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  • LIFE

    British grand guignol

    Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 07/03/2014

    » Fans of two films that stand near the top of the long list of British supernatural thrillers, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and multi-director shocker Dead Of Night were poorly served on DVD. Although the image quality in both cases was acceptable, the soundtracks had deteriorated dreadfully. Listening to the main title music of either film was an experience to make the teeth itch, and the screechiness the degraded soundtrack inflicted on young Sally Ann Howes’s voice in Dead Of Night was real fingernails-on-blackboard torture.

  • LIFE

    Like they were shot yesterday

    Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 30/08/2013

    » When Blu-ray discs appeared several years ago there were dire predictions about their future. With film lovers already downloading or renting movies online, the same thing seemed to be happening with cinema that had happened with music: people were willing to sacrifice video and audio quality to have the movie they wanted to see appear on the screen then and there.

  • LIFE

    The hidden language of the soul

    Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 01/02/2013

    » In 2009 German director Wim Wenders was preparing to make a documentary film about the great German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch when her heavy smoking caught up with her and she died within a few days of receiving a cancer diagnosis.

  • LIFE

    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.

  • LIFE

    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.

  • LIFE

    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.

  • LIFE

    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.

  • LIFE

    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.

  • LIFE

    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.

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