Sukiyaki Western Django

Sukiyaki Western Django was directed by Takashi Miike, the prolific Japanese horror/exploitation film-maker whose Ichi The Killer is often cited as one of the most violent films ever made.

In a prologue with a painted backdrop resembling Tears Of The Black Tiger, we learn about the Genpei War, a conflict between rival Genji and Taira gangs. Then, in an isolated town, the descendants of the rival groups prepare for a showdown, with one side in white and the other in red. I was reminded of the current political situation in Bangkok: two sides and two colours (anti-government, in yellow; pro-government, in red) facing each other in a violent confrontation.

The lead character is a lone cowboy (clearly inspired by Clint Eastwood's character in A Fistful Of Dollars) who arrives in town, proves he is quick on the draw, then puts an end to the feud between the two gangs by defeating both of them (just as Eastwood's character does). The stoical cowboy's role is not substantial, though, as he mostly bides his time until the final duel. Arguably more central to the story is a silent young boy whose mother and father belonged to different gangs.

Django, an early Spaghetti western, provides the inspiration for Sukiyaki Western Django, and indeed Miike's film is technically a Django prequel, as we learn at the end of the film that the young boy will later travel to Italy and become known as Django.

Miike has put a Japanese twist on the Italian Spaghetti western genre, a genre which was itself partly inspired by the Japanese samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. There have been similar attempts from other countries, the closest equivalent to Miike's being the Japanese Noodle western Tampopo. From India came the Curry western Sholay. This year, the South Korean The Good The Bad & The Weird was marketed as a Kimchi (pickled cabbage) western. The Israeli films Fortuna and Hagiga B'Snuker were known as Bourekas (a traditional pastry dish). Spaghetti westerns were predated in Germany by Spatzle (egg noodle) westerns such as Der Schatz Im Silbersee.

Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino makes an amusing cameo appearance in the prologue, wearing a poncho in another echo of Clint Eastwood; when we return to his character near the end of the film, however, he has become a ridiculous old man in a wheelchair. Other characters are equally implausible. Neither gang leader is remotely menacing: one rolls his eyes, cowers behind his men, and recites Shakespeare very badly; the other has the weak-looking, lithe physique of Russell Brand. The most absurd character is the sheriff, who becomes severely schizophrenic in an unsuccessful attempt at slapstick comedy.

The film's dialogue is delivered in English, though the actors are largely Japanese, and their thick accents make many of their lines incomprehensible. There is stunning cinematography in several sequences, notably the prologue with its artificial backdrop and a couple of scenes with stylised blue lighting, though the characters and dialogue make it hard to take the film seriously.

This Area Is Under Quarantine

A new documentary by Thai film-maker Thunska Pansittivorakul, This Area Is Under Quarantine, was screened at Makhampom Studio, Bangkok, last night. (Thunska's website is at thaiindie.com; all of his previous films were shown at a retrospective in April.) Before the premiere of this new feature-length documentary, there were screenings of his recent short films Action! (which premiered at the 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, and is currently showing as part of the 4th Project 6) and Middle-Earth (which premiered at the 11th Thai Short Film & Video Festival), and his music video Blinded Spot. Most of the photographs from Thunska's recent Life Show exhibition were also displayed, though some were missing. [Guess which ones!]

Thunska has always made highly provocative films, and This Area Is Under Quarantine is no exception. Its first half resembles his earlier films Life Show and Chemistry, with two gay men being interviewed about their past relationships. (They later have sex with each other, filmed in close-up with a constantly moving camera, recalling Thunska's film Sigh.)

One of the men mentions that he is a Muslim, which unexpectedly veers the discussion towards the notorious incident at Tak Bai in 2004 when eighty-five Muslim men suffocated while held captive by the Thai army. Video footage of the Tak Bai incident is included, and Thaksin Shinawatra, who was Thailand's Prime Minister at the time of the incident, is directly criticised in the film.

More contentiously, photographs of Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, who were hanged in Iran in 2005, are also included, with the suggestion that they were hanged because they had consensual sex with each other. In fact, human rights organisations have since concluded that the two Iranians were hanged for their rape of a thirteen-year-old boy, and thus that their reputation as gay martyrs is inappropriate. [Though hanging anyone for any crime is, of course, abhorrent.]

There were a few technical glitches at last night's sold-out screening. The film will be shown again at the same venue on 1st September.

12th Thai Short Film & Video Festival

The 12th Thai Short Film & Video Festival will open on 29th August at the new Bangkok Art & Culture Centre, running until 14th September. (The BACC is also the venue for the forthcoming exhibition Traces Of Siamese Smile.) Last year's 11th Festival provided an opportunity for Thai film-makers to respond to the 2006 military coup, and featured several marquee-name directors.

This year's event will begin with Sompot Chidgasornpongse's film Diseases & A Hundred Year Period. Sompot was an assistant director on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes & A Century, and his new film is a reaction to the Thai censorship of Apichatpong's work.

Halliwell's Film Guide 2008

This is the 23rd edition of Halliwell's Film Guide, now retitled Halliwell's Film Video & DVD Guide 2008 and edited by David Gritten. Gritten takes over from John Walker, who had edited the Guide since Leslie Halliwell's death in 1989.

Leslie Halliwell was famous for his dislike of modern cinema, refusing to give his maximum four stars to any film made after Bonnie & Clyde. His capsule reviews would damn many films with faint praise, and it's quite fun to look up your favourite films to read the criticisms which accompany even the highest-rated titles. The Seventh Seal, for instance, is a "minor classic", and Annie Hall was successful for "no good reason". Too often, a film's narrative structure is unfairly criticised; for example, Citizen Kane has "gaps in the narrative", Jaws is "slackly narrated", Dr Strangelove has an "untidy narrative", and so on.

In his stint as editor, John Walker rewrote some of the most acerbic reviews and revised many of the star ratings. At the last minute, he requested that his name be removed from this latest edition, hence the sticker bearing David Gritten's name covering Walker's.

