Showing 11 - 17 of 17
Thirties shocker still affecting
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 27/07/2012
» When the Motion Picture Production Code, a draconian set of moral censorship guidelines, came crashing down on Hollywood studios in 1934 it put an end to one of the most adventurous eras in American film-making, extinguishing a spark that was not to be revived until the early 1970s.
The end of an era
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 01/06/2012
» There are no trysting lovers steaming up windows in Roy Baker's 1958 film on the sinking of the Titanic, and if there were they would be badly out of place. If James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster, Titanic, was an uneasy welding together of a trite across-class-lines romance and a terrific disaster movie, Baker's film more successfully combines the styles of a feature film and a documentary.
An exploration of erotica
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 18/05/2012
» Sex as a loveless addiction, a compulsion that brings no pleasure or happiness, is no stranger to us here in Bangkok, where sex bars, bathhouses and massage parlours cater nightly to regulars who can't stay away. Recently, after I screened this new Blu-ray edition of Shame, Steve McQueen's wrenching portrait of a sex addict, for a group of friends, one of them wondered aloud what would have happened to its hero, Brandon Sullivan, if he had made his way to Soi Cowboy. It is a gruesome thought.
Silenced speaks volumes
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 27/04/2012
» It would be hard to think of many subjects uglier than the one surveyed in excruciating detail by director Hwang Dong Hyuk in this film. Adapted from a novel by Cong Jee-yeong that was in turn based on actual events that took place in Korea in the mid-1990s, Do-ga-ni centres on a Korean school for deaf children where the students are routinely beaten and raped by the teachers and staff. It follows the events through a young teacher who discovers the extent of the abuse and then finds that all attempts to stop it are frustrated as the local police and Christian community close ranks to protect the offenders.
Pure cinematic fantasy
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 30/03/2012
» Almost as impressive as his own films in recent years has been Martin Scorsese's work as a guide to and curator of other directors' work. His loving cinematic tours of Italian cinema and personal favourites from the US and other countries have attracted millions of viewers to films that they may never had heard of otherwise. He does not take us back yet again to Citizen Kane or Grand Illusion or Intolerance. His choices are often obscure movies that he saw on television as a boy in New York _ often, I suspect, on the old 1950s Million Dollar Movie programme_ and never forgot. Scorsese has also been active in the restoration old films, and viewers who watch elaborately-documented DVD editions of classic films like those issued by Criterion will find him turning up from time to time doing commentary tracks on which his enthusiasm is impossible to resist.
When worlds collide
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 17/02/2012
» A few years ago I happened on a series of releases on DVD of an ancient US science-fiction television programme called Tales of Tomorrow. It was broadcast during 1951-2, when memories of World War II and the horrific revelations of its final years were still quite fresh. They gave rise to a widely felt pessimism about human nature that was apparent in the movies of the post-war years _ shadowy American film noir culminating in Robert Aldrich's apocalyptic, still-terrifying Kiss Me Deadly, French existentialist parables like Wages of Fear, and many of the Japanese classics made during the period.
Peeking into the past
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 03/02/2012
» In her book, On Photography, Susan Sontag pointed out that the passage of time often readjusts the aspects of a photograph that we find interesting. When looking at an old photo of someone's remote relative, taken in the 1880s or 1890s, the face of the person represented may be the first thing we look at, but often the clothing is what really draws the attention, or the furniture, knick-knacks sitting on shelves or tabletops, books on shelves, lamps or wallpaper, things that would have been taken for granted by the person who took the photo.