Studio Ghibli Film Festival 2023

A retrospective of Hayao Miyazaki’s most popular films is being held at selected SF Cinema branches (Central malls in Chonburi, Korat, Khon Kaen, Salaya, Surat Thani, and Phuket; the Mall Lifestore in Bangkae and Ngamwongwan; Laemtong in Bangsaen; Sermthai Complex in Maha Sarakham; MAYA in Chiang Mai; and CentralWorld, Rama IX, and MBK in Bangkok) from 25th November to 31st December. SF’s Studio Ghibli Film Festival 2023 features seven Miyazaki classics: Howl’s Moving Castle (ハウルの動く城), Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し), Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫), Porco Rosso (紅の豚), Laputa: Castle in the Sky (天空の城ラピュタ), Kiki’s Delivery Service (魔女の宅急便), and My Neighbor Totoro (となりのトトロ).

Miyazaki’s masterpiece Spirited Away—arguably the greatest anime film ever made—will be shown on 25th November and 9th December at CentralWorld, MBK, Chiang Mai, Khon Kaen, Phuket, and Chonburi; on 26th November at CentralWorld and MBK; on 2nd December at MBK; on 3rd December at CentralWorld, Chiang Mai, Khon Kaen, Phuket, and Chonburi; on 10th December at MBK and CentralWorld; on 16th December at CentralWorld, Rama IX, Korat, Bangkae, Ngamwongwan, Salaya, and Surat Thani; on 17th December at MBK; on 18th December at CentralWorld and Chiang Mai; on 19th December at MBK; on 20th December at Maha Sarakham and Bansaen; on 23rd December at MBK, Rama IX, and Ngamwongwan; on Christmas Eve at CentralWorld; on 29th December at Rama IX; on 30th December at MBK, and on 31st December at CentralWorld. It has previously been screened in Bangkok at the Jam Café in 2015, at TK Park in 2018, and at the Baan Dusit Thani hotel in 2020.

Asian Political Cartoons

John A. Lent’s Asian Political Cartoons is a remarkable and comprehensive book, covering the history of political cartoons in no fewer than twenty countries. As the publisher claims, with justification, it is “not only the first such survey in English, but the most complete and detailed in any language.” Lent has interviewed more than 200 cartoonists—most notably, Zunar in Malaysia—and made multiple research trips to each of the countries he documents.

Histories of political cartoons traditionally focus on revolutionary France, Georgian Britain, and the Reconstruction era in the United States. Lent’s book, on the other hand, is a window into a previously inaccessible world of satirical art. He shows how cartoonists have challenged authoritarian regimes throughout Asia, and assesses the varying degrees of “freedom to cartoon” in the region (such as the repressive treatment of Mana Neyestani in Iran and Arifur Rahman in Bangladesh).

For his chapter on Thailand, Lent interviewed Chai Rachawat and Arun Watcharasawad, veteran cartoonists who have covered Thai politics since the 1970s for Thai Rath (ไทยรัฐ) and Matichon (มติชน), respectively. He discussed the Thaksin Shinawatra era with Buncha and Kamin from Manager (ผู้จัดการรายวัน), and he describes the enforced ‘attitude adjustment’ of another Thai Rath cartoonist, Sia, under Prayut Chan-o-cha’s military rule. He also covers the rise of anonymous online satirists such as Khai Maew. (Sia wasn’t interviewed for the book, though he spoke to Dateline Bangkok last year.)

The scope of Asian Political Cartoons is unprecedented, though Cherian George’s Red Lines also examines political cartooning from an international perspective. Victor S. Navasky’s The Art of Controversy covers European and American political cartoons, and Alexander Roob reproduces early newspaper cartoons in The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921.

Small-Talk

Cremation Ceremony (ประวัติย่อของบางสิ่งที่หายไป) will be shown as part of a triple bill of short films by Vichart Somkaew at Doc Club and Pub in Bangkok this month. The Small-Talk programme will be screened on 16th, 19th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 26th, and 28th November; and 1st, 4th, and 12th December. Vichart will be present for a post-screening discussion on 19th November. Cremation Ceremony was previously shown at this year’s Chiang Mai Film Festival, and at Wildtype 2023.

The film, which resembles a video installation, shows the faces of three politicians staring impassively at the viewer. The three men—Anutin Charnvirakul, former health minister; and two former prime ministers, Abhisit Vejjajiva and Prayut Chan-o-cha—are each responsible for gross injustices. Anutin oversaw the Thai government’s initially sluggish response to the coronavirus pandemic. Abhisit authorised the shooting of red-shirt protesters in 2010. Prayut led a coup, and his government revived lèse-majesté prosecutions.

Vichart sets fire to photographs of the three men, their faces distorting as the photographic paper burns. There is no dialogue, and the only sound is the crackling of the flame. This symbolic ritual is a commemoration of the deaths of Covid victims, red-shirt protesters, and political dissidents, though it’s also a metaphorical act of retribution, as the three men have faced no consequences for their actions. (Anutin recently returned to government, Abhisit was cleared of all charges by the Supreme Court in 2017, and Prayut announced his retirement this year.)

While the three portraits burn slowly, captions mourn the red-shirts shot at Wat Pathum Wanaram, political prisoners charged under article 112, and—most tragically—casualties of the coronavirus. Arnon Nampa’s speech calling for reform of the monarchy is also summarised in the captions, and the film ends on an optimistic note: a final caption explains that pro-democracy parties “emerged victorious” in this year’s election. (The film was made before the progressive election winners were denied a place in the governing coalition and replaced by the political wings of the military junta.)

Pulp Fiction

Neighbourhood, the Bangkok community mall that began regular outdoor film screenings last month, will show Pulp Fiction tomorrow. Quentin Tarantino’s classic was previously shown at House Samyan and Bangkok Screening Room in 2019, and at Cinema Winehouse in 2018 and 2015.

Sondhi v. Prachatai

Thailand’s Criminal Court yesterday dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul against the online news organisation Prachatai. Sondhi had filed the case in August, claiming that Prachatai misrepresented his opinion by falsely implying that he supported another coup.

In a Facebook post on 31st July, Sondhi speculated on the future of Thai politics, listing thirteen potential scenarios. The last of these was the possibility of another coup, which he described as “ไร้ความชอบธรรม” (‘illegitimate’). Later that day, the Prachatai website reported Sondhi’s comments about the chances of a coup, though its headline omitted the word ‘illegitimate’.

The Criminal Court noted that the first sentence of Prachatai’s article quoted his reference to an ‘illegitimate coup’, and that the article also went on to reproduce Sondhi’s list of thirteen scenarios in full, thus mitigating any potential misunderstanding caused by the headline. (Dateline Bangkok raised the same points a few days after Sondhi sued Prachatai.)

Cannibal Holocaust (4k blu-ray)

Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust was remastered in 4k for the first time by 88 Films in the UK last year, and their new transfer was released on UHD blu-ray and standard blu-ray discs. The film’s opening titles were digitally recreated for the 4k version, using a slightly different typeface [pictured left] compared to the original version [right]. The new titles include several typos: Franco Palaggi and Franco Di Nunzio’s first names both mistakenly appear as “FRANKO”, and ‘authenticity’ is misspelt “autheticity”. (A full stop is also missing.)