Gritten has improved the Guide's layout, with blue text for each film title and a line between each entry. The star ratings are now much more generous than in Halliwell's day - perhaps too generous. The latest edition reviews more than 24,000 films, which is more than most other guides though less than the 27,000 in Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever. Videohound only includes films available on VHS or DVD, however, so while it does feature DTV titles missing from Halliwell's, it doesn't cover any titles which were released theatrically but not on video. For that reason, Halliwell's is still necessary.

Diary Of The Dead

Diary Of The Dead is the latest in George A Romero's zombie series. (The previous films are: Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn Of The Dead, Day Of The Dead, and Land Of The Dead. The first two are notable for their social commentaries and for their then-unprecedented levels of on-screen gore.)

Like Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project, Diary Of The Dead is a mockumentary comprised of purportedly recovered footage. As in those two earlier films, we are first introduced to the film-makers and their equipment (taking care to establish the multiple cameras, thus enabling the real film-maker to justify shot/reverse-shot editing). The same themes - that filming an event makes it more real, and that the camera viewfinder filters reality - are explored in all three films.

Diary Of The Dead's film-within-the-film is titled The Death Of Death; the film's real title, and Romero's name, do not apear until the end credits, though Romero does have a cameo role as a police officer (and there are also cameos by Quentino Tarantino and Wes Craven, as radio reporters).

Funny Games

The Austrian version of Michael Haneke's Funny Games was released in 1997. The film was intended as an endurance test for viewers, and Haneke has called it his only deliberate act of audience provocation. In the film, two articulate, charming, yet sadistic young men torture a bourgeois family. The scenario resembles Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and Haneke returned to the theme with the more subtle Cache in 2006.

This year, Haneke remade Funny Games in Hollywood. The only differences are the language (English) and the cast (led by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth). The script has not been changed, and the same ideas are explored: the total emasculation of the husband/father, the sudden disruption of bourgeois complacency, and the breaking of the fourth wall to render the audience complicit in the action.

The soundtrack, camerawork, and editing are practically identical to the original Funny Games, to an even greater degree than Gus VanSant's Psycho remake. To such an extent, in fact, that the exercise becomes redundant - why don't American viewers simply watch the subtitled original version?

Watts and Roth can't quite hide their natural movie-star charismas, in contrast to the utterly un-self-conscious performances of the original actors (Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Muhe). Brady Corbet, as Peter, successfully adopts the mannerisms of Frank Giering, who originally played the character. Michael Pitt, playing Paul, is less chilling than Arno Frisch's original interpretation of the same role.

International Film Festival 2008

The 2008 International Film Festival, organised by Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, opens on 8th August with Four Months Three Weeks & Two Days (which premiered in Thailand at the EU Film Festival last year). The Festival (chulafilmfest.multiply.com) runs until 25th August, with free admission to every film.

2008 Bangkok International Film Festival

It has been confirmed that the Bangkok International Film Festival will go ahead this year, running from 23rd to 30th September at CentralWorld's SF World cinema. (This year's Festival poster was designed by Tears Of The Black Tiger director Wisit Sasanatieng.) The Festival's future had been in doubt following corruption charges filed against Juthamas Siriwan, the former head of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, relating to money she received from the American company Film Festival Management.

The Festival budget for this year will again be provided by TAT, though the funding will amount to less than half of the budget for the 2007 Festival (which itself relied on only half of the 2006 Festival budget). The financial situation may not be as drastic as it seems, however, as previous festivals wasted enormous amounts of money on corporate events which no-one attended and on Hollywood stars who made only fleeting appearances.

4th Project 6

Project 6, a film and photography exhibition, will be hosted by Gallery VER, Bangkok, next month. The event will include the short film Action! (premiered at the 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival) by Thunska Pansittivorakul, whose photographic exhibition, Life Show, is currently on display at VER. The 4th Project 6 will open on 15th August (the day Life Show closes), and will run until 30th August.

Teeth

Teeth, directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, is a blackly funny horror film about a teenager with a vagina dentata. Once she discovers her 'mutation', she uses it to castrate the various male chauvinists who seem to populate her life. Her brother is a ridiculously over-the-top stereotype, though the other characters are all believable. The central character herself is sympathetic throughout 99% of the film, though her femme fatale smile in the final shot is out of character.

Metropolis: complete print discovered

A complete print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis has been discovered at the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. The full-length version, which premiered in 1927 at over three hours long, had previously been considered lost.

There have been various attempts to restore the film over the years, the most successful being the 2001 Murnau-Stiftung version, though even that superb edition represented only 75% of the original footage. Archivists had given up all hope of ever finding the missing 25%.

The complete print discovered in Buenos Aires is in 16mm, and, as the photographs indicate, its condition is not exactly pristine. However, the fact that a complete version exists, in any condition, is a revelation. A new Murnau-Stiftung restoration, incorporating the Buenos Aires footage, has already been initiated.

Wilders charged; Wilders acquitted

Today, Geert Wilders was charged with anti-Islamic blasphemy by a Jordanian court, following the online release of his inflammatory film Fitna earlier this year. Wilders faces three years in prison, and may be arrested by Interpol if he leaves his home country, the Netherlands. Yesterday, however, Dutch prosecutors acquitted Wilders of all domestic charges filed against him.

Subversion

Subversion, by Duncan Reekie is the first book to explore not only avant-garde art cinema and film-making collectives but the entire history of underground films, from the 1920s onwards. The book is a strange combination of dry theoretical discussion and personal polemic. Amos Vogel's Film As A Subversive Art, with its frame-enlargements from hundreds of obscure films, remains an essential study of underground cinema [and is probably my all-time favourite film book]; Subversion does not quite live up to its subtitle (The Definitive History Of Underground Cinema), but it does provide an opportunity to consider underground films within their historical contexts.

