Indian protests after cartoon is reprinted

There have been protests in India following the reprinting of a Mohammed cartoon by the Tamil newspaper Dinamalar on 2nd September. A dozen highly controversial Mohammed caricatures were originally published in Jyllands-Posten in 2005, and widely reprinted the following year.

Bangkok Post Sunday

The Bangkok Post today relaunched its Sunday edition, substantially expanding its pagination. Traditionally, Sunday newspapers are thicker than their weekday equivalents, and in the UK I enjoyed nothing more than settling down to read The Observer and The Sunday Times on a Sunday afternoon (as I discussed a couple of years ago). So it's great that the Bangkok Post has expanded its Sunday edition.

In contrast, today's edition of The Sunday Nation is extremely thin: only eighteen pages in total, with virtually no advertising at all. Today's launch of the bulkier Bangkok Post Sunday should have been the perfect opportunity for The Nation to either launch a new supplement or revamp its existing content. However, The Nation instead appears to have practically given up. It does at least include national news now, which it had dropped following the launch of the Daily Xpress; the Xpress itself is now twenty pages shorter than it used to be (and is seemingly no longer published on Sundays, replaced by The Sunday Nation).

The 500 Greatest Movies Of All Time

Empire magazine's next issue will feature The 500 Greatest Movies Of All Time - and the magazine will have 100 different covers, each featuring one of the films from the list.

The magazine asked its readers for their nominations last month. My ten choices were a combination of personal favourites and world classics.

International directors and critics were also polled, making this survey, according to Empire, "THE MOST AMBITIOUS MOVIE LIST EVER ATTEMPTED".

The full list of 500 films will be published on 25th September.

nominations for Empire's Top 500

Empire magazine has launched a survey to find the 500 greatest films of all time. Voting is open until 5th September, and you can either vote online at empireonline.com/500 or by using the form printed in the magazine.

Mohammed cartoons publisher cleared

The Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission, Canada, has rejected a complaint by the Edmonton Council of Muslim Canadians against Ezra Levant, the former publisher of Western Standard magazine. A previous Commission investigation into Levant was dropped after Sayed Soharwardy withdrew a complaint against him. Western Standard published the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons on 13th February 2006, one of many magazines which reprinted the images.

Bangkok Post letter

Today's Bangkok Post newspaper has printed a letter I wrote regarding Grand Theft Auto.

Grand Theft Auto withdrawn from Thailand

The distributors of Grand Theft Auto have withdrawn all versions of the game from sale in Thailand, after a taxi driver was stabbed by a man who says the game inspired him.

Phalawat Chinno, a student, admitted murdering Khuan Phokaeng, saying he was motivated by a sequence in the game in which a taxi driver is also murdered. Phalawat stabbed Khuan more than ten times with a kitchen knife. It's not clear exactly which version of GTA (I-IV) he played, although there is a sequence in Grand Theft Auto II titled Taxi Drivers Must Die!; Grand Theft Auto IV had not yet been released in Thailand, and its release has now been cancelled.

Blaming media violence for real-life violence is an easy, knee-jerk response, but it doesn't address the social causes. It could be argued that GTA gave Phalawat the idea to select a taxi driver as his victim (rather than a postman, or a shopkeeper, for example), but the act of playing a game cannot turn someone into a murderer. Violent games can, in contrast, be cathartic, allowing us to release our natural violent feelings in a controlled situation, thus making us less violent in real life.

Violence has always been a part of human nature, and murders were committed long before video games were invented. Violence in the media is reflecting the violence which already exists in real life, not influencing it.

Just because a criminal uses a computer game as an excuse does not mean that the person is any less culpable, unless the person is either so young, or so mentally unbalanced, that they cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. Phalawat's mental state, personal morality, and socio-economic background are the real causes of this crime, not GTA.

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes

As part of the Kubrick Season on More4 this month, Jon Ronson presented (and directed) Stanley Kubrick's Boxes on 15th July, a True Stories documentary about Kubrick's archives. Ronson examined the boxes (designed to Kubrick's specifications) containing the director's notes, photographs, and props in situ at Childwickbury Manor, near St Albans, before they were transferred to the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts in London. The programme includes a short Lolita screen test featuring Sue Lyon, and footage filmed by Vivian Kubrick on the set of Full Metal Jacket.

Art Monthly Australia criticised

Art Monthly Australia magazine has been criticised by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd after it printed a photograph of a nude child on this month's cover. The photograph was published in protest at the closure of a Bill Henson exhibition (which was subsequently cleared of obscenity last month).