As a UK release, the 4k version has been censored by the BBFC, though only one sequence—the killing of a coati—has been cut. As if to offset the typos and censorship, the 88 Films discs also include an excellent new audio commentary by horror expert Kim Newman and writer Barry Forshaw. The US blu-ray, from Grindhouse Releasing, is uncensored, though for purists the only truly complete version is the Dutch Ultrabit DVD edition: in this print, the documentary sequence The Last Road to Hell is a few seconds longer.

The film is notoriously shocking, and remains one of the most famous titles caught up in the ‘video nasties’ moral panic in the UK during the early 1980s. Its genuine cruelty to animals is, of course, indefensible, but it’s also notable as the first ‘found footage’ horror film, directly influencing The Blair Witch Project and indirectly inspiring the wave of Blair Witch imitations that followed.

Cannibal Holocaust is undeniably an exploitation movie—from a cycle of cannibal-themed Italian horror films that began with Man from Deep River (Il paese del sesso selvaggio)—though it transcends that reputation with its critique of the mondo documentary subgenre. As discussed in Killing for Culture, mondo films mutated from the relatively mild Mondo Cane to violent ‘shockumentaries’, a trend that Cannibal Holocaust both condemns and exploits.

Surprisingly, the film has been available uncut on DVD in Thailand for more than twenty years, prior to the introduction of the rating system. (As noted in Thai Cinema Uncensored, Thai film censors are concerned far more with politics and religion than with violence.) It was shown at Bangkok’s Jam Café in 2015, and a screening at Thammasat University was planned in 2020, though this was cancelled due to the coronavirus lockdown.

Cannibal Holocaust is not the only film whose title sequence has been mangled on blu-ray. All standard blu-ray releases of Ingmar Bergman’s classic The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) feature a Swedish title screen with a missing word: “SJUNDE INSEGLET”. (The definite article “DET” has been omitted; 4k UHD blu-ray releases are unaffected.)

The Disturbing Movie Iceberg

In 2021, a Reddit user known as Nice Guy Phil posted an infographic titled The Disturbing Movie Iceberg, an eight-tiered hierarchy of violent and offensive films. The metaphor in the title suggested that the films in tier one were ‘the tip of the iceberg’, while those in tier eight were the most disturbing films imaginable.

The chart generated a great deal of interest online, though most people who saw it were unaware of most of the films listed. In fact, it’s not advisable to seek out many of the films in the chart, and the only recommended films are those in tiers three and four. (The other tiers are either too mild to be considered truly disturbing, or too extreme to be considered narrative films.)

Tier one consists of mainstream horror movies that are entirely conventional and uncontroversial. Tier two features titles that are slightly more violent than those in tier one, including mainstream horror films that have been dismissed as ‘torture porn’.

Tiers three and four are the core of the list, and most viewers should confine themselves to these tiers. The exploitation films in tier three (such as Cannibal Holocaust) are not mainstream titles, though they have all been theatrically released. Tier four features fake snuff films released on video (including the Guinea Pig/ギニーピッグ series).

The titles in the remaining tiers are not commercial feature films, and should be avoided by most viewers. Tier five features Japanese porn videos, and tier six consists of mondo videos. The final two tiers contain extreme online material: fetish porn in tier seven, and death clips in tier eight.

(A compilation of footage from the 7th October Hamas attack on Israel, untitled though known colloquially as the ‘video of horrors’, would surely find a place in tier eight, though it has not been released to the public. The video, variations of which are between forty-four and forty-seven minutes long, was edited by Mattan Harel-Fisch and includes uncensored footage of the deaths of many Israelis on that day. It has been shown to journalists, politicians, and diplomats at various private screenings.)

Short Film Marathon 27

The 27th Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้นครั้งที่ 27) runs from 16th December until Christmas Eve at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya. As a prelude, all of the films submitted will be screened in alphabetical order in this year’s online Short Film Marathon (หนังสั้นมาราธอน), between 31st October and 6th December.

The Short Film and Video Festival, founded in 1997, is Thailand’s longest-running film event. Whereas other festivals have come and gone, the Short Film and Video Festival goes from strength to strength: 400 films were submitted last year, and this year the total has increased to 600, though only a fraction will be selected for the main event.

Highlights this year include A Love Letter to My Sister by video journalist Napasin Samkaewcham, a deeply moving documentary about the volatile relationship between his parents. It will have its first public screening on 11th November.

Also, the feature-length version of Supamok Silarak’s documentary Red Poetry (ความกวีสีแดง)—a profile of performance artist Vitthaya Klangnil, who has been convicted of lèse-majesté—will be shown on 16th November. (It has previously been shown only at under-the-radar screenings in Chiang Mai.)

Three standouts from the Wildtype 2023 event—Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s ANG48 (เอเอ็นจี48), Vichart Somkaew’s Cremation Ceremony (ประวัติย่อของบางสิ่งที่หายไป), and Koraphat Cheeradit’s Yesterday Is Another Day—are also included, showing on 2nd, 4th, and 19th November, respectively. (Cremation Ceremony and Yesterday Is Another Day were previously screened at this year’s Chiang Mai Film Festival, and Yesterday Is Another Day has also been shown at Silpakorn University.)

Chatchawal Thongjun’s From Forest to City (อรัญนคร), one of the best Thai short films of the year, will be shown on 6th December. Koraphat Cheeradit’s experimental, transgressive Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now! (ฉันแต่งงานกับปัจจุบัน ช่วยตัวเองด้วยเมื่อวาน และมีเพศสัมพันธ์กับวันพรุ่งนี้) is screening on 19th November.

กลุ่มอิสระล้อการเมือง 14 ตุลา (‘political parody of 14th Oct.’), Warat Bureephakdee’s satirical commentary on the aftermath of the 14th October 1973 massacre, is screening on 21st November. Warat’s collage film reappropriates footage from the documentary อนุทินวีรชน 14 ตุลาคม (‘diary of 14th October heroes’), and he takes a skeptical view of the claims of democratic freedom that were made after the event. The film ends with the caption “ถนอม WILL RETURN” (‘Thanom will return’), in the style of the James Bond series, though in this case the ominous reference is to military dictator Thanom Kittikachorn. Thanom was sent into exile after the massacre, though he did indeed return to Thailand in 1976, and this precipitated the 6th October 1976 coup.

On 30th November, Teeraphan Ngowjeenanan’s แฟ้มรวมภาพทักษิณกลับไทย (‘dossier of pictures of Thaksin’s return to Thailand’) documents another politician’s return from exile. Thaksin Shinawatra returned to Thailand earlier this year, and the film is a compilation of live TV coverage of his arrival at the airport and his performative prostration in front of a portrait of Rama X. The events are replayed more than twenty times, each from a different TV broadcast, accompanied by commentary from each channel’s news anchors. The film ends with a montage of TikTok videos from Thaksin supporters at the airport.

Kawinnate Konklong’s แค่วันที่โชคร้าย (‘unfortunately’) dramatises the ideological gap between generations, as a royalist father files a lèse-majesté charge against his daughter’s girlfriend, Bam, after she attends a protest calling for reform of the monarchy. The man tells his daughter: “I used the law to protect the King from defamation. Unfortunately, the person was Bam.” His dialogue evokes a comment from former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, who dismissed dozens of civilian casualties: “unfortunately, some people died”. The film will be shown on 23rd November, and although its plot is fictional, it echoes journalist Michael Peel’s book The Fabulists. Peel interviewed a man who filed lèse-majesté charges against young activists, and consequently “had fallen out with his son over his alleged disrespect for the monarchy.”