Italian Film Festival 2008

Bangkok's Lido cinema will host the Italian Film Festival 2008 later this month, from 18th to 25th June. One of the highlights will be Martin Scorsese's documentary My Voyage To Italy (20th and 25th June at 6.30pm). Scorsese's documentary (in the style of his earlier A Personal Journey Through American Movies) is a four-hour tribute to Italian cinema, from Cabiria to Federico Fellini. Scorsese's most passionate comments are reserved for Neo-Realist classics such as Rome: Open City and Bicycle Thieves.

Indiana Jones IV

The fourth film in the Indiana Jones series, Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, is similar in tone to the three earlier films, with wit and serial-style adventure in equal measure. Again, it's directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a story by George Lucas.

Unfortunately, these days Lucas can't resist CGI. (His Star Wars prequels were almost entirely computer-generated.) In interviews, Spielberg stresses how traditional the action sequences and special effects are, in keeping with those of the earlier Indiana Jones films (and Spielberg is known for his love of analogue film technology), yet there are still too many CGI elements here. The CG aliens in the finale are excusable, but rendering monkeys, insects, and waterfalls with CGI is merely cutting corners.

As the rather clunky title suggests, the plot is a little convoluted. It's something about aliens from another dimension bringing civilisation to the ancient Mayans, though it results in exposition overkill. After all that exposition, only the most cursory of explanations is given for the incomprehensible events at the end of the film. Anyway, shouldn't Spielberg be done with flying saucers by now? (The film's MacGuffin object is inspired by quartz skulls which, while rumoured to be pre-Columbian artefacts with paranormal powers, are more likely to be 300-year-old fakes.)

The film is set in 1957, so the bad guys this time are Communist Russians. (Since the end of the Cold War, Russians have been replaced as Hollywood movie antagonists by Europeans and Arabs.) The lead villain, played by Cate Blanchette, never poses a real threat; thus, while the chase sequences are exciting, they aren't especially suspenseful, because Blanchette is not particularly scary. The 1950s setting also allows for comments on US domestic nuclear testing (in an eerily realistic mock-suburban test site) and paranoid anti-Commie witch-hunts, though these themes are dropped almost as soon as they are begun.

Harrison Ford is superb as Indy, and it's possible to suspend your disbelief that a man his age can still be an action hero. This time around, Ford as Indy is joined by Shia LaBeouf, who makes his entrance on a motorcycle in an homage to Marlon Brando's character in The Wild One.

In the first sequence, there's a glimpse of the Ark of the Covenant, a subtle nod to the first (and best) Indiana Jones film, Raiders Of The Lost Ark. But how many of the new film's audience-members will get the reference?

Sweeney Todd

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet St., is a Gothic horror musical directed by Tim Burton. It stars Burton's regular alter ego, Johnny Depp, and co-stars Burton's partner, Helena Bonham Carter. (Depp and Bonham Carter both also starred in Burton's Charlie & The Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride.)

Sweeney Todd was adapted from a Broadway musical, and it does feel quite stagey at times. I'm not especially a musicals fan, and the songs in this film haven't won me over. The production design, acting, and direction are all excellent, however. London is much more convincingly realised than in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, and Depp and Bonham Carter's characters both have suitably pallid complexions. Of the supporting cast, Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall play according to type but do so superbly.

When Depp first holds his cut-throat razor, we recall Edward Scissorhands, and the similarity is increased due to Sweeney and Edward's equally wild hair (shared by Burton himself). Sweeney is a less sympathetic or misunderstood character than Depp's other roles for Burton, though, despite the Grand Guignol-style tragic climax.

Adaptation

Adaptation was directed by Spike Jonze, and stars Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. It was written by Charlie Kaufman, one of the most fascinating contemporary screenwriters (who also wrote Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind).

Cage plays a character called Charlie Kaufman, a fictionalised version of Kaufman himself. [Subsequent references will be to the character, not the real writer.] Cage also plays Charlie's brother, Donald, who is credited as co-writer of the film, though Donald Kaufman is a purely fictitious character. Charlie is hired to adapt a book, The Orchid Thief, into a screenplay; he hopes to produce a profound, true-to-life script, though he spends months on frustrated false starts. Donald, meanwhile, writes a formulaic thriller screenplay which is immediately optioned. Unable to create a compelling narrative from The Orchid Thief, Charlie decides to follow the book's author, Susan Orlean; surprisingly, her secret (and totally fictionalised) double-life is a far more fascinating screenplay subject, providing the character arcs and suspense that Charlie had dismissed as unrealistic.

Adaptation is incredibly self-referential, recalling films about the frustrations of film-making such as 8 1/2 and Stardust Memories, and the novel Tristram Shandy (and thus the film A Cock & Bull Story). The film is not only about Charlie's Orchid Thief adaptation, it is his adaptation, as all of his ideas have been incorporated. His voice-over in which he runs through several potential film openings echoes Woody Allen's opening monologue in Manhattan.

All About Eve

All About Eve, starring Anne Baxter and Bette Davis, was directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz. Baxter plays Eve Harrington, a seemingly devoted fan of the actress Margo Channing (played by Davis, who smokes throughout the entire film). Margo takes Eve under her wing, initially taken in by Eve's faux humility and innocence. It later transpires that Eve has is calculating and ambitious, exploiting Margo's insecurities about impending middle-age.

Baxter has the title role, but the film is largely a study of Davis's Margo, who is far more realistic than Eve. Davis is sensational: alternately cynical, compassionate, warm, and bitter. By contrast, Baxter simply goes from too-good-to-be-true to scheming bitch. The greatest scene, showcasing Davis's impressively unglamorous performance, is the party sequence, in which a drunk Margo warns her guests: "Fasten your seatbelts; it's going to be a bumpy night!". The party also features a scene-stealing cameo from Marilym Monroe, in the same year as her bit-part in The Asphalt Jungle.

The two leading men, especially Hugh Marlowe, are rather bland, though George Sanders, as an oily gossip columnist, is more interesting. The ending (in which the cycle begins again, with a young girl ready to do to Eve what Eve did to Margo) is disappointing, considering the otherwise sophisticated, witty script.