The cover photo shows six-year-old Olympia Nelson posing in front of a painted landscape; it was taken by the girl's mother, Polixeni Papapetrou. The magazine now faces losing the state funding it receives.

The Kubrick Files

Today, The Sunday Telegraph (UK) newspaper's Home & Living section has a four-page supplement called The Kubrick Files. It includes extracts from Kubrick's correspondence, taken from the Stanley Kubrick Archive.

Stanley Kubrick Season

More4, a UK digital TV channel owned by Channel 4, will show a season of Kubrick's films this month, as well as a new documentary about his archives on 15th July. (This is the third Kubrick season organised by Channel 4: the first was broadcast in June 1996, and the second in September 1999.)

Deia Juan Carlos case resumes

Spain's National Court has resumed legal proceedings against the satirical magazine Deia, despite the case being dismissed in April. The magazine's controversial photomontage of King Juan Carlos was originally published in 2006. (In a parallel case, two El Jueves cartoonists are appealing against their convictions after they were fined 3,000 euros for their cartoon of Prince Filipe.)

appeal against Jyllands-Posten acquittal fails

An appeal by a group of Danish Muslims against Jyllands-Posten has been rejected. The appeal was launched following the dismissal of a lawsuit against the newspaper in 2006. Jyllands-Posten printed twelve Mohammed cartoons in 2005; the illustrations ignited an international controversy and were widely reproduced.

(A similar appeal, against the acquittal of French magazine Charlie Hebdo, also failed.)

Flat Earth News

Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, paints an unpleasant picture of contemporary journalism. It's subtitled An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood Distortion & Propaganda In The Global Media.

Davies criticises journalists for their reliance on wire stories and press-releases, and for never letting the facts get in the way of a good story. I'm pleased to say that the Daily Mail, a reactionary UK tabloid, is one of the main targets: Davies criticises the racist scaremongering and distortion in the Mail's immigration coverage.

Newspaper sensationalism and distortion is nothing new, of course. Press baron William Randolph Hearst (the model for Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane) once reputedly told a photographer: "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war" (a line which was paraphrased in Kane). Famously, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a fictional newspaper editor explains: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend".

Davies was initially inspired by the news media's unquestioning acceptance of government spin regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. As a pretext for war, the UK and US governments both claimed that Saddam Hussain possessed WMDs and even nuclear weapons, warning that he could deploy them against the West at any time. The BBC reported that some of these claims were inserted at the request of UK spin doctors, and after the invasion of Iraq, the WMD threat was exposed as a gross exaggeration. (Alastair Campbell wrote about his involvement with this issue in his diary, published last year; Davies claims that Campbell's criticism of the errors in the BBC's coverage was a smokescreen to cover the errors in the government's dossiers.)

Flat Earth News is a necessary book, because media literacy is so crucial in a media-saturated culture. Life truly has few greater pleasures than a quality newspaper, though we should always read actively and, sometimes, skeptically.

El Jueves cartoonists appeal

Two Spanish cartoonists, Guillermo Torres and Manel Fontdevila, are appealing against their 3,000 euro fines and lese majeste convictions. They were responsible for a banned cartoon of Spain's Prince Filipe published in 2006.

The C Word

The C Word, rather cumbersomely subtitled How We Came To Swear By It, was broadcast by BBC3 in the UK on 30th July 2007. The programme, directed by Pete Woods, was an hour-long investigation into attitudes towards the c-word, making Channel 4's A Brief History Of The F-Word (2000) seem tame by comparison. It was a fascinating programme which managed to touch on all of the major debates surrounding the word.

The presenter, Will Smith, was quite annoyingly middle-class; he looked a bit like a young Stephen Fry, and I wonder why Fry himself didn't present the show instead. Smith made the class aspect of the word a major focus, which is something I've always avoided because I feel that it's out-dated. Also, he interviewed the increasingly ridiculous Eve Ensler for far too long, perhaps because more important people such as Germaine Greer had clearly turned him down. (Greer made a ten-minute segment about the c-word for BBC1's Balderdash & Piffle in 2006.) Smith told us that the word's first appearance in a newspaper was in The Independent in the 1980s; this 'fact' has been regularly repeated, though my own research has antedated the c-word's first appearance by over a decade.

[Full disclosure: I was invited to take part in this programme, but I couldn't fly back to the UK at a suitable time.]

Maxim Goes To The Movies

This month's Maxim magazine is a special Maxim Goes To The Movies issue, and includes a list titled The 300 Movies You Must See Before You Die!, divided into genres and other (occasionally odd) categories. (Musicals have been deliberately excluded.)

