

The film contains four separate stories, though they have little in common except that they are all set in Rome. The effect is a concise alternative to Paris, Je T'Aime, Sawasdee Bangkok, or New York Stories. The four narratives are intercut, though their timeframes aren't parallel.

In one of the strands, Roberto Benigni plays a clerk who suddenly becomes a 'reality TV' star, chased by paparazzi (first seen in La Dolce Vita, also set in Rome), in a satire on contemporary celebrity culture. There is also a one-joke segment featuring a mortician who performs operas from a shower cubicle (inspired by Rolando Villazon). Another story concerns a man who becomes involved with a prostitute (a recurring theme: there were also prostitutes in Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, Deconstructing Harry, and You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger).

The most intriguing and ambitious strand stars Alec Baldwin as an architect who meets an architecture student played by Jesse Eisenberg. Baldwin becomes an ever-present mentor to Eisenberg, though he is apparently not visible to other characters. At first, it seems that Allen is repeating the ontological device of Play It Again, Sam, in which an apparition of Sam Spade (from Casablanca) gives relationship advice. However, in this case the trick is reversed: Eisenberg exists only in Baldwin's imagination, as Baldwin is remembering the experiences of his own youth. (This interpretation is suggested by the repeated phrase "ozymandias melancholia", which comes from Allen's Stardust Memories; it recalls Owen Wilson as a back-street time-traveller in Midnight In Paris, and Allen and Diane Keaton as spectators of their memories in Annie Hall.)

The film has an impressive cast, including Penelope Cruz (who also starred in Vicky Christina Barcelona) and Judy Davis (wonderful in Deconstructing Harry). Allen himself makes a welcome return to acting, in his first role since Scoop. In the film's funniest sequence, Allen over-reacts on an aeroplane ("I can't unclench when there's turbulence, I'm an atheist"). He also returns to his favourite themes: death (which he says is a natural consequence of retirement) and analysis ("Don't psychoanalyse me", he insists. "Many have tried, all have failed").

To Rome With Love is enhanced by Allen's schtick and the excellent ensemble cast. Most of the action is rather frivolous, though Baldwin's scenes are more substantial. It's too much to ask for a return to form (more than thirty years after Annie Hall and Manhattan), but this is the next best thing.

17 July 2012

Designing Media

Designing Media
Designing Media, by Bill Moggridge, is a collection of interviews with leading figures in print and online design. Interviewees include the publisher of the New York Times (Arthur Salzberger), the editor-in-chief of Wired (Chris Anderson, also the author of The Long Tail), and International Herald Tribune columnist Alice Rawsthorn.

Moggridge has also interviewed the founders of Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), YouTube (Chad Hurley), Blogger and Twitter (Evan Williams), and Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales). Extracts from the interviews are featured on an appropriately well-designed DVD which accompanies the book.

オールタイム・ベスト 映画遺産200

オールタイム・ベスト 映画遺産200
オールタイム・ベスト 映画遺産200 外国映画篇, published in 2009, is a guide to the 200 greatest films ever made. The book includes two lists, arranged chronologically and ranked in order of preference (with The Third Man at #1). Japanese films were excluded from the selection. The Japanese edition of Newsweek compiled a similar list this year, and renowned Japanese film critic Nagaharu Yodogawa compiled lists of his top 100 (淀川長治 究極の映画ベスト100) and top 1000 (淀川長治映画ベスト1000) films.

PDF

04 July 2012

Art, Politics, & Censorship

Bangkok's FCCT will host a seminar tomorrow, Art, Politics, & Censorship. Ing K (director of Shakespeare Must Die) and Tanwarin Sukkhapisit (director of Insects In The Backyard) will take part, and the event will be moderated by Bangkok Post film critic Kong Rithdee.