While the film is set on Broadway, the script includes regular industry in-jokes and barbs about Hollywood. Rather than a backstage theatre story, it might be more accurate to call it a behind-the-scenes film, and it's one of the very best of its kind.

Blood For Dracula

Blood For Dracula was filmed by Paul Morrissey back-to-back with his Flesh For Frankenstein. (Antonio Margheriti is sometimes cited as a co-director with Morrissey, though the extent of his contribution is unclear.)

The two films are very similar: both star Udo Kier and a cast of other non-native English speakers concentrating on their lines so much that they forget to emote, both feature the incongruous Joe Dallesandro, and both are Gothic melodramas which culminate in campy violence. In both films, Dallesandro appears out of place not only because of his beefcake physique and American accent but also due to the attitudes of his characters. In Blood For Dracula, in contrast to the aristocratic lineage of every other main character, he plays a worker who hopes for a Communist revolution, adding the theme of class conflict to the traditional Dracula story.

Blood For Dracula is notable for the cameo roles played by two acclaimed directors. Roman Polanski (director of Chinatown) is great as a labourer playing cards in a tavern, though Vittorio DeSica (director of Bicycle Thieves) is almost incomprehensible as a down-on-his-luck aristocrat.

Inside Out Outside In

Gallery VER, Bangkok, hosted a short season of indie films by Thunska Pansittivorakul and Panu Aree from 18th to 20th April. The event, Inside Out Outside In, featured a complete retrospective of both directors.

Panu Aree's first film, Once Upon A Time, is a compilation of home movie footage of his family at an amusement park, and was edited by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. His other films are: Destiny, Postcards From Kaosan Road, In Between, The Magic Water, Stills, Parallel, The Lost Highway, and Silent Lights.

Thunska's excellent Middle-Earth originally screened at the 11th Thai Short Film & Video Festival, and his recent films Soak and Action! were screened at the 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival.

Thunska's early short films are:

Private Life
(Thunska's first film: he drives to the beach with his boyfriend, but they never make it and can't find the time or place to be alone with each other)

Lovesickness (aka Just A Life II)
(a man in his studio apartment, with only a goldfish for company; he treats it obsessively as a partner: feeding it rice, washing it with soap, and ejaculating into its water)

...for Shiw Ping 28/12/97
(faces filmed in negative, and footage of a rainstorm: Thunska's memories of his relationship with Ping in 1997)

Sigh
(two men have sex, with the images filtered by double-exposures, rapid editing, and low resolution)

Chemistry
(a man narrates his formative sexual experiences in voice-over)

Life Show
(a young actor is interviewed about his illicit sex-life, with nudity and smoking censored in the style of Thai TV)

After Shock
(a man masturbating in a boat; made for the Ministry of Culture in response to the 2004 tsunami)

Unseen Bangkok
(a split-screen film: a nude hustler discusses his clients, and a covert recording of a man taking a shower)

Endless Story
(a slideshow of Thunska's personal and graphic snapshots)

Vous Vous Souviens De Moi?
(a short story about a robot who cannot feel love, narrated over images of a nude man in an apartment)

Out Of Control
(a group of boys playing on a beach)

You Are Where I Belong To
(Thunska filming people he meets in Japan, as he tries to forget his ex-boyfriend)

Thunska's feature-length documentaries Voodoo Girls and Happy Berry (and the short sequel Happy Berry: Oops I Did It Again; all featuring frank discussions between groups of Thai youngsters), and his music video Blinded Spot (for Soundlanding) were also screened.

The Asphalt Jungle

The Asphalt Jungle, drected by John Huston, is a heist film starring Sterling Hayden. As in so many subsequent heist films, a gang of expert criminals is assembled to plan and execute the perfect robbery. Naturally, the execution doesn't quite go according to plan: a combination of coincidences and double-crossings ensure that crime does not pay (as dictated by the American film censors, of course).

While in later films it's often the chief of police who's revealed to be the most corrupt character, in The Asphalt Jungle it seems that every character except the chief is corrupt. In fact, the police commissioner makes an earnest speech about the necessity of law enforcement, which is out of place alongside the film's otherwise gritty dialogue.

This is Huston's third Film Noir, after The Maltese Falcon and Key Largo. Those two earlier films had Noir plots, though they were both rather stagey (confined to unatmospheric interiors, with characters who are entertaining rather than menacing). The Asphalt Jungle, on the other hand, is more stylistically and emotionally Noirish. It's full of dark shadows, and the equally dark plot offers no redemption for any of the characters.

There's a notable pre-stardom cameo from Marilyn Monroe, though Sterling Hayden in the hardboiled lead role gives the film's greatest performance. He would later star in Kubrick's The Killing, a film whose plot owes a great deal to The Asphalt Jungle.

12:08 East Of Bucharest

12:08 East Of Bucharest is a comedy directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, set in the small Romanian town of Vaslui. It is one of a handful of recent Romanian films to receive international critical acclaim, including Cristian Mungiu's Four Months Three Weeks Two Days.

The film is divided into two distinct halves. First, we are introduced to the three central characters on a typical morning. There is a TV host, trying to book guests for his cheap talkshow; later, he pretentiously introduces the show with quotations from ancient philosophers. Then a henpecked history teacher, who drinks too much and owes everyone money. Finally, a lonely old man, who is busy buying a Father Christmas costume so he can entertain school-children. The teacher and pensioner will be the only guests on the TV host's talkshow.

The second half is taken up entirely with the talkshow, and is filmed by the TV studio's camera. The show's topic is: was there a revolution in Vaslui, or not? Anti-Communist demonstrations led to Romania's self-appointed leader Nicolae Ceausescu fleeing Bucharest by helicopter at 12:08 on 22nd December 1989. The talkshow takes place on the sixteenth anniversary of Ceausescu's downfall, and hinges on a debate about when the population of Vaslui began demonstrating.