The Right to Rule: Thirteen Years, Five Prime Ministers and the Implosion of the Tories

The Right to Rule: Thirteen Years, Five Prime Ministers and the Implosion of the Tories, by Ben Riley-Smith, sets out to explain how the Conservatives have held on to power in the UK since 2010. One reason is simply that the party has an inbuilt sense of entitlement: “The story that emerges is one of a party built to rule. Time and again, the same message was echoed by interviewees: what must be understood is that the Conservatives are not an ‘ideological party’ but a ‘power party’.”

A complete political history of the past thirteen years would be impossible to cover in a single volume, so the book instead focuses on “ten critical moments or parts of the story, the pivotal points that explain the wider whole.” These include David Cameron’s decision to hold the Brexit referendum, Theresa May’s ill-fated 2017 election, Boris Johnson’s resignation (Riley-Smith subscribes to the ‘three Ps’ theory cited in The Fall of Boris Johnson), and the brief Liz Truss premiership.

Riley-Smith interviewed more than 100 sources for the book, including three of the last five prime ministers (Cameron, Johnson, and Truss). He spoke to twenty of Johnson’s cabinet ministers, and obtained the first drafts of Johnson’s resignation speech and Truss’s party conference speech. He also quotes previously unpublished material from his Telegraph interview with Sunak—“people are fed up with politicians talking about things and not actually doing them”—and extracts from a tranche of internal party memos from the 2017 election campaign.

Surprisingly, The Right to Rule has not been widely reviewed, except by The Daily Telegraph, of which Riley-Smith is the political editor. But it deserves wider coverage, particularly for its revealing insights into Conservative party procedures: it explains the process by which letters of no confidence are submitted to the chairman of the 1922 Committee, and it includes the first published photograph of a cabinet reshuffle whiteboard.

รำลึก 19 ปี ตากใบ(‘remembering 19 years of Tak Bai’)

Today marks the nineteenth anniversary of the tragedy that took place at Tak Bai on 25th October 2004. More than 1,000 people protested outside Tak Bai’s Provincial Police Station, and police responded with water cannon, tear gas, and live ammunition, killing five people. The surviving demonstrators were crammed into trucks and taken to Ingkhayuttha Borihan Fort military camp, though seventy-eight people died of suffocation during the five-hour journey.

The security forces have never been held accountable for the deaths, and the government prohibited the broadcasting of video footage of the incident. In defiance of the ban, Same Sky (ฟ้าเดียวกัน) magazine distributed a Tak Bai VCD—ความจริงที่ตากใบ (‘the truth at Tak Bai’)—with its October–December 2004 issue (vol. 2, no. 4). The footage is also included in Thunska Pansittivorakul’s documentary This Area Is Under Quarantine (บริเวณนี้อยู่ภายใต้การกักกัน), leading to the film being banned. (Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses the censorship of Tak Bai videos.)

รำลึก 19 ปี ตากใบ (‘remembering 19 years of Tak Bai’), an exhibition at Patani Artspace, opens today to commemorate the anniversary, and closes on 16th December. Video and photographs are included, and this afternoon there will also be a rare opportunity to play Patani Colonial Territory. (The card game, which was banned last year, was designed as an educational tool to provoke discussion about the contested history of the Patani region.)

The Heard the Unheard (สดับเสียงเงียบ) exhibition at Silpakorn and Thammasat universities earlier this year also commemorated the nineteenth anniversary. Tak Bai photographs were shown at the Deep South (ลึกลงไป ใต้ชายแดน) exhibition last year in Bangkok. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Photophobia series incorporates press photographs of the incident, as does the interactive installation Black Air by Pimpaka Towira, Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, Koichi Shimizu, and Jakrawal Nilthamrong.

Jehabdulloh Jehsorhoh’s Violence in Tak Bai (ความรุนแรงที่ตากใบ) features white tombstones marking the graves of each victim, and his book The Patani Art of Struggle (سني ڤتاني چاراو او سها) shows three versions of the installation in situ. It was first installed, just a few days after the massacre, at Prince of Songkla University in Pattani, and the grave markers were accompanied by rifles wrapped in white cloth. In 2017, it was recreated at Patani Artspace and then mounted on a plinth containing Pattani soil at the Patani Semasa (ปาตานี ร่วมสมัย) exhibition.

Two other installations—Jakkhai Siributr’s 78 and Zakariya Amataya’s Report from a Partitioned Village (รายงานจากหมู่บ้านที่ถูกปิดล้อม)—both include lists of the Tak Bai victims’ names. Photophobia, 78, and Violence in Tak Bai were all included in the Patani Semasa exhibition in Chiang Mai. (The exhibition catalogue gives Violence in Tak Bai a milder alternative title, Remember at Tak Bai.)

The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021

The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021, published last year, is the only book to cover the entirety of Donald Trump’s presidency in a single volume. Every day of his four-year term brought another I-can’t-believe-he-did-that moment, so it’s not surprising that The Divider is over 700 pages long.

The Divider—written by Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker—argues that Trump succeeded by stoking the embers of preexisting social polarisation: “He exploited the fissures in American society to gain, wield, and hold on to power.” This divide-and-conquer strategy, which gives the book its title, culminated in the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021.

Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker began their book on Trump’s final year in office by listing a dozen of his personal failings. The Divider, on the other hand, opens by identifying arguably the most pernicious aspect of his presidency—not included in Leonnig and Rucker’s litany—namely his “sustained four-year war on the institutions and traditions of American democracy.”

Most of the major Trump books—by Leonnig, Rucker, Maggie Haberman, Bob Woodward, and Robert Costa—are structured scene-by-scene, with atmospheric accounts of selected meetings recounted by the participants. The Divider is just as well-sourced—Baker and Glasser interviewed more than 300 people, including Trump—but it focuses instead on the bigger picture, giving a uniquely comprehensive overview of Trump’s presidency.

This is the twentieth, and surely the last, Trump book reviewed on Dateline Bangkok (at least until his inevitable ghostwritten memoir is published). The others are: Betrayal, Confidence Man, Fire and Fury, Too Much and Never Enough, Fear, Rage, Peril, I Alone Can Fix It, A Very Stable Genius, Inside Trump’s White House, The United States of Trump, Trump’s Enemies, The Trump White House, The Room Where It Happened, Team of Five, American Carnage, TrumpNation, The Cost, and the audiobook The Trump Tapes.

Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones

Madonna released her dance remix album Finally Enough Love last year. An expanded version, Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones, was released a few months later as a CD triple album and a six-disc vinyl box set. The album features fifty tracks, including forty-nine of the fifty number ones Madonna has achieved on Billboard’s dance club songs chart. The title is a line from the lyrics to I Don’t Search I Find, from the Madame X album, and the text on the cover has been cut-and-pasted from Billboard’s website. Unfortunately, most of the tracks are edited versions, so this isn’t a definitive collection of Madonna remixes. (The full-length remixes are available on her back catalogue of 12" singles and maxi CDs, Justify My Love being a personal favourite.)