02 July 2012

39 Steps To The Genius Of Hitchcock

39 Steps To The Genius Of Hitchcock
39 Steps To The Genius Of Hitchcock, edited by James Bell, is a collection of thirty-nine thematic essays on Alfred Hitchcock to accompany the BFI's Genius Of Hitchcock film season. Arguably the most authoritative Hitchcock anthology, it includes contributions from Camille Paglia (a chronological analysis of the female roles in Hitchcock's Hollywood films), Sidney Gottlieb (a study of Hitchcock's PR strategies, illustrated with rare publicity materials), Bill Krohn (a brief essay on guilt), and David Thomson (an extensive account of Hitchcock's position within the studio system [a subject also discussed by Thomas Schatz in The Genius Of The System]).

Paglia is most famous for her collections of post-feminist essays (Sexual Personae; Sex, Art, & American Culture; Vamps & Tramps), though she also wrote a BFI Film Classics study of The Birds. Gottlieb edited Hitchock On Hitchcock. Krohn wrote a Masters Of Cinema study of Hitchcock, and the superb Hitchcock At Work. Thomson's Biographical Dictionary Of Film has been highly praised (though not by me); he has also written Have You Seen...? and The Moment Of Psycho.

Hitchcock has been analysed and written about more than perhaps any other director. Paul Duncan's Hitchcock: Architect Of Anxiety is an illustrated summary of Hitchcock's career. François Truffaut's book-length interview Hitchcock, and Donald Spoto's filmography The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock, are both indispensable. There are shorter interviews in Who The Devil Made It (Peter Bogdanovich) and The Men Who Made The Movies (Richard Schickel). The standard Hitchcock biography is Spoto's The Dark Side Of Genius, and John Russell Taylor wrote Hitch, an authorised biography. Laurent Bouzereau's Hitchcock: Piece By Piece and Dan Auiler's Hitchcock's Notebooks both delve into the Hitchcock archives.

01 July 2012

The Best 100 Movies

The Best 100 Movies
The 2nd May issue of Newsweek Japan features a list titled The Best 100 Movies. The list was selected by a group of actors and directors, including Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, who each chose a handful of their favourite films. Previously, renowned Japanese film critic Nagaharu Yodogawa compiled lists of his top 100 (淀川長治 究極の映画ベスト100) and top 1000 (淀川長治映画ベスト1000) films.

PDF

27 June 2012

Information Graphics

Information Graphics
Infographia
Cubism & Abstract Art
Digital Nostalgia
Carte Figurative
Information Graphics, written by Sandra Rendgen and edited by Julius Wiedemann, is a survey of data visualisation, published last month by Taschen. This folio-sized volume has hundreds of full-page, colour illustrations. It also includes the poster Infographia, designed with typical clarity by Nigel Holmes, illustrating the taxonomy and concise history of information graphics.

The book begins with essays that present an overview of the development of information design. This section contains an impressive range of historical illustrations, in chronological order, creating a comprehensive visual history of maps, charts, and diagrams. Fascinating examples from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Age of Enlightenment are included, and there are no significant omissions.

Historical highlights include Alfred H Barr's Cubism & Abstract Art (which was updated by Daniel Feral last year), the amusing Periodic Table Of Swearing by Modern Toss, and Eugene Pick's epic timeline of civilisation, Tableau De L'Histoire Universelle. [Time magazine produced a similar timeline recently, just a few weeks before Information Graphics was published.] Joseph Minard's representation of Napoleon's Russian campaign, described by Edward R Tufte (in The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information) as "the best statistical graphic ever drawn," is also included.

Providing a wide survey of contemporary information graphics, the book includes over 400 illustrated examples, ranging from art to journalism. The featured graphics are divided into four brightly colour-coded categories: cartography, chronology, taxonomy, and hierarchy.

The selection of contemporary infographics includes ambitious visualisations of the internet (Web Trend Map, by Information Architects) and warfare (Everyone Ever In The World, by Peter Crnokrak). My favourite is the Digital Nostalgia series (by Paul Butt), which traces the evolution of consumer technology formats.

I Am Spartacus!

I Am Spartacus!
Kirk Douglas, who starred in Spartacus and produced the film, has written a memoir titled I Am Spartacus!: Making A Film, Breaking The Blacklist. The book expands on the account Douglas previously gave in his autobiography The Ragman's Son.