The teacher maintains that he was part of a small group of people who shouted anti-Ceausescu slogans in the town square before 12:08, though all of the show's callers disagree with him. Defending himself against accusations that he is a liar, he repeatedly recounts what happened in the town square, adding extra information each time. The callers (including an ex-guard, with all the best lines, who exposes the show's inadequacies) all offer their own different versions of what took place. As in Rashomon, objective truth remains elusive.

Fitna

Fitna, a short film by Geert Wilders, has been released online. Wilders had previously attempted to screen it on Dutch television, without success. After Fitna's official website, fitnathemovie.com, was deleted by its host company, the film was finally hosted by liveleak.com (though even they removed it for one day, due to security concerns). There have been demonstrations against the film in Islamic countries.

Fitna begins as an attack on the Koran. Passages from the book, which seem to incite violence, are followed by images of Islamic terrorism. Wilders presents Islam as a violent, intolerant religion; what he does not acknowledge, of course, is that there are some equally blood-thirsty passages in the Bible. Kurt Westergaard's Mohammed cartoon (reprinted in February) was originally featured as Fitna's first image, though it was later replaced by a new caricature of Mohammed carrying a bomb.

The second half of the film, however, degenerates into a racist anti-immigration polemic. Wilders directly condemns the rising Muslim population in Europe in general and Holland in particular, and is clearly resentful of the influences immigrant Muslims have in Dutch society.

Thus, while the first half is provocative and interesting, the second half is no better than the hysterical 'flood of immigrants' headlines in UK newspapers such as the Daily Express.

Death Proof

Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof was originally part of Grindhouse, a double bill also featuring Planet Terror. After the lukewarm American reaction to Grindhouse, the concept was dropped for international markets, and instead the films have been released separately. The revised release pattern enabled Tarantino (who also did his own cinematography) to add almost thirty minutes to Death Proof, including much more dialogue and a lap-dancing scene which was completely cut from the Grindhouse version. After reviving other 1970s exploitation genres (Blaxploitation in Jackie Brown and 'chop socky' kung-fu in Kill Bill), Grindhouse is a natural progression, in which he uses jump-cuts and scratched prints to recreate the lurid experience of 1970s grindhouse films. Death Proof was shot entirely on location, which adds to the cheap, gritty grindhouse look.

The film has two halves, which are roughly parallel. In each segment, a quartet of women are observed at a distance by Stuntman Mike, a retired film stuntman. Stuntman Mike is one of the few characters in cinema to get sexual pleasure from car crashes (the only other example that comes to mind is Crash, the JG Ballard novel and David Cronenberg film). The first half of Death Proof ends with Mike crashing into the girls' car at 200mph, killing all four of them. In the second half, after he chases the girls (in a stunningly tense though implausible sequence) they are eventually able to overtake him, leading to a (convincingly grindhouse-style) feminist revenge ending.

Death Proof (titled Thunder Bolt in a split-second jump-cut during the title sequence) is exactly what you'd expect a Tarantino car-chase film to be. It's full of witty, profane, trivial, naturalistic dialogue; it has moments of bloody, stylised violence; there are constant references to cult cinema, music, and television; there's a cool 1970s soundtrack; there's a low-angle point-of-view shot (from inside a car bonnet, rather than the usual car boot); it exists within the self-referential Tarantino universe, with name-checks for Big Kahuna Burger and Red Apple cigarettes (see Pulp Fiction) and recurring characters (see Kill Bill). There are even in-joke references to his other films: Tarantino (in a traditional cameo) repeats the "tasty beverage" line from Pulp Fiction, and Rosario Dawson's ringtone is a Bernard Herrmann composition used in Kill Bill.

War Of The Worlds

War Of The Worlds (a remake of the 1950s classic The War Of The Worlds) is a major disappointment. Its director (Steven Spielberg) and leading actor (Tom Cruise) are arguably the two most successful men in the Hollywood film industry, and their previous collaboration, Minority Report, was a sophisticated sci-fi thriller, but War Of The Worlds pales in comparison.

Tom Cruise gives his standard Cruise smirk and nothing more, so his character has no real development. Dakota Fanning, playing Cruise's daughter, spends the whole film screaming, in a hugely irritating performance. The plot, which is sometimes borderline illogical, sets up several possibilities which are later simply dropped. The feel-good ending is unbelievable.

The original version is one of the greatest science-fiction films of the 1950s, and one of only a handful of films featuring a full-scale alien invasion. (Others include Earth Vs The Flying Saucers, Independence Day, and the parodic Mars Attacks.) It is also, however, an overtly Christian film, with a quasi-Biblical narration.

This religious aspect has been retained in Spielberg's remake, which I find both surprising and disturbing. Spielberg's film, a blockbuster 'event movie', was released around the world, yet he still included references to "God's creatures" in the narration: he has turned American cultural imperialism into proselytism, entirely inappropriate in an increasingly secular and multi-cultural society.

Tomyam Pladib

Tomyam Pladib, which opened on 19th March until 5th June, is an exhibition of Thai and Japanese art hosted by the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. The exhibition features Emerald, a video by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Emerald is the name of an abandoned Bangkok hotel, and Apichatpong's slow-moving camera films the hotel's deserted rooms filled with floating white feather-like objects. The effect is elegiac and contemplative, evoking the memories of the hotel's long-departed guests.

Apichatpong discussed his various films and videos in a presentation this evening (Apichatpong On Video Works). He explained the origins of his multi-screen video installations (one of the more surprising sources being Thai melodramas), and played extracts from several of his films. He also screened a few short films in full: Ghost Of Asia (a man follows the instructions of a group of children), 0116643225059 (a telephone call between the director and his mother), and The Anthem (a wonderful overture to cinema, first screened at the 11th Thai Short Film & Video Festival). There was also a short Q&A session with the director.

5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival

The 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival began yesterday.

This year's event, organised by Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Project 304 (project304.org/beff5), has The More Things Change... as its central theme. There will be two programmes commenting on post-Thaksin political instability (Learned Behaviour, 27th March at 8.30pm and 30th March at 2pm; Track Changes, 26th March at 8.30pm and 30th March at 6pm). Both of these programmes will include films from Spoken Silence at the 11th Thai Short Film & Video Festival, including Middle-Earth in Learned Behaviour. Another highlight is sure to be Thaiindie Buffet, featuring a selection of independent Thai films (Thaiindie Showcase, 29th March at 8pm) and music videos (Experimental Music Videos, 27th March).