Of the fifty chart toppers, forty-nine were singles, the one exception being Madonna’s previous dance remix album, You Can Dance, as the entire album was counted as one entry on the dance club songs chart. 50 Number Ones features two tracks from You Can Dance—Everybody and Physical Attraction—but one of the forty-nine singles, Causing a Commotion, is missing. This is odd, because it did reach number one on the dance club songs chart, and it’s clearly a song that Madonna still likes, as she sang it a cappella during yesterday’s performance of The Celebration Tour.

The 50 Number Ones track list is: Holiday, Like a Virgin, Material Girl, Into the Groove, Open Your Heart, Everybody, Physical Attraction, Like a Prayer, Express Yourself, Keep It Together, Vogue, Justify My Love, Erotica, Deeper and Deeper, Fever, Secret, Bedtime Story, Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, Frozen, Ray of Light, Nothing Really Matters, Beautiful Stranger, American Pie, Music, Don’t Tell Me, What It Feels Like for a Girl, Impressive Instant, Die Another Day, American Life, Hollywood, Me Against the Music, Nothing Fails, Love Profusion, Hung Up, Sorry, Get Together, Jump, 4 Minutes, Give It 2 Me, Celebration, Give Me All Your Lovin’, Girl Gone Wild, Turn Up the Radio, Living for Love, Ghosttown, Bitch I’m Madonna, Medellín, I Rise, Crave, and I Don’t Search I Find.

Cunt

Feminist artist Janice Turner has published two books of her ‘cunt’ paintings: The Cunt Book in 2019, and the significantly expanded The Essential Cunt last year (which also includes an interview with the author). Turner cites Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues as the original inspiration for her quest to reclaim the c-word, and in The Essential Cunt she repeats the word in the same way that Ensler does: “Cunt, practice it cunt cunt cunt cunt love the word and love your CUNT”.

There are also other possible influences. Turner’s phrase “love your CUNT” evokes Germaine Greer’s pioneering essay Lady Love Your Cunt, and The Essential Cunt seems to paraphrase a monologue about the f-word from Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour. Madonna told her audience: “‘Fuck’ is not a bad word... If your mom and dad did not fuck, you would not be here”; Turner writes: “CUNT is not a dirty word!... If not for a CUNT, you would not be here!” Other artists who have painted the c-word include Marlene McCarty, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Alison Carmichael.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Like The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is around three-and-a-half hours long, but the running time doesn’t feel excessive, thanks to Scorsese’s direction and Robbie Robertson’s score. The film tells the true story of the murders of Osage Native Americans in the 1920s, killings committed by white settlers who married into Osage families to inherit the profits from oil wells in Osage County.

Robert De Niro’s character, King Hale, is a corrupt patriarch in the same vein as John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown, though De Niro’s performance is more subtle than Huston’s. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hale’s nephew, Ernest Burkhart—who loves his wife, but loves money even more—with an almost permanent frown. Relative newcomer Lily Gladstone is outstanding as Ernest’s stoic wife, Mollie.

Killers of the Flower Moon opened in cinemas yesterday, and will be available on Apple TV in the near future. One of Scorsese’s best films of the last two decades, it’s an epic late-career masterpiece from the world’s greatest living director (who makes a few cameo appearances, in front of the camera and in voiceover). The film’s Osage-language title is 𐓀𐒻͘𐓂͘𐓄𐒰 𐒹𐒿𐒰𐓆𐒼𐒰 𐓓𐒻͘𐒼𐒰 𐓊'𐒷𐓍𐒷.

Trilogy of the Wayward Travelers

Weerapat Sakolvaree’s short film Nostalgia will be shown tomorrow at Bangkok University’s School of Digital Media and Cinematic Arts, as part of the Trilogy of the Wayward Travelers programme. Weerapat will be present for a post-screening discussion.

Nostalgia has previously been shown at the Chiang Mai Film Festival 2023, Future Fest 2023, Wildtype 2022, and the 26th Thai Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้นครั้งที่ 26). Weerapat is also the director of Zombie Citizens.

The Celebration Tour

“I’m gonna tell you the story of my life, but I’m gonna do it through music and dance, so I hope you enjoy it.”
— Madonna

The Celebration Tour, Madonna’s eleventh world tour, began last night in London. (The show was originally scheduled to open on 27th July, but was postponed after the singer developed a severe bacterial infection.) Madonna will be performing in Europe, the US, Canada, and Mexico, with the final concert being held on 24th April 2024.

Unlike Madonna’s previous tours, which have all promoted individual album releases, The Celebration Tour is her first greatest hits or retrospective tour. The title comes from her 2009 compilation album Celebration. It’s also her first tour without a live band, as the music and backing vocals are all prerecorded. With almost thirty songs performed live, a platform suspended above the crowd, and a spectacular lighting rig, it’s Madonna’s most elaborate live show, after the relative intimacy of the Madame X Tour.

The tour is effectively an autobiography, conceived after Madonna cancelled plans to write and direct a biopic about herself. Montages of clips from Madonna’s music videos, extracts from Truth or Dare, newspaper headlines, and archive photos—including some from the Sex book—provide an audio-visual collage of her forty-year career. She wears an updated version of her notorious Blond Ambition World Tour conical bra, designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier, while she performs Vogue, Human Nature, and Crazy for You.

The full set list is: Nothing Really Matters, Everybody, Into the Groove, Burning Up, Open Your Heart, Holiday, Live to Tell, Like a Prayer, Erotica, Justify My Love, Hung Up, Bad Girl, Vogue, Human Nature, Crazy for You, Die Another Day, Don’t Tell Me, a cover version of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, La Isla Bonita, Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, Bedtime Story, Ray of Light, Rain, Bitch I’m Madonna, and Celebration (featuring the chorus from Music). On the opening night, she also sang an a capella version of Little Star

Other songs—In This Life, The Beast Within, and I Don’t Search I Find—appear as prerecorded interludes. There is also a prerecorded version of Like a Virgin, in a medley with Michael Jackson performing Billie Jean. (Madonna previously sang a Like a Virgin and Billie Jean medley on The Virgin Tour.) In light of the credible child abuse allegations made against Jackson, lyrics like “Touched for the very first time” make the medley particularly inappropriate.

Madonna’s previous world tours are Who’s That Girl, Blond Ambition, The Girlie Show, Drowned World, Reinvention, Confessions, Sticky and Sweet, MDNA, Rebel Heart, and Madame X. The Virgin Tour was performed only in the US and Canada.

“Meloni, Salvini: bastardi...” (‘Meloni, Salvini: bastards...’)

>A political commentator was found guilty yesterday of defaming Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Speaking on the Piazzapulita (‘clean sweep’) talk show on 3rd December 2020, Roberto Saviano criticised Meloni and another far-right politician, Matteo Salvini, for their anti-immigration rhetoric: “Viene solo da dire: bastardi. Meloni, Salvini: bastardi. Come avete potuto?” (‘it just makes you say: bastards. Meloni, Salvini: bastards. How could you?’)

Saviano was fined €1,000, though he will only be liable to pay if he repeats his comments. Prosecutors had originally sought a €50,000 penalty. The clip from Piazzapulita is still accessible on the website of La7, the TV channel that broadcasts the programme. Meloni is also suing singer Brian Molko, who called her a fascist at a concert earlier this year.

50 ปี 14 ตุลาเจ้าฝันถึงโลกสีใด(‘50 years of 14th Oct.: what colour world do you dream of?’)