"Egos clashed like swords" during the making of the film, according to Douglas: "Stanley Kubrick vs. Dalton Trumbo. Charles Laughton vs. Laurence Olivier. Kubrick vs. his cinematographer, Russell Metty". And, of course, Douglas versus Kubrick: "Stanley looked a little intimidated. I hadn't wanted to do this in front of the entire crew, but perhaps it was a good thing".

Though directed by Kubrick, Spartacus was conceived as a Kirk Douglas production. It's notable as one of the few historical epics without an overtly religious theme, though its real significance was that it gave a screen credit to Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo was one of the 'Hollywood Ten', blacklisted as Communists after they were investigated by Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.

26 June 2012

Barack Obama: The Story

Barack Obama: The Story
Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss, is a biography of Obama's heritage and youth, covering roughly the same period as Obama's autobiography Dreams From My Father. It was published in the UK with a different subtitle: The Making Of The Man.

The book is over 600 pages long, and involved research trips to Kenya and Indonesia. It's hard to imagine a more thorough account of Obama's formative years. The level of background detail is sometimes excessive, with the first 200 pages devoted to Obama's parents and grandparents. Obama is not even born until page 165, and he starts university at the book's midpoint.

Maraniss characterises the young Obama as a man struggling with his sense of identity, growing up as a mixed-race child and viewed as an Oreo (black on the outside; white on the inside) by some of his college peers. Embracing his black identity became more of a conscious calculation that a natural progression: Maraniss quotes one friend's description of Obama as "the most deliberate person I ever met in terms of constructing his own identity".

The narrative of Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father was central to this identity-construction. In his introduction (which Obama read before publication), Maraniss says that Obama's book "falls into the realm of literature": it presents autobiographical events, though each account is selected "to advance a theme, another thread in his musings about race". In his book, Obama admitted that "some of the characters that appear are composites of people I've known, and some events appear out of precise chronology", though Maraniss reveals the full extent of this artistic licence.

Genevieve Cook, a former girlfriend of Obama's, is one of Maraniss's most revealing sources, and Maraniss quotes extensively from her diary. Genevieve dismisses several of the anecdotes in Obama's book, and Maraniss later discussed the discrepancies with Obama himself: "Obama acknowledged that the scene did not happen with Genevieve. "It is an incident that happened," he said. But not with her". (Obama gave Maraniss an interview at the White House, as he had done for Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars and Ron Suskind's Confidence Men.)

Alongside the issue of racial identity, Maraniss portrays cool detachment as Obama's defining characteristic. He quotes one of Obama's former colleagues describing "that calm, rational, let's think this through demeanor, let's find a common ground. He's had that all along and that's helped shape him. Sometimes I wish he would pound his fists on the table".

18 June 2012

Italian Film Festival 2012

Italian Film Festival 2012
A Fistful Of Dollars
For A Few Dollars More
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
Once Upon A Time In The West
The Italian Film Festival opens next month at SF World (CentralWorld, Bangkok). Last year's Festival featured a Mario Monicelli tribute; this year's event includes a retrospective of Sergio Leone's classic 'spaghetti westerns', which will be screened in their Italian-language versions. The Festival runs from 3rd-7th July, and screenings are free.

A Fistful Of Dollars, the film that launched the spaghetti western sub-genre, will be screened on 4th July, followed by its sequel, A Few Dollars More. The last and greatest film in the trilogy, The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly (shown previously at Lido's Festival Of Classic Movies), will be screened on 7th July, in 35mm. The epic Once Upon A Time In The West will be shown on 5th July, also in 35mm.

A Fistful Of Dollars may not have the epic scope of The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, though it contains some of the most famous sequences in Italian cinema. Clint Eastwood's tense opening confrontation ("Get three coffins ready..."), and his climactic duel ("Aim for the heart, Ramon...") have both become iconic. The film was an unofficial remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and would later inspire Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django. Leone was also influenced by the classical Hollywood westerns, notably Shane, that his film subverts.