This evening, the Sompot+Thunska programme featured three works by Sompot Chidgasornpongse (Naoko Is Trying To Teach Me How To Make Tonkatsu In One Minute, 8,241.46 Miles Away From Home, and Landscape 101 01 1101 01...) and two new films by Thunska (Action! and Soak). There was also a Q&A session with Thunska.

Action! is a short compilation of out-takes from Zart Tanchareon's film God Man, featuring the actor Sitthipong Prempridi. Sitthipong died last year, and Action! is Thunska's tribute to him.

Soak stars Saifah Tanthana, who is filmed swimming in the sea (during which the soundtrack is dominated by the gurgling of the water) and riding a motorcycle, with the video camera representing Thunska's gaze. The film is an extended, improvised sequel to Thunska's first film, Private Life. It also recalls his film You Are Where I Belong To, which briefly features Thunska filming a man as they paddle in the sea.

The Bangkok Experimental Film Festival runs from yesterday until Sunday, primarily at Esplanade Cineplex.

The Return Of The King

The Return Of The King is the third film in Peter Jackson's trilogy The Lord Of The Rings. I saw the extended version, which is almost an hour longer than the theatrical version. This third film is more satisfying than the second, The Two Towers, perhaps because the battle of Gondor (in this film) has more narrative significance than the battle of Helm's Deep (in the second film). In retrospect, the substantial time devoted to Helm's Deep now seems more like an excuse for dramatic tension in the second film rather than an integral episode in the overall narrative. It's nice to return to bucolic Hobbiton at the end, a place which (as in the first film, The Fellowship Of The Ring) resembles Teletubbyland!

The Two Towers

The Two Towers is the second film in Peter Jackson's trilogy The Lord Of The Rings, the sequel to The Fellowship Of The Ring. I saw the extended version, which is substantially longer than the theatrical version, containing several unique sub-plots. It was as impressive as The Fellowship, although slightly less enjoyable. I was fascinated by the sheer variety of characters and locations established in The Fellowship, whereas The Two Towers more conventionally intercuts between three plot strands. Andy Serkis is outstanding as the schizophrenic Gollum, physically ravaged and mentally unbalanced by his "precious" ring.

The Stranger

The Stranger was the first film directed by Orson Welles following his Rio documentary It's All True. His work on It's All True earned Welles an unfair reputation: that he was profligate and extravagant. The Stranger was a conscious (and successful) attempt to prove otherwise - to show that he could make a regular, popular film within the studio system, on-budget and on-schedule.

In the film, Welles plays a Nazi war criminal (the architect of the Holocaust, no less) who has changed his identity and escaped to a small American town. He marries a judge's daughter, played by Loretta Young, to keep up appearances. Edward G Robinson plays a detective attempting to track him down.

A similar situation occurs in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, made in the same year, with the major difference being the role of the nazi's wife: Loretta Young's extremely naive character is very different from the Ingrid Bergman role in Notorious. A more general comparison could be made with Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt, in which a killer seeks refuge in a small American town; in that film, it is the killer's sister who is (initially) as naively unsuspecting as Young is in The Stranger. Welles's line about watching people from the clock tower "like God, looking at little ants" anticipates his role in The Third Man, when he looks down from the ferris wheel at the "dots" below.

The Stranger is a less personal project than Welles's other films, though it does include numerous high-angle and low-angle shots which add visual interest. The dark lighting and heavy shadows are not only typical of early Welles but also typical of the period, as by this point Film Noir had caught up with Welles's eccentric cinematography. (Welles later directed the final film in the classic Noir cycle, Touch Of Evil.)

L'Erotisme

L'Erotisme is a DVD featuring eleven underground films, inspired by Georges Bataille's excellent book Eroticism, a study of sex and death as cultural taboos:

Ritualis
(a Black Mass ritual set to Heavy Metal music; directed by Pat Tremblay)

Maldoror: A Pact With Prostitution
(a man meets a prostitute in a cemetery, and kills a grotesque glow-worm [!] with a rock; directed by Nate Archer and Micki Pellerano)

Ass
(as a woman fingers herself, the red-tinted film intercuts rapidly between her face and her buttocks; directed by Usama Alshaibi)

KI
(partially obscured glimpses of a man receiving fellatio; directed by Karl Lemieux)

La Fin De Notre Amour
(an artist and an unidentified woman cut themselves with razors and surgical instruments; directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani)

Extase De Chair Brisee
(a rape-revenge story: a woman kills two masked men with a drill, after they molest her in a park; directed by Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt and Frederick Maheaux)

Baby Doll
(a doll is tied up and fondled, in a bondage fantasy; directed by Serge DeCotret)

The Loneliest Little Boy In The World
(a pig's head is licked and worshipped by a nude woman; directed by Mike Dereniewski)

Paranoid
(a woman films herself with a camcorder as she inserts a dildo; directed by Anna Hanavan)

D'Yeux
(a slide-show of erotic photomontages featuring body parts and meat; directed by Monk Boucher)

Imperatrix Cornicula
(a woman rubbing herself with feathers, and birds gathering in the sky; directed by Jerome Bertrand)

Almost all of these short films are silent, except for Ritualis (which features slowed-down incantations as dialogue, though would be more effective as a silent film). Maldoror even adds mock-Victorian inter-titles, to add to the silent film aesthetic.

Maldoror's occult symbols evoke Kenneth Anger's treatment of magick, and the film's decaying, abject glow-worm could be a refugee from David Lynch's Eraserhead. It's one of the best films on the DVD.

Another highlight is KI, the only film to cross the borderline into hardcore imagery. Its intentionally degraded and washed-out images resemble Peggy Ahwesh's The Color Of Love, another porn/sex scene rendered semi-abstract by degraded film-stock, though KI is less confrontational than Ahwesh's uncomfortable film.