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 14th October 1973 demonstration, when 500,000 people rallied at Bangkok’s Democracy Monument calling for a new constitution and an end to Thanom Kittikachorn’s dictatorial rule. The protest was successful, as Thanom was dismissed as prime minister and sent into exile—leading to a three-year period of democracy—though the military shot and killed seventy-seven protesters.

Commemorations of the massacre are surprisingly understated, despite the historic fiftieth anniversary. A commemorative exhibition earlier in the year contained no references to the incident. There is an exhibition of political billboards at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, albeit on a small scale. Most lamentably, there is an even smaller display of photocopied pages—from The Ten Days (วันมหาวิปโยค)— outside the 14 October 73 Memorial. The most substantial event is a series of film screenings at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya.

Another compact exhibition commemorating the anniversary opened today at Queen Sirikit National Convention Center. Organised by the publisher of Matichon (มติชน), 50 ปี 14 ตุลา เจ้าฝันถึงโลกสีใด (‘50 years of 14th Oct.: what colour world do you dream of?’) features a display of books, notably บันทึกลับจากทุ่งใหญ่ (‘secret notes on Thung Yai’), which exposed military corruption in the months before the protests. The exhibition also includes a monitor screening the documentary อนุทินวีรชน 14 ตุลาคม (‘diary of 14th October heroes’).

The documentary will also be shown at the Thai Film Archive, on 14th October. The exhibition at QSNCC runs until 23rd October, to coincide with Book Expo Thailand 2023. The exhibition brochure folds out into a small poster with a black-and-white photo of protesters at Democracy Monument on the day before the massacre.

Matichon also launched a new book about the events of October 1973 at the Book Expo today. ข้างหลังภาพ 14 ตุลาฯ: จากระบอบปฏิวัติของเผด็จการสู่การปฏิวัติของประชาชน (‘behind the image of 14th Oct.: from the dictatorship’s revolutionary regime to the people’s revolution’), by Pandit Chanrochanakit, includes reproductions of newspaper headlines and paintings related to the protests, and provides context on the political climate in the years before the massacre.

๕๐ ปี ๑๔ ตุลา(‘50 years of 14th Oct.’)

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 14th October 1973 demonstration, when 500,000 people rallied at Bangkok’s Democracy Monument calling for an end to Thanom Kittikachorn’s dictatorial rule. The protest was successful, as Thanom was dismissed as prime minister and sent into exile, though the military shot and killed seventy-seven protesters. The anniversary was commemorated with an exhibition of paintings at g23 earlier in the year, and there will also be an exhibition at the forthcoming Thailand Book Expo and screenings at the Thai Film Archive later this month.

Bangkok Art and Culture Centre is also holding an exhibition to mark the anniversary, from 3rd to 15th October, with replicas of billboards created by the United Artists’ Front of Thailand (แนวร่วมศิลปินแห่งประเทศไทย). The billboards were originally displayed outdoors in 1975, and the replicas have been shown at two previous exhibitions: Political Cut-out Artworks of the October Event (ภาพศิลปะคัทเอาท์การเมืองเดือนตุลา) in 2003 and ภาพคัตเอาท์การเมืองเดือนตุลา (‘October political billboard artworks’) in 2009.

BACC will also be screening a series of short films, including Pirab (พิราบ) and the documentary The Shadow of History (เงาประวัติศาสตร์) on 8th October, and 16 ตุลา (‘16th Oct.’) on 15th October. (Pirab was previously shown at Thammasat University earlier this month, at Future Fest 2023, and at the Thai Film Archive in 2017. 16 ตุลา was previously shown online as part of Democracy.exe in 2021.)

The Shadow of History, produced by the Thai Film Archive on the fortieth anniversary of the protest, features newsreel footage of the event filmed by Chin Klaiparn and Taweesak Wiriyasiri. It was directed by Panu Aree, Kong Rithdee, and Kaweenipon Ketprasit.

Pirab, directed by Pasit Promnumpol, begins with a flashback (in sound only) to another massacre, on 6th October 1976, which took place after Thanom’s return from exile. The film dramatises a student’s anguished decision to leave his family and join the Communist insurgency, allowing the audience to empathise with the young man’s dilemma.

In 16 ตุลา, three student protest leaders debate their tactics in the aftermath of the 2014 coup. (The three students could, of course, be substitutes for Arnon Nampa, Panusaya Sithjirawattanakul, and Parit Chirawak.) Aomtip Kerdplanant’s drama shows how the students’ lives have changed in the years since their initial campaign, indicating how seasoned protesters can become disillusioned. The title is a conflation of the 14th October 1973 and 6th October 1976 massacres, which have been whitewashed to such an extent that many people cannot tell them apart.

The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life

The prime ministerial memoir is a staple of British political literature. Recent PMs Tony Blair (A Journey), Gordon Brown (My Life, Our Times), and David Cameron (For the Record) have all written about their times in office, though Theresa May’s new book isn’t a traditional memoir. May also makes clear that it’s “not an attempt to justify certain decisions I made in office or to provide a detailed retelling of historical events.” Instead, it’s an account of “the abuse of power exhibited so often in the way the institutions of the state, and those who work within them, put themselves first and the people they are there to serve second.”

The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life includes damning assessments of the Hillsborough Stadium and Grenfell Tower tragedies, and the Primodos scandal, amongst other miscarriages of justice (but not the Post Office Horizon case). May rightly condemns the institutional failings that resulted in these horrific episodes, though her book also discusses seemingly unrelated issues, including her government’s Brexit negotiations. May’s reflections on Brexit—and her thoughts on other world leaders, such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—are fascinating, though they would be more suited to a conventional memoir. In fact, there’s something quite offensive about equating the Brexit deadlock with the Hillsborough disaster.

As May recognises, she will be remembered primarily for her protracted Brexit negotiations: “I know in my heart of hearts that the political reality is that my premiership will always be seen in the context of Brexit and my failure to get a deal through the House of Commons.” She also accepts partial blame for the 2017 election campaign car-crash that wiped out her parliamentary majority: “The most obvious, and arguably the defining, mistake was the press conference after the revision of our social care policy where I said nothing had changed. Obviously something had changed.”

The election result greatly weakened May’s ability to pass legislation in parliament, though she blames former parliamentary Speaker John Bercow for the stalemate instead: “I am certain that he scuppered the Brexit deal.” May is surprisingly direct in her condemnation of Bercow: without mincing words, she describes him as “not just a bully but a serial liar.” She also criticises her predecessor as PM for the Downing Street parties held during coronavirus lockdowns: “there were those at the top of politics, including but not limited to Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, who did not think that the laws they made applied to them.”

In contrast, the book presents May as a vicar’s daughter and a dutiful crusader for justice. In her concluding chapter, May considers how to prevent future abuses of power, but rather than increased regulation or transparency, she calls for more public figures who share her belief in “[s]elf-sacrifice rather than selfishness.” But it’s unrealistic to expect such selflessness from those in public life (except perhaps Gordon Brown, who has a similar background to May), and the book’s final lines are overly idealistic: “those in public service, particularly politicians, should cast aside the mantle of selfishness and devote themselves unashamedly to duty and the service of others.”

คนอุบลใน 6 ตุลา(‘Ubon people and 6th Oct.’)