There are actually slightly more than 300 films included, because original films and their sequels are counted as single entries. The Lord Of The Rings I, The Warriors, Fight Club, A History Of Violence, Star Wars V, and Terminator II all appear twice, each in two different categories.

Comedy

• The Big Lebowski
  
• Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy
  
• Kingpin
  
• Monty Python & The Holy Grail
  
• This Is Spinal Tap
  
• Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan
  
• Airplane!
  
• Animal House
  
• Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery
  
• American Pie
  
• Bachelor Party
  
• Bananas
  
• Beverly Hills Cop
  
• Blazing Saddles
  
• Caddyshack
  
• The Cannonball Run
  
• Clerks
  
• Dazed & Confused
  
• Duck Soup
  
• Dumb & Dumber
  
• Election
  
• The 40-Year-Old Virgin
  
• Ghostbusters
  
• Groundhog Day
  
• Happy Gilmore
  
• Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
  
• It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World
  
• The Jerk
  
• Modern Times
  
• The Nutty Professor
  
• Office Space
  
• Old School
  
• The Pink Panther Strikes Again
  
• The Princess Bride
  
• Raising Arizona
  
• Sixteen Candles
  
• Some Like It Hot
  
• Trading Places
  
• Vacation
  
• Wedding Crashers
  
• Wet Hot American Summer
  
• Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory
  
• Young Frankenstein

The Master Class

• Breathless
  
• Citizen Kane
  
• La Dolce Vita
  
• The Seven Samurai
  
• The 400 Blows
  
• The Seventh Seal
  
• Un Chien Andalou

War

• The Deer Hunter
  
• The Bridge On The River Kwai
  
• Dr Strangelove
  
• Apocalypse Now
  
• Black Hawk Down
  
• The Dirty Dozen
  
• Gallipoli
  
• The Great Escape
  
• M*A*S*H
  
• Platoon
  
• Saving Private Ryan

So Bad They're Good

• Glen Or Glenda?
  
• Showgirls
  
• Airport 1975
  
• Barbarella
  
• Battlefield Earth
  
• Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls
  
• Death Race 2000
  
• Phantom Of The Paradise
  
• Reefer Madness
  
• Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
  
• The Toxic Avenger

Sequels That Are Better Than The Original

• Bride Of Frankenstein
  
• Evil Dead II
  
• Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan
  
• Superman II
  
• Terminator II: Judgement Day
  
• Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back

Rebels

• Cool Hand Luke
  
• Taxi Driver
  
• Sid & Nancy
  
• Easy Rider
  
• Billy Jack
  
• Dirty Harry
  
• Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
  
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off
  
• The Graduate
  
• A History Of Violence
  
• The Hustler
  
• The King Of Comedy
  
• Network
  
• One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
  
• Raging Bull
  
• Risky Business
  
• Smokey & The Bandit
  
• Three Days Of The Condor
  
• Trainspotting

Classics

• Lawrence Of Arabia
  
• Kind Hearts & Coronets
  
• The Adventures Of Robin Hood
  
• Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ
  
• Casablanca
  
• Double Indemnity
  
• Metropolis
  
• The Night Of The Hunter
  
• On The Waterfront
  
• The Third Man
  
• Touch Of Evil
  
• Vertigo
  
• White Heat
  
• The Wizard Of Oz

Sci-Fi/Fantasy

• Starship Troopers
  
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
  
• Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back
  
• Alien I-II
  
• Back To The Future
  
• Blade Runner
  
• Children Of Men
  
• Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
  
• ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
  
• King Kong
  
• Planet Of The Apes
  
• Star Wars IV: A New Hope
  
• Terminator I-II

Horror

• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
  
• Night Of The Living Dead
  
• Dawn Of The Dead
  
• Carrie
  
• The Exorcist
  
• The Fly
  
• Halloween
  
• Jaws
  
• A Nightmare On Elm St.
  