I also like La Fin De Notre Amour very much. It's filmed as a series of static images (like La Jetee), and, though it's perhaps a bit too stylised (tinted red and blue), it is certainly disturbing.

In my opinion, the weakest films are Ritualis (cliched, verging on self-parody) and, especially, Extase De Chair Brisee. This latter film is like a cross between I Spit On Your Grave and The Driller Killer - in other words, it's an exercise in gratuitous exploitation. The unconvincing acting, costumes, and make-up remove any sense of empathy or engagement, and the camerawork is frequently out of focus.

Fast Food Nation

Richard Linklater's film Fast Food Nation is a drama inspired by the superb investigative book of the same name by Eric Schlosser. It follows two recent documentaries on the secretive and unhealthy nature of McDonald's and its products, McLibel and Super-Size Me.

The exploitation of the American fast food industry is illustrated by the experiences of Mexican immigrants working at a meat-packing factory, a student activist who has a McJob at Mickey's (the fictional company created for the film), and a Mickey's executive who investigates claims of contaminated beef. Though the characters are fictitious, the film concludes with genuine Blood Of The Beasts-style slaughterhouse footage.

The narrative intercuts between a series of concurrent stories, though characters from separate stories never meet (except for one shot in which vehicles from two different segments unknowingly stop beside each other at a traffic light). The structure doesn't quite work, though, because it's too episodic. Characters are introduced, they have one or two major scenes, then they are never seen again, leaving numerous plot points unresolved. This pattern is repeated throughout the film, which has an impressive ensemble cast but no strong central plot line to link everything together.

The Seven Year Itch

The Seven Year Itch is a comedy directed by Billy Wilder, starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell. Like all 20th Century Fox productions of the period (the mid-1950s), it was filmed in CinemaScope. Wilder would later direct Monroe in his fantastic Some Like It Hot.

Ewell plays Richard Sherman, a New York publisher whose wife and son go on holiday for the summer. Monroe's un-named character sub-let's the apartment above Sherman's (from an implicitly gay male couple), and he fantasises about seducing her while his wife is away. In the earlier play of the same name, they do have an affair, though in the toned-down film version he is only unfaithful in his imagination. (Some of the fantasy sequences are parodies of popular films, such as From Here To Eternity.)

At the start, the premise is laboured a bit too much, with repeated emphasis on Sherman's regular office job and normal marriage, and several references to the New York wives who apparently all go on summer vacations without their husbands. It seems a bit strained, as if it were attempting to normalise an unrealistic scenario.

There'a a bit too much of Ewell, who narrates the story and appears in every scene, though when Monroe appears she is sensational. She has some great lines, such as recognising classical music because "there's no vocal". This film also contains Monroe's most famous scene: standing over a subway grating, her skirt billowing above her waist (iconically represented in a Sam Shaw photograph).

A nude photograph of Monroe had been published by Playboy the year before the film was released, and in an interesting parallel, Monroe's character had also previously posed for a cheesecake photo. In an even more blatant in-joke, Sherman, discussing Monroe's character, says "Maybe it's Marilyn Monroe"!

To Catch A Thief

To Catch A Thief is in many ways a typical Alfred Hitchcock film, though it doesn't have the tension or cinematic sophistication of much of his other work. The sophistication on display here relates to the costumes and locations, rather than the camerawork or editing. The pace is extremely slow: excessive establishing shots of scenery and grand buildings, and over-long helicopter shots and chase sequences.

Cary Grant, one of Hitchcock's favourite actors, plays John Robie, a cat burglar who has retired to the French coast. Grace Kelly, probably Hitchcock's favourite actress, plays Frances Stevens, who falls in love with him. Robie is that archetypal Hitchcock figure, the persecuted innocent: he gave up burglary years before, though he is framed for a spate of recent jewellery thefts. To prove his innocence, he must catch the real burglar himself. The final revelation of the burglar's identity is hardly a surprise, and the whole plot is rather flimsy.

There are some amusing double-entendres, including Kelly asking Grant if he wants "leg or breast" (she's talking about pieces of chicken). Apparently, these moments were improvised by Kelly and Grant. There's one, however, which Kelly seems to fluff: she tells him: "I have a feeling that tonight you're going to see one of the Riviera's most fascinating sights. I was talking about the fireworks!". (Her pause between these two sentences is much too short, and thus not suggestive enough.)

Interestingly, Grant's character explains that he travelled around Europe performing in a circus during his youth - which is exactly what Grant did in his own youth. Grant is always a superbly suave actor, though he was better in Hitchcock's North By Northwest and Notorious. In this film his skin is alarmingly dark; his tan actually makes it difficult to recognise his face in some scenes. I thought there was something wrong with the colour settings on my TV, but all the other actors look normal.

Japanese Film Festival 2008

The 2008 Japanese Film Festival, organised by the Japan Foundation, takes place from 18th-25th January in Bangkok.

The event's subtitle is The Hidden Treasures Of Japanese Cinema: Masterpieces From Its Golden Age - 1950s-1960s. The 1950s were indeed a golden age for Japanese film (as, previously, were the 1920s), with Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon introducing international audiences to Japanese cinema for the first time. However, the cinema of Japan does not begin and end with Kurosawa. The Japanese Film Festival emphasises the lesser-known directors of Japanese cinema's second golden age.

The schedule includes Gion Bayashi (Saturday at 8pm) by master director Kenji Mizoguchi, and the histroical drama Wild Geese by Shirou Toyoda (Sunday at 3pm). Also included is The Ghost Of Yotsuya (Sunday at 8pm), a classic interpretation of Japan's most famous ghost story by its greatest horror director, Nobuo Nakagawa. (The legend of Yotsuya is the Japanese equivalent of the Thai folk take Mae Nak, on which Nang Nak was based.) There are also two films by Mikio Naruse: Repast (Thursday at 7pm) and Sound Of The Mountain (Friday at 7pm). All films will be screened, free of charge, at the Grand EGV cinema, Siam Discovery Center. See jfbkk.or.th/event/jff2008_eg.html for the full schedule.