10 June 2012

Prometheus

Prometheus
[Please note: this review contains plot spoilers. Also, Prometheus is showing in 2D, 4DX, and IMAX DMR formats in addition to its original 3D version.]

Prometheus, filmed in 3D, is Ridley Scott's much-anticipated prequel to his science-fiction/horror classic Alien. A few years after Alien, Scott directed Blade Runner, a masterpiece of neo-noir futurism, and Prometheus marks Scott's long-awaited return to science-fiction, more than thirty years later. (Evil Dead director Sam Raimi made a similar return to his genre roots with his recent horror film Drag Me To Hell.) Alien spawned a long-running franchise; the three sequels were all made by outstanding directors (James Cameron, David Fincher, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet), though Scott was not associated with any of them.

Prometheus opens with a title sequence clearly inspired by Alien, as the letters of the title are formed slowly from a series of straight lines. Also, the opening shot resembles the first image of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, and, like 2001 (and Terrence Malick's Tree Of Life), Prometheus explores the origin and evolution of life. In a prologue sequence, we see a muscular man drink a strange black liquid and plunge into a waterfall. His body begins to disintegrate, and his DNA fuses with the water to create life on Earth. Only much later is it revealed that he was an alien from a distant solar system.

As in Alien, a group of astronauts exploring a seemingly barren moon encounters a hostile alien species. The Prometheus expedition was instigated by a scientist, played by Noomi Rapace, who discovers a star map in pre-historic cave paintings. The voyage to this constellation is funded by an elderly industrialist, played by Guy Pearce, and supervised by his assistant, played by Charlize Theron. Potential narrative flaw: the aliens created microbial life on Earth, though that happened long before the paintings, so why were people still aware of their extra-terrestrial origins after millions of years of evolution?

Noomi Rapace (an actress of considerable versatility) plays a character who initially seems similar to Jodie Foster in Contact. In a tense and claustrophobic set-piece that updates the famous chest-bursting scene from Alien, Rapace performs a Caesarean section to abort an alien foetus. (This sequence should inspire an update of Barbara Creed's book The Monstrous-Feminine.) Rapace's character subsequently develops into a heroic precursor to Sigourney Weaver's role in Alien. Charlize Theron gives a performance as icy and authoritarian as her role in Snow White & The Huntsman. Guy Pearce (outstanding in Memento and LA Confidential) is barely recognisable wearing thick old-age prosthetics; presumably, other sequences showing him as a younger man were cut from the final version.

The most impressive performance is that of Michael Fassbender (who starred in the recent film Shame). He plays an android called David, who watches Lawrence Of Arabia and imitates Peter O'Toole. His character's name is presumably a reference to the android child in Steven Spielberg's AI (a project originated by Kubrick). His voice is as calm yet inscrutable as that of the computer, HAL, in Kubrick's 2001, and like HAL, David is not entirely trustworthy. Like the equally devious android in Alien, David is ultimately decapitated and reanimated. Of course, he is also a replicant, like the principal characters in Blade Runner.

Prometheus is surprisingly intense and violent: it may be a science-fiction blockbuster, though it's aimed at adults. It's reassuring that such an expensive event-movie hasn't been sanitised to appeal to a wider audience. However, presumably due to its much larger budget, the film lacks the gritty feel of Alien (and John Carpenter's Dark Star). Also unlike Alien, Prometheus has a constant air of grandiosity, with vast spaceships and landscapes, and philosophising characters. This could have been pretentious, though it's arguably justified by the stunning production design and cinematography.

Less defensible are the various unexplained character motivations. We are led to believe that Guy Pearce's character died before the voyage, though he later turns up on the spaceship in an insignificant plot twist. More intriguingly, David the android deliberately infects one of the astronauts with alien DNA, though we have no real idea why. The film's ending is its only serious weakness, with a CGI alien spacecraft risibly squishing Charlize Theron, and the final sequence merely provides the set-up for a potential sequel.