Tomorrow marks the forty-seventh anniversary of the massacre that took place at Thammasat University on 6th October 1976, the most notorious date in modern Thai history. The anniversary will be commemorated at Thammasat tomorrow, but only for a single day. There will be a one-day exhibition—112 มรดก 6 ตุลา— (‘112: the legacy of 6th Oct.’) and screenings of the documentary Different Views, Death Sentence (ต่างความคิด ผิดถึงตาย ๖ ตุลาคม ๒๕๑๙) and the short film Pirab (พิราบ). There will also be a discussion titled เอายังไงดีกับกองเซ็นเซอร์: บทบาทของคณะกรรมการพิจารณาภาพยนตร์และวิดิทัศน์ภายใต้รัฐบาลซอฟต์พาวเวอร์ (‘what to do with the censors: the role of the National Film and Video Committee and soft power’), arguing that Thailand’s film industry can only contribute to the country’s soft power if the censors’ role is restricted purely to classification rather than cutting or banning films.

คนอุบลใน 6 ตุลา (‘Ubon people and 6th Oct.’), an exhibition at the Songsarn café in Ubon Ratchathani, runs from 22nd September to 6th October and includes photographs of the massacre. Outside the cafe is an enlargement of the Neal Ulevich photograph that has come to symbolise the tragedy, with the hanging man’s body cut out, leaving a physical void in the image to symbolise the whitewashing of the event. A folding chair—a reference to Neal Ulevich’s famous photograph of the massacre—is also hanging outside the venue, and will be used in a performance by artist Narasith Vongprasert tomorrow.

Both the Thammasat and Songsarn exhibitions feature reproductions of the infamous Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper front page that precipitated the massacre. The Thammasat exhibition also includes a copy of a speech read by Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul at a 12th December 2021 protest calling for the abolition of article 112 of the criminal code (the lèse-majesté law). The paper is stained with Panusaya’s blood, as she carved “112” into her arm at the demonstration.

Pirab will also be shown on 8th October at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. It was previously shown at Future Fest earlier this year, and at the Thai Film Archive in 2017. Folding chairs have also been shown suspended from ropes at the Status in Statu, Uncensored, and Khonkaen Manifesto (ขอนแก่น แมนิเฟสโต้) exhibitions.

The Last Politician:Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, by Franklin Foer of The Atlantic magazine, is the third book on President Biden’s administration, after The Fight of His Life (by Chris Whipple) and Peril (by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa). Whipple had higher-level access than Foer, though with some restrictions: he interviewed Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, but only via email. Foer wasn’t granted on-the-record interviews, though he did speak to almost 300 people in the administration and, unlike Whipple, his account doesn’t seem overreliant on some sources at the expense of others.

Foer writes that he was initially critical of Biden: “I began this project sharing the Washington establishment’s skepticism of the man.” His opinion evolved during the research for the book and, like Whipple’s, his assessment became broadly positive: “as I reported on him at close distance... my respect for him grew.” Also like Whipple, Foer reserves his harshest criticism for Biden’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan, describing it as “the decision that scarred his legacy.” (Whereas The Fight for His Life and Peril focus on the decision to withdraw, The Last Politician has more coverage of the evacuation itself.)

After his first year in office, Biden’s reputation seemed tarnished: “his messy presidency looked like it would be best remembered for its failures—a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the humiliating collapse of his Build Back Better legislation, and the rise of inflation.” But the Inflation Reduction Act, and his public support for Volodymyr Zelensky, turned his presidency around: “redemption—and a profound legacy—came unexpectedly, splayed across the second half of his second year, as he orchestrated the most fertile season of legislation in memory and rallied the world to Ukraine’s defense.”

Biden’s personal relationship with Zelenksy was, at least initially, one of mutual suspicion, and he accused the Ukrainian President of irresponsibly seeking to provoke World War III. His feelings about Russian President Vladimir Putin are well documented, and Foer quotes him telling a friend that Putin slouched like an “asshole schoolkid” during bilateral meetings.

กรุงเทพ กลางแปลง(‘Bangkok open air’)

The กรุงเทพ กลางแปลง (‘Bangkok open air’) festival returns this year, with outdoor screenings around Bangkok between 7th October and 12th November. Highlights include The Moonhunter (14 ตุลา สงครามประชาชน), showing on 14th October at Lan Khon Mueang Town Square; 6ixtynin9 (เรื่องตลก 69), on 5th November at the historic Metropolitan Waterworks Authority building; and The Wizard of Oz, on 11th November at Benchakitti Forest Park.

The Moonhunter dramatises the 14th October 1973 protest that ended Thanom Kittikachorn’s military dictatorship, and the screening will take place on the fiftieth anniversary of the event. It will also be shown at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya, on 15th and 19th October.

Pen-ek Ratanaruang remade his thriller 6ixtynin9 as a Netflix series last month. The film was previously shown at Bangkok Screening Room in 2017. As part of a Pen-ek retrospective in 2018, it was screened on DVD at the Jam Factory and in 35mm at House RCA, and it was also shown at Alliance Française as part of another Pen-ek retrospective that year.

The Wizard of Oz, a Hollywood classic, returned to cinemas earlier this year to celebrate the centenary of Warner Bros. It was previously shown at Bangkok Screening Room in 2018, 2019, and 2020. It has also been screened at the Scala, Cinema Winehouse, Bangkok Community Theatre, and Jam Café.

Halloween Special!

Neighbourhood, a Bangkok community mall that opened in May, will start regular outdoor film screenings from this month. Their inaugural programme, Halloween Special!, includes a handful of horror movies for Halloween. Wes Craven’s postmodern classic Scream will be screened on 27th October.

Nine Nasty Words —English in the Gutter:Then, Now, and Forever

How many swear words are still considered taboo? Any list of such terms should inevitably start with the seven words—including all the four-letter ones—that comedian George Carlin described on his album Occupation: Foole. That album was broadcast on 30th November 1973 by MBIA, a New York radio station, which ultimately led to a landmark Supreme Court verdict giving the Federal Communications Commission the authority to censor radio and network television.

In his book Nine Nasty Words — English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever, John McWhorter slightly expands the classic Carlin list: “I will zero in on not seven but nine of the bedrock swears of modern English, including what we more conventionally term slurs but which qualify as our newest profanity. Or, really, eleven if you count damn and hell.” He gives etymologies for each term, and his citations include literary references and early twentieth century popular culture.

McWhorter has interesting points to make about the c-word, refuting the common interpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “queynte” as a euphemism: “Chaucer did not bedeck his Canterbury Tales with casual references to cunts, despite how this gets around among English majors. It is easy to suppose, because Middle English spelling looks so odd to us and was not yet regularized, that his queynte was an eccentric spelling of cunt. However, it was actually what it looked like: the word quaint”.

Rebecca Roache’s For F*ck’s Sake, Philip Gooden’s Bad Words and What They Say about Us, Peter Silverton’s Filthy English, Ruth Wajnryb’s Language Most Foul, and David Sosa’s Bad Words cover similar ground to McWhorter. Geoffrey Hughes wrote An Encyclopedia of Swearing, expanded from his earlier Swearing. Forbidden Words, by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, is the most authoritative book on linguistic taboos, and Allen also recently edited The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Words and Language.

The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921:The Golden Age of Graphic Journalism

Alexander Roob’s The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921: The Golden Age of Graphic Journalism, published earlier this year by Taschen, is a stunning 600-page survey of illustrations from nineteenth and early twentieth century newspapers and magazines. The book features hundreds of images, many of which are full-page and double-page reproductions (such as the John Leech drawing from Punch magazine that first used the word ‘cartoon’ to refer to satirical art), and it includes a comprehensive bibliography.