Hostel

Hostel was directed by Eli Roth, one of a group of contemporary directors known as the Splat Pack due to the graphic violence of their horror films. The films themselves have been called 'torture porn', such is their emphasis on blood and gore.

Hostel begins with a group of three male backpackers, who are told about an Eastern European hostel full of attractive women. When they arrive at the hostel, they do indeed meet three ladies, though what they don't realise until far too late is that they have been drawn into a honeytrap. The women are prostitutes, hired by a Russian company called Elite Hunting, who bring the men to a derelict factory where they are to be tortured and killed by the company's paying clients. (Elite Hunting was supposedly inspired by a Thai organisation whose website Roth saw.)

The torture scenes are dank, dark, and hard to watch the first time. (I saw the unrated edition, which is slightly longer than the theatrical version.) During subsequent viewings I always have to look away when Josh's ankles split open. Jan Vlasak, who plays a Dutch businessman who uses Elite Hunting's services, gives a chilling, casually sadistic performance.

Prosperity For 2008

A new short film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul is available at Thunska Pansittivorakul's website thaiindie.com. The film, Prosperity For 2008, is a beautiful, abstract work, in which a dot of light travels slowly across a black background (and is perhaps a firework in the night sky).

Jackass II

I had seen neither the Jackass MTV series nor the original Jackass film, so I had little idea of what to expect from this sequel. Basically, it's a group of raucous men daring each other to perform a variety of risky stunts, directed by Jeff Tremaine.

What surprised me was how scatological many of these activities were - bodily fluids (both human and animal) were required (and ingested) for several stunts. The version I saw was the unrated DVD, and I don't know how much of this material was missing from the theatrical version.

The team are so over-enthusiastic that it's difficult to laugh at them too much, though it is genuinely fascinating in a disgusting kind of way, if only to wonder at how they cleaned up and recuperated afterwards. Also, there's a cameo by director John Waters, whose film Pink Flamingos rivals Jackass II for sheer abjection.

Casino Royale

Casino Royale was the first of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, though the film rights to it had always eluded Cubby Broccoli, who produced films based on all of Flemings subsequent Bond books. A film of Casino Royale was made in 1967, though it was a spoof version featuring a huge, chaotic ensemble of directors, writers, and stars. When the rights finally passed to Broccoli's company, a canonical version could finally be made, directed by Martin Campbell.

Campbell had previously directed Pierce Brosnan as an ultra-suave Bond in GoldenEye. Brosnan's replacement, Daniel Craig, is more reminiscent of Die Hard's John McClain than the traditional James Bond character. (Does he want his Martini shaken or stirred? "Do I look like I give a damn?" is his iconoclastic answer, though he does do the obligatory "Bond, James Bond" line at the end.)

The Bridge

The Bridge is a documentary directed by Eric Steel. Throughout 2004, Steel used remote cameras to film people walking across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, looking for anyone who was preparing to jump off the bridge. His cameras captured nineteen people as they jumped to their deaths. The film includes footage of these suicides, and interviews with friends and relatives of those who died.

Documentary film-making has always raised questions about directorial intervention, though in this case the issue is absolutely fundamental. Steel maintains that, any time he saw someone behaving unusually, he called the coastguard, and that he was thus able to prevent six suicide attempts. One of the film's interviewees, a photographer, explains the detachment he feels when looking through a camera viewfinder, and this has also been explored in horror films such as Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project. In The Bridge, the photographer overcame his artistic instinct and intervened to save the life of the suicidal woman he was photographing, and Steel himself is adamant that he did all he could for each of the people whose deaths he filmed.

Destination Moon

Destination Moon was directed by Irving Pichel and produced by George Pal. Pal's intention was to inject scientific credibility and documentary realism into science-fiction, though the result is a rather boring, uneventful film. A group of engineers build a rocket, fly to the moon, and then fly back again. They don't encounter any aliens, they don't crash, and there isn't even any dramatic conflict. (Some elements, such as the coloured space suits, the procedural details, and an astronaut adrift in space, could have influenced Kubrick's 2001.)

While Pichel and Pal were perfecting their scrupulous accuracy, they were overtaken by a low-budget exploitation film, Rocketship XM, which was rushed into production and actually released before Destination Moon. Rocketship XM has no production values, but it's far more exciting than Pichel's film. Pal later produced the alien invasion film The War Of The Worlds, one of the most dramatic sci-fi films of the period, but it was the success of Destination Moon which revived the genre at the start of the 1950s.

Love Of Siam

Love Of Siam is an exceptional romantic drama set in downtown Bangkok (Siam Square, hence the title) and directed by Chukiat Sakweerakul. It's exceptional for a variety of reasons, though unfortunately its advertising campaign highlights none of them.

This is one of the longest and most ambitious films in recent Thai commercial cinema. Although on the surface it's a teen romance, the film also portrays the gradual breakdown of a marriage, a surprisingly mature and emotionally deep sub-plot considering that Chukiat is less than thirty years old. It is also one of the first Thai films to portray a gay relationship sensitively and realistically, following the coming-of-age of two childhood friends who develop stronger feelings for each other in high school. The film never resorts to melodrama, and (at least in my opinion) it does not have a conventional, happy ending.

It's a shame that this wonderful film is so misrepresented by its trailer and poster, both of which present it as a story of two heterosexual relationships. Apparently, this strategy was approved by the director, who did not want to limit the potential audience - it is being marketed as a love story, not as a gay film. In commercial terms, the scheme has paid off, as screenings are sold-out and it's the latest hot topic in Bangkok. But surely if you want a mainstream audience to accept a gay narrative, you should not pretend that it's something else just to lure them into the cinema.

I hope that, before too long, a film like this can be marketed as what it is - a deeply affecting portrayal of contemporary relationships, emphasising the complexities of friendship, family, and gay first-love.