09 June 2012

The Battle For The Arab Spring

The Arab Spring
The Battle For The Arab Spring: Revolution, Counter-Revolution, & The Making Of A New Era is the first comprehensive account of last year's Arab Spring movement. The writers, Lin Noueihed and Alex Warren, systematically cover the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the civil war in Libya, and the continuing oppression in Syria, providing a complete survey of the events across the Middle East. They also consider the broader conditions that fermented the uprisings, especially the empowerment created by satellite broadcasting, cellular networks, and social media. Finally, they analyse the potential repercussions of the paradigm shift in Arabian politics and society.

The Arab Spring also influenced citizens of other authoritarian regimes, such as China (where artists called for a Jasmine Revolution) and Russia (where demonstrators marched against Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency). (Thailand's 2010 massacre, in the year before the Arab Spring, was another example of a government using the military to suppress pro-democracy protesters.)

The Wonderful Parisian Cinematographe

The Wonderful Parisian Cinematographe
Tomorrow, the Thai Film Archive (at Salaya, near Bangkok) will celebrate the 115th anniversary of the development of Thai cinema. The event, titled The Wonderful Parisian Cinematographe, will recreate the first Thai film screening, which took place in 1897. There will be a hand-cranked 35mm projection of the ten films first presented by the Lumiere brothers in Paris in 1895.

08 June 2012

The Spectator

The Spectator
The Spectator magazine has been fined £3,000 after it published a column by Rod Liddle that was deemed prejudicial to the trial of Gary Dobson and David Norris. The magazine was also ordered to pay £2,000 in compensation to the family of Stephen Lawrence.

The article, published on 19th November last year, claimed that Dobson and Norris would not receive a fair trial. (The two defendants were accused, and subsequently convicted, of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.) At the trial, the judge ordered the jury not to read The Spectator, and referred the magazine to the attorney general.

Liddle's article began: "I wonder what would happen if I wrote an article for this magazine saying that Gary Dobson and David Norris had nothing to do with the stabbing to death of the black youngster Stephen Lawrence 18 years ago? And that they are entirely innocent? The two are in court at this moment charged with the murder of Lawrence, and therefore I would be in contempt of court".

Five men, including Dobson and Norris, were arrested on suspicion of murdering Lawrence, though the charges were later dropped. Famously, the Daily Mail named the five men and labelled them "MURDERERS" in a banner headline on 14th February 1997: "The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us". (None of the men sued.)

In Flat Earth News, Nick Davies subsequently claimed that the Mail's coverage was based on a personal connection: "the dead boy's father, Neville Lawrence... had done some plastering" for the newspaper's editor, Paul Dacre. The Mail's decision to identify the suspects echoed that of the ITV programme Who Bombed Birmingham? (28th March 1990), which argued that the 'Birmingham six' were innocent and named the real bombers.

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07 June 2012

No Expenses Spared

No Expenses Spared
No Expenses Spared, by Robert Winnett and Gordon Rayner, provides an account of the recent UK parliamentary expenses scandal. Winnett and Rayner are the two journalists who initially exposed the story, with a series of scoops in the Daily Telegraph.

A complete database of MP's expenses claims and payments was leaked to the Telegraph in May 2009, and the details were front-page news every day for several weeks. This gradual revelation (or serialisation) of the leaked expenses ensured that the story dominated the news agenda for most of the year.

The most serious breaches of parliamentary rules involved MPs making false claims for mortgages, and these resulted in criminal prosecutions. However, the scandal came to be epitomised by the absurdly anachronistic claims made by privileged and out-of-touch Conservative politicians: Douglas Hogg submitted a £2,000 moat-cleaning bill, and Peter Viggers claimed more than £1,000 for an ornamental duck house.

The repercussions of the scandal included, for the first time in over 300 years, the resignation of the Speaker of the House of Commons. Several cabinet ministers also resigned: Jacqui Smith was humiliated as her expenses included charges for porn films viewed by her husband (an individual story broken by the Sunday Express, before the Telegraph's investigation), and Hazel Blears was forced to quit after Prime Minister Gordon Brown refused to support her. The scandal was one of a series of public-relations crises affecting Brown's government, and when James Purnell resigned from the cabinet he also called for Brown's resignation.