• Psycho
  
• Rosemary's Baby
  
• The Shining
  
• 28 Days Later

Non-Boring Documentaries

• Brother's Keeper
  
• Don't Look Back
  
• Hoop Dreams
  
• Pumping Iron
  
• Richard Pryor: Live In Concert
  
• When We Were Kings

Conspicuously Gay Straight Movies (Beyond Top Gun)

• 300
  
• Fight Club
  
• Spartacus
  
• The Bear
  
• The Lord Of The Rings I: The Fellowship Of The Ring
  
• The Warriors
  
• X-Men

Westerns

• The Good The Bad & The Ugly
  
• The Searchers
  
• Jeremiah Johnson
  
• Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid
  
• High Noon
  
• High Plains Drifter
  
• Tombstone
  
• True Grit
  
• Unforgiven
  
• The Wild Bunch

Buddy Movies

• The Last Detail
  
• Top Gun
  
• Superbad
  
• Deliverance
  
• American Graffiti
  
• The Blues Brothers
  
• Breaking Away
  
• Glengarry Glen Ross
  
• The Goonies
  
• Lethal Weapon
  
• The Right Stuff
  
• Saturday Night Fever
  
• The Shawshank Redemption
  
• Stand By Me
  
• Stripes
  
• Swingers
  
• The Warriors

Conspicuously Gay [Patrick] Swayze Movies

• Next Of Kin
  
• Red Dawn
  
• Road House
  
• The Outsiders
  
• Youngblood

Action

• The Matrix
  
• Rocky I-IV
  
• The Road Warrior
  
• Batman
  
• Batman Begins
  
• Battle Royale
  
• The Bourne Identity
  
• The Bourne Supremacy
  
• The Bourne Ultimatum
  
• Braveheart
  
• Clash Of The Titans
  
• Die Hard
  
• Enter The Dragon
  
• Face/Off
  
• First Blood
  
• 48 Hours
  
• Gladiator
  
• The Incredibles
  
• Kill Bill I-II
  
• The Lord Of The Rings I-III
  
• Predator
  
• Raiders Of The Lost Ark
  
• Speed
  
• Spider-Man

Non-Gratuitous Nudity!

• Wild Things
  
• Fast Times At Ridgemont High
  
• Carnal Knowledge
  
• Angel Heart
  
• Body Heat
  
• Boogie Nights
  
• Coffy
  
• Jackass: The Movie
  
• McCabe & Mrs Miller
  
• Mulholland Drive
  
• Poison Ivy: The New Seduction
  
• Revenge Of The Nerds
  
• Ten

Essential James Bond Movies

• Casino Royale
  
• Goldfinger
  
• The Spy Who Loved Me
  
• Live & Let Die
  
• You Only Live Twice

Arthouse

• City Of God
  
• A Clockwork Orange
  
• Annie Hall
  
• Withnail & I
  
• Midnight Cowboy
  
• Badlands
  
• Bicycle Thieves
  
• The Conversation
  
• Do The Right Thing
  
• The Elephant Man
  
• The Last Picture Show
  
• Repo Man
  
• Rushmore
  
• Short Cuts
  
• There Will Be Blood

Mindbenders

• Akira
  
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show
  
• Beetlejuice
  
• Blue Velvet
  
• Brazil
  
• Donnie Darko
  
• Edward Scissorhands
  
• Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
  
• Fight Club
  
• Memento
  
• Pink Floyd: The Wall
  
• The Manchurian Candidate

Best Movies With Puppets

• Being John Malkovich
  
• Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
  
• Team America: World Police
  
• The Dark Crystal
  
• The Muppet Movie
  
• Weekend At Bernie's

Cops

• To Live & Die In LA
  
• Bullitt
  
• Hard-Boiled
  
• Bad Lieutenant
  
• Chinatown
  
• The Departed
  
• Donnie Brasco
  
• Fargo
  
• The French Connection
  
• RoboCop
  
• Seven
  
• Shaft
  
• The Silence Of The Lambs
  
• The Untouchables

Criminals

• The Godfather I-II
  
• No Country For Old Men
  
• Bonnie & Clyde
  
• Reservoir Dogs
  
• Atlantic City
  
• Bad Boys
  
• Bloody Mamma
  
• The Boys From Brazil
  
• Boyz 'N The Hood
  
• Carlito's Way
  
• Casino
  
• Crimes & Misdemeanors
  
• Dog Day Afternoon
  
• The Getaway
  
• Get Carter
  
• GoodFellas
  
• Heat
  
• A History Of Violence
  
• In Cold Blood
  
• The Long Good Friday
  
• Mean Streets
  
• Midnight Express
  
• Natural Born Killers
  
• Pulp Fiction
  
• River's Edge
  
• Scarface
  
• Sexy Beast
  
• Sin City
  
• Super Fly
  
• True Romance

Movies You Need To See Once But Are
So Traumatic You Never Need To See Again

• Leaving Las Vegas
  
• Million Dollar Baby
  
• Requiem For A Dream
  
• Schindler's List
  
• United 93

Casino Royale is [presumably] the recent version rather than the 1960s spoof, and Scarface is the Brian DePalma version instead of the Howard Hawks original, but otherwise the list is refreshingly free of remakes.