A prologue outlines the early history of press graphics, from the late sixteenth century onwards, though the book’s starting point is 1819. This was the year of the Peterloo massacre in Manchester, England, and William Hone and George Cruikshank’s pamphlet The Political House That Jack Built, published in response to the tragedy, which “established the era of pictorial journalism”.

Roob examines the technical developments in printing over the period, from wood engraving and lithography in the 1870s to photoxylography a century later. There is also extensive coverage of caricature and political satire, including Charles Philipon’s cartoons of the French King Louis-Philippe.

Philipon was arrested for treason after drawing Louis-Philippe as a plasterer in La Caricature on 30th June 1831. At his trial, he mischievously demonstrated that the King’s likeness could be discerned in almost anything, even a pear, and that fruit became a symbol of Louis-Philippe in subsequent illustrations by Philipon and others. On 27th February 1834, Philipon’s magazine Le Charivari (‘hullabaloo’) published a front-page editorial about the King in the form of a calligram, with the text typeset to resemble a pear.

Philipon’s pear sketches, and a caricature of Louis-Philippe as Gargantua by Honoré Daumier, are reproduced in The Art of Controversy. There is a chapter on press graphics in History of Illustration. The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921 is published in a folio format, the same size as Taschen’s Information Graphics, History of Information Graphics, Understanding the World, and Logo Modernism.

Gay Is OK!A Christian Perspective

Malaysia’s Court of Appeal today reinstated a ban on Ngeo Boon Lin’s book Gay Is OK! A Christian Perspective. The book was published in 2013 without incident, though it was banned by the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2020. Navin Manogaran’s Tamil-language novel Peichi (பேய்ச்சி), published in 2019, was banned at the same time.

Last year, the High Court overturned the Gay Is OK! ban, though the Court of Appeal’s judgement today means that the book cannot be distributed in the country. Homosexuality remains prohibited in Malaysia, and the book’s title and central thesis are therefore at odds with the law.

Various books have been banned in Malaysia in recent years, including Sapuman and other comics by Zunar. The comic Belt and Road Initiative for Win-Winism was banned in 2019, the novel Perempuan Nan Bercinta (‘a woman in love’) was banned in 2014, and dozens of books were banned in 2017.

The Fall:The End of the Murdoch Empire

Rupert Murdoch—proprietor of The Sun, The Times, and Fox News—ran his media empire for more than seventy years, before finally retiring aged ninety-two. Murdoch was an endling, the last surviving member of an endangered (and now extinct) species: the press baron. He announced his retirement on 21st September, less than a week before the publication of a new book on the twilight of his career, which will be released tomorrow.

The UK edition of Michael Wolff’s book is titled The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire, and little did the author know how prescient that subtitle would be. (In the US, the subtitle is The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.) This is Wolff’s second book on Murdoch: he previously wrote The Man Who Owns the News, an excellent biography that benefited from rare access to Murdoch himself and his immediate family.

As Wolff writes in his introduction to The Fall, “Murdoch hated my book about him,” so this second volume is an unauthorised account. But Wolff still has contacts close to Murdoch, explaining that this makes him “the journalist not in his employ who knows him best.” (This is actually rather modest for Wolff, who boasted in a November 2011 GQ article about Murdoch: “I know what he is thinking; I know how he is thinking it; I know the rhythms of the way he talks about what he thinks; I know what he remembers and I know what he forgets.”)

After that first Murdoch biography, Wolff wrote a series of books on Donald Trump’s presidency, starting with Fire and Fury, which relied for many of its revelations on Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief political strategist. Wolff similarly uses former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes as a major source in The Fall. The problem this time, though, is that Ailes resigned in disgrace in 2016, and died a year later. Despite this, The Fall is padded out with a prologue on Ailes, who Wolff still seems to admire.

The Man Who Owns the News contained extensive notes on its sources, but The Fall has no notes whatsoever. And while it’s become standard practice for writers of contemporary history to cite unidentified sources, Wolff goes a step further: often, he doesn’t even refer to individual sources, whether anonymous or otherwise. Also, Wolff didn’t approach Fox News to verify what he had written, breaking a basic rule of journalism. Then again, as he explains in his introduction, he sees himself as “a writer, perhaps more so than as strictly a journalist”.

This results in a book with plenty of colour but little evidence. Wolff adds novelistic details to his dialogue, telling us not only what the participants said, but also how they said it, how they felt, and even their body language at the time. He quotes Murdoch’s concerns about the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case, for instance: “quietly, but clearly” Murdoch said that the lawsuit “could cost us fifty million dollars”. Later in the same conversation—on Murdoch’s yacht—the tycoon banged a table, grumbled, scowled, and felt affronted. How Wolff knows all this is anyone’s guess.

Murdoch’s prediction of the Dominion payout was a gross underestimate, as Fox ended up paying almost $800 million for broadcasting Trump’s lies about election fraud. Wolff was in the courtroom when the judge announced that Fox had settled the case, and he reveals that Murdoch originally proposed firing host Sean Hannity as part of the settlement. (Ultimately, Tucker Carlson was sacked instead.)

Another of Wolff’s stylistic devices is to distance himself from the narrative, to an extent that sometimes misleads the reader. In Fire and Fury, he wrote that Trump telephoned an “acquaintance” without revealing that the acquaintance was Wolff himself. Likewise, in The Fall, he describes Ailes speaking to an “interlocutor” without disclosing that he was almost certainly the interlocutor in question. (He has also done this in recent interviews, with an anecdote about Murdoch, Trump, and a “guest” in a lift. In some interviews, he has identified himself as the guest, though in others he leaves the guest unnamed.)

When Murdoch retired last week—an event that Wolff did not foresee—he confirmed that his son Lachlan would take over as executive chairman. (As in the HBO series Succession, the long-term heir will only be determined once Murdoch dies.) In light of that announcement, Wolff’s reading of their relationship now seems off beam: “he seemed to wholly disregard whatever Lachlan might say. Could it be that the father had had it with the son?” It’s a rhetorical question, but the answer is apparently ‘no’.

Wildtype 2023

Wildtype, the annual season of short films programmed by Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa and Sasawat Boonsri, returns next week. The event was held in several provinces in 2021 and 2022, though Wildtype 2023 has expanded significantly, with screenings at Doc Club and Pub in Bangkok, Mueang Thong Rama in Phayao, Alien Artspace in Khon Kaen, Chiang Mai University’s Department of Media Arts and Design, Noir Row Art Space in Udon Thani, Lorem Ipsum in Hat Yai, 82 Jabang in Pattani, Grow Home in Chaing Rai, June Art Home in Phitsanulok, and Class Café in Korat. This year’s highlights include Koraphat Cheeradit’s Yesterday Is Another Day, Vichart Somkaew’s Cremation Ceremony (ประวัติย่อของบางสิ่งที่หายไป), and Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s ANG48 (เอเอ็นจี48).

In Yesterday Is Another Day, a teenage boy enjoys what could be his last day of freedom, as he prepares to appear in court on lèse-majesté charges. Cremation Ceremony condemns three Thai politicians—Anutin Charnvirakul, Abhisit Vejjajiva, and Prayut Chan-o-cha—by slowly burning their portraits in a metaphorical act of retribution. ANG48 reappropriates footage from Chulayarnnon’s recent video works, including his banned film Birth of Golden Snail (กำเนิดหอยทากทอง).

