Showing 1 - 5 of 5
A life less ordinary
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 04/01/2013
» Movies about addiction date in interesting ways. Seen today, Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, whose lurid treatment of alcoholism made the film a bombshell of controversy in 1945 (it may have been the first movie to present alcoholism as a disease rather than a character flaw) and won it a shelfful of awards, looks antiquated now. Its overwrought dialogue and posture of appalled shock at behaviour that subsequent films have made familiar to the point of cliche haven't aged well.
Deadly by design - a film noir masterpiece
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 14/12/2012
» There are very few good people in Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, and those who do appear are on the screen for only a few minutes, usually terrified and trembling at the doom that they know awaits them. The world is never a hospitable place in the film noir movies made in Hollywood during the late 1940s and early 1950s. All are steeped in the mood of pessimism created by World War II with its extermination camps and nuclear bombings. But Kiss Me Deadly, released in 1955, is the most hopeless and least romantic of them all.
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.
Hypnotic epic
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 02/03/2012
» Most of the mysteries referred to in the title are of the kind found in those immense, ultra-melodramatic serialised novels that kept 19th-century readers waiting for the next issue. The generous documentary extras included with this new release explain that the super-prolific Camilo Costelo Branco, whose 1854 serial novel Mysteries of Lisbon is adapted here, sometimes wrote these long-running, cliffhanging narratives. So here we have all of the mothers dead in childbirth, multiple identities, long-shot coincidences, crimes of passion, stories-within-stories-within-stories, and other tasty ingredients that make those books fun to read even today.
Paranoia rules
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 20/01/2012
» John Carpenter's 1982 version of The Thing is about monsters from space in the same way that Lars von Trier's recent Melancholia is about the end of the world. Both films use spectacular catastrophes out of science fiction to show the power of destructive mental states that can literally pull the world out from under those affected by them.