No Expenses Spared is essentially a diary of the scandal's daily developments, from the perspectives of journalists in the Telegraph's newsroom. The background to the leak, and the initial frenzy as the story broke, are covered in minute detail, though the later ramifications (including the various ministerial resignations) are summarised in a single chapter. There is no index.

Page One

Page One
Page One: Inside The New York Times & The Future Of Journalism, edited by David Folkenflik, is a collection of essays to complement Andrew Rossi's documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times. Rossi writes the book's first chapter, describing the background to his film.

There are also contributions from several senior New York Times journalists, including media correspondent David Carr. Scott Shane writes about the newspaper's uneasy collaboration with WikiLeaks and the sensitivities of publishing leaked US embassy cables.

For the 'born digital' generation, printed newspapers such as the New York Times are largely an anachronism. Consumers increasingly read on screen rather than on paper, preferring instant Twitter updates instead of detailed newspaper analysis. Also, readers expect that online content should be free, and online advertising is less lucrative than traditional print advertising, so newspaper profits (and print circulations) are in sharp decline.

Page One addresses and advocates this digital transformation, arguing that recent reports of the death of journalism are greatly exaggerated. Emily Bell and Alan Rusbridger suggest that firewalls and 'freemium' models simply drive potential visitors to free alternatives. (Two UK newspapers, The Guardian and the Daily Mail, have successfully penetrated the American market by generating free content for their respective websites, though how to make a profit is another matter.) Jim Bankoff challenges former editor Bill Keller's concerns about news aggregators, though I'm not fully convinced.

06 June 2012

Batman Begins

Batman Begins
Batman Begins is the first of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. (It was followed by The Dark Knight and the forthcoming The Dark Knight Rises.) Batman and Batman Returns portrayed Gotham City through Tim Burton's Gothic vision, though Nolan's Gotham is closer to the urban decay of Blade Runner.

Nolan's best films, Memento and Inception, both have unconventional narrative structures, though after some early flashbacks Batman Begins is essentially a linear action movie. The flashbacks are part of a drawn-out origin story, with Nolan apparently using his first Batman film to establish the character in preparation for The Dark Knight.

Though Batman has no super powers (like Iron Man and The Red Eagle), he does benefit from gadgets supplied by Lucius Fox, who has the same function as James Bond's Q. (He also has Wayne Tower, like Iron Man's Stark Tower, though Wayne's playboy persona is a facade whereas Stark's isn't.) Michael Caine, as Alfred the butler, gives the first of several performances in Nolan's films (the others being The Prestige, Inception, and the Batman sequels).

01 June 2012

International Buddhist Film Festival 2012

International Buddhist Film Festival 2012
The 2012 International Buddhist Film Festival will take place in Bangkok later this month. The Festival, organised by Buddhaleela Bangkok, opens at SF World (CentralWorld) on 7th June and runs for three days.

There will be two screenings of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Morakot, as part of the Thai Short Film Panorama event on 8th and 9th June. (Morakot was previously shown at Tomyam Pladib, Save The Film, and Indy Spirit Project.)

The MDNA Tour

The MDNA Tour
Madonna's MDNA Tour opened last night, and will continue until the end of the year. The show features tracks from her latest album, MDNA, though it also includes older singles such as Express Yourself (incorporating a cover version of Lady Gaga's Born This Way) and Open Your Heart. It's her first world tour since Sticky & Sweet. There are four themed acts: 'transgression', 'prophecy', 'masculine/feminine' (featuring costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier), and 'redemption'.

The full set list is: Girl Gone Wild, Revolver, Gang Bang, Papa Don't Preach, Hung Up, I Don't Give A, Best Friend, Express Yourself, Give Me All Your Luvin', Turn Up The Radio, Open Your Heart, Masterpiece, Justify My Love, Vogue, Candy Shop, Human Nature, Like A Virgin, Nobody Knows Me, I'm Addicted, I'm A Sinner, Like A Prayer, and Celebration.

30 May 2012

Caligula Night

Caligula
On 1st June, film professor Stephen Barber will introduce a free screening of Caligula at the Electric Pussycat Lounge in Bangkok. Caligula, directed by Tinto Brass, remains one of the most controversial films ever made.