Yesterday Is Another Day and Cremation Ceremony will be screened in Bangkok on 1st October, and in Chiang Mai on 5th October. Cremation Ceremony is showing in Udon Thani on 7th October and in Khon Kaen on 5th November. Yesterday Is Another Day will also be shown in Phayao on 1st October, in Pattani on 2nd October, in Chiang Rai on 7th October, and in Khon Kaen on 4th November. ANG48 will be shown in Bangkok, Pattani, and Phayao on 1st October; in Chiang Mai on 4th October; in Phitsanulok on 7th October; in Udon Thani on 8th October; and in Khon Kaen on 7th November. ANG48 and Yesterday Is Another Day will be screened in Hat Yai on 1st October. All three films will be screened in Korat on 1st October.

Yesterday Is Another Day had a previous screening at Silpakorn University in Bangkok. Cremation Ceremony has previously been shown at the AEY Space gallery in Songkla, at Lorem Ipsum in Hat Yai, and at the University of Phayao. Both films were also included in this year’s Chiang Mai Film Festival. ANG48 was first shown at the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok.

Nitade Movie ClubDragon Inn

King Hu’s Dragon Inn (龍門客棧) will be shown at Chulalongkorn University next week as part of a triple bill. The screening, organised by Nitade Movie Club, will be at the Faculty of Communication Arts on 19th September. Dragon Inn (also known as Dragon Gate Inn) set the template for the modern wuxia (martial-arts fantasy) film, and the genre was revived in the 2000s by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍) and Hero (英雄).

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

Veeraporn Nitiprapha’s novel The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth was originally published in Thai (ไส้เดือนตาบอดในเขาวงกต) in 2015, and was translated into English by Kong Rithdee in 2019. Veeraporn describes the shroud that descended over Bangkok following the events of May 2010: “After the fire was doused and the terrible incidents ended days later, the city would still find itself cloaked in an impenetrable haze that prevented it from knowing the truth of what had actually happened. That darkness would remain in place for many years.”

In an interview with the Electric Literature website, Veeraporn explained how the novel had been directly inspired by Ratchaprasong: “I was overcome with a deep, painful bitterness seeing the fashionable, well-educated, well-paid people of the city feeling content about the injuries inflicted upon the poorer, less educated people who were mostly from the upcountry. And it was important to write about that bitterness.” This situates the novel within a movement that Sayan Daenklom called “Post-Ratchaprasong art” (in the journal Read/อ่าน, vol. 3, no. 2).

The novel has an intentionally melodramatic narrative, in a parody of Thai lakorn (soap operas), particularly Club Friday (คลับฟรายเดย์เดอะซีรีส์). In the Electric Literature interview, Veeraporn linked the repetitive nature of soap plotlines to the vicious cycle of Thai politics: “they have the same old toxic storylines that keep repeating themselves, which is also very similar to how the general public keeps becoming involved with politics in the streets of Thailand.” (The short film The Love Cycle makes the same point, comparing lakorn remakes to the cycle of Thai coups.)

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth also describes the whitewashing of another notorious episode from the collective memory: “6 October was twelve years past and its memory had begun to fade. People were no longer even sure if it had actually happened.” (Similarly, all reminders of Ratchaprasong’s violent past have long since been removed.) The short films We Will Forget It Again (แล้วเราจะลืมมันอีกครั้ง) and Delete Our History, Now! (อำนาจ/การลบทิ้ง), and the exhibitions Amnesia and Unforgetting History, also address this social amnesia, which is a central theme in Thongchai Winichakul’s book Moments of Silence.

6ixtynin9: The Series

Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s 6ixtynin9: The Series (เรื่องตลก 69 เดอะซีรีส์) was released on Netflix on 6th September (6/9). Pen-ek has remade his 1999 thriller 6ixtynin9 (เรื่องตลก 69) as a six-episode series with a new cast. In an interview with the Bangkok Post two days before the release date, he denied that the project was a straightforward remake: “I wouldn’t call it a remake because that wasn’t what I intended to do... I think this is a new version of the story and not a remake. There are more storylines, new characters and locations.”

The plot has certainly been expanded, though the events of the original film are all repeated. (Even the 1990s technology has barely been updated: the characters now have smartphones, but landlines and cassettes are still significant to the plot.) As in the film version, a young woman (Toom) loses her job and finds ฿1 million in a box outside her door. Like the similar setup in Shallow Grave, this unexpected windfall soon leads to unwanted visitors and bodies piling up. Alfred Hitchcock is another clear influence, especially Rope (bodies in chests) and Psycho (the swamp). Pen-ek even has a Hitchcockian cameo in the series, as an advertising executive.

While Toom’s plotline sticks closely to the film version, there’s a new subplot involving a police drugs raid (which takes up most of the final episode), and a mysterious woman in white who greets the deceased at the pearly gates. (This female Saint Peter is played by Veeraporn Nitiprapha, author of The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth/ไส้เดือนตาบอดในเขาวงกต). The heavenly sequences take the series into Magical Realist territory, when two dead characters are—literally—given a new lease of life. This initially seems like a reprieve for one man, though he dies again when a joke from the film version is actually carried out in the series (in a reference to In the Realm of the Senses/愛のコリーダ).

The series is more graphic than the film, as the film was made before Thailand’s movie rating system was introduced. (The sex scenes are framed similarly to those in Pen-ek’s Ploy/พลอย.) In an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored, Pen-ek described how the censors instructed him to add a caption reassuring cinema audiences that Toom had been successfully apprehended by the police: “we were asked by the police to put the rolling credit saying that she was caught and went to jail.” Their justification wasn’t the usual crime-doesn’t-pay moral lesson; instead, it was a face-saving measure by the police: “if the girl could do this, the police look bad.”

The film was made, and set, in the aftermath of Thailand’s 1997 economic collapse (known here as the ‘tom yum goong crisis’). The new series was filmed shortly after the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused similar economic damage. Toom’s company goes bankrupt and—like real-life businesses such as Star Edu, owners of the Kaplan Thailand franchise—its management tries to avoid giving its staff the severance pay they’re legally entitled to.

The show also has a political message: news reports of pro-reform student protests are seen on TV sets throughout the series, starting with footage from 16th October 2020. Similarly, Snap (แค่... ได้คิดถึง), The Island Funeral (มหาสมุทรและสุสาน), Tang Wong (ตั้งวง), and Pen-ek’s short film Two Little Soldiers (สาวสะเมิน) are also punctuated by news reports of political violence. The series ends with an ominous written epilogue speculating on another state crackdown: “THE WIND OF CHANGE HAS BLOWN AWAY... TEAR GAS A YEAR LATER. BUT HOW LONG WILL IT LAST? ONLY TIME WILL TELL.”

The film version of 6ixtynin9 will be shown on 5th November in an outdoor screening at the historic Metropolitan Waterworks Authority building in Maen Si, Bangkok. The screening is part of the second กรุงเทพ กลางแปลง (‘Bangkok open air’) festival, which runs from 7th October to 12th November. The film was previously shown at Bangkok Screening Room in 2017. As part of a Pen-ek retrospective in 2018, it was screened on DVD at the Jam Factory and in 35mm at House RCA, and it was also shown at Alliance Française as part of another Pen-ek retrospective that year.