The original director's cut featured scenes of graphic violence and simulated sex, though producer Bob Guccioni inserted hardcore sex sequences against the wishes of the director and the distinguished cast (which included Malcolm McDowell and John Gielgud). Brass, director of exploitation classics such as Salon Kitty, later disowned the film, and it has been heavily censored around the world.

Explicit imagery is rarely permitted by Thailand's film ratings board: Insects In The Backyard and This Area Is Under Quarantine were banned for this reason. (However, film-festival screenings, such as Anatomy Of Hell, Serbis, Otto, Antichrist, and Dogtooth, are generally given more leniency.) There have been covert screenings of Taxidermia, Reincarnate, and The Terrorists, all of which are extremely graphic; presumably the forthcoming Caligula Night screening is similarly unauthorised.

How To Cook Jesus Christ

Artist Javier Krahe has been charged with blasphemy after his art film How To Cook Jesus Christ was shown on television in Spain. Krahe directed the short film with Enrique Sesena in 1978, and it was immediately banned. It was broadcast on the Canal+ TV show Lo + Plus in 2004, and the show's producers are also facing blasphemy charges. The film's original title is 10 Comentarios: Sobre La Cristofagia, though it is more commonly known as Como Cocinar Un Cristo (How To Cook Jesus Christ).

26 May 2012

Citizen Dog

Citizen Dog
Tomorrow, the Thai Film Archive (in Salaya, near Bangkok) will screen Wisit Sasanatieng's film Citizen Dog. This whimsical romantic comedy retains the over-saturated colours of Wisit's debut film, the incredible Tears Of The Black Tiger (screened at the Archive in 2009 and 2010). After Citizen Dog, Wisit directed more mainstream projects: the horror film The Unseeable (featured in Spirits) and the action movie The Red Eagle (screened at Movies On The Beach).

Wisit has also made the short film Norasinghavatar (part of the Traces Of Siamese Smile exhibition), the music video เราเป็นคนไทย, and a segment of the portmanteau film Sawasdee Bangkok. He wrote the scripts for Nonzee Nimibutr's Nang Nak and Dang Bireley's and Young Gangsters [sic], wrote the outline for Kongkiat Khomsiri's Slice, appeared at the 28 Days festival, and designed the posters for the 2008 and 2009 Bangkok International Film Festivals. Currently, he is working with Thunska Pansittivorakul on the forthcoming film Supernatural.

25 May 2012

Artists' Postcards

Artists' Postcards
Artists' Postcards: A Compendium, by Jeremy Cooper, is the first book dedicated to the postcard as an artistic medium. Rather than discussing scenic tourist postcards (as in Frank Staff's The Picture Postcard & Its Origins and Martin Willoughby's A History Of Postcards), Cooper focuses on limited-edition postcards produced by artists.

An excellent introduction traces the cultural history of postcards and their artistic appropriation, and subsequent chapters present a chronological survey of postcard artworks. The bulk of the book is dedicated to an annotated taxonomy of contemporary artists' postcards. There is no bibliography.

22 May 2012

The Spear

The Spear The Spear
Ngcono Ihlewpu Kunesibhanxa Sesityebi
The South African government, the ANC, has insisted on the removal of a portrait of President Zuma from the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. The painting, The Spear by Brett Murray, depicts Zuma exposing his genitals, and is based on an iconic propaganda portrait of Lenin; it was due to be exhibited until 16th June, as part of the Hail To The Thief II exhibition.

The painting was also reproduced by the Sunday newspaper City Press, on 13th May. It was vandalised today, when two gallery visitors daubed paint onto it (as shown on eNews Channel). Zuma has been caricatured before, by the cartoonist Zapiro.

There is an artistic precedent for The Spear: Ayanda Mabulu's painting Ngcono Ihlewpu Kunesibhanxa Sesityebi (2010) also depicts a naked Zuma. Mabulu's work was included in his Unmute My Tongue exhibition in Capetown.