The Top 100 Films Of All Time

On Saturday, The Times published a list of the Top 100 Films Of All Time, chosen by a selection of the newspaper's film critics led by James Christopher. The list is deliberately revisionist and provocative, hence its intentional omission of established classics like Citizen Kane. (Kane as the world's greatest film may be a cliche, but it's still an essential film by any standard.) There are actually 102 films on the list, as the entry for Pather Panchali also includes two subsequent films about the Apu character.

The Top 100 Films are as follows:

1. Casablanca
2. There Will Be Blood
3. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
4. Chinatown
5. The Shining
6. Vertigo
7. Kes
8. Sunset Blvd
9. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
10. The Godfather
11. The Sound Of Music
12. Alien
13. 2001: A Space Odyssey
14. The Jungle Book
15. Apocalypse Now
16. Metropolis
17. Annie Hall
18. Don't Look Now
19. The Exorcist
20. The Wizard Of Oz
21. The Towering Inferno
22. The Breakfast Club
23. Some Like It Hot
24. The Philadelphia Story
25. Picnic At Hanging Rock
26. GoodFellas
27. A Clockwork Orange
28. Gone With The Wind
29. Duck Soup
30. Rebel Without A Cause
31. His Girl Friday
32. Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back
33. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
34. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
35. Withnail & I
36. Jaws
37. Beau Travail
38. Rear Window
39. The Graduate
40. Monty Python's Life Of Brian
41. A Star Is Born
42. Blue Velvet
43. Terminator II: Judgement Day
44. A Streetcar Named Desire
45. The Life & Death Of Colonel Blimp
46. All About Eve
47. Fargo
48. Shoah
49. High Society
50. Blade Runner
51. Cabaret
52. La Dolce Vita
53. Mildred Pierce
54. Roman Holiday
55. The Matrix
56. Whisky Galore
57. Raging Bull
58. Dr Zhivago
59. Pulp Fiction
60. The Crying Game
61. Rashomon
62. Taxi Driver
63. On The Waterfront
64. Do The Right Thing
65. The Thin Blue Line
66. Toy Story
67. The Piano
68. The Maltese Falcon
69. Cache
70. The Conversation
71. This Is Spinal Tap
72. Days Of Heaven
73. Great Expectations
74. Rosemary's Baby
75. The Good The Bad & The Ugly
76. From Here To Eternity
77. Pather Panchali/Aparajito/Apur Sansar
78. The Lady Eve
79. Deliverance
80. Tokyo Story
81. North By Northwest
82. Chungking Express
83. Spartacus
84. Festen
85. Dog Day Afternoon
86. Nosferatu
87. The Silence Of The Lambs
88. Wild Strawberries
89. Touch Of Evil
90. Trainspotting
91. Short Cuts
92. Breathless
93. Cool Hand Luke
94. La Haine
95. Grand Hotel
96. Lost In Translation
97. Point Break
98. My Fair Lady
99. Beauty & The Beast
100. Jurassic Park

Every film on this list is important in some way, but there should be more silents (there are only two) and more foreign-language films (there's nothing from Italy pre-La Dolce Vita, and nothing by Jean Renoir or Sergei Eisenstein). There Will Be Blood may be a modern classic, but is it really the second-greatest film ever made?

Deia Juan Carlos case dismissed

A Spanish court has ruled that a satirical photomontage of King Juan Carlos published in 2006 does not constitute lese majeste. (A similar case, however, did result in a conviction, when two El Jueves cartoonists were fined 3,000 euros last year for a cartoon of Prince Filipe.)

Bangkok Post letter

Today's Bangkok Post newspaper has printed a letter from me regarding the discriminatory new policy of the Thai Red Cross.

Ethnography citations

This month's issue (#9.1) of the journal Ethnography includes references to my research into the c-word. Jacqueline Z Wilson's article, Pecking Orders: Power Relationships & Gender In Australian Prison Graffiti, cites both my website and my thesis. (Wilson refers to my "MA thesis", though the title she mentions was actually my BA thesis; my MA thesis was unrelated.)

Bangladeshi cartoonist released

Arifur Rahman, the Bangladeshi cartoonist who was jailed last year following his innocuous "Mohammed cat" cartoon, has now been released after the prosecution failed to pursue the case against him.

appeal against Charlie Hebdo acquittal fails

In 2006, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published a collection of Mohammed cartoons and was sued by a group of French Muslims. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2007, and yesterday an appeal against the dismissal was rejected, completely vindicating the magazine.

The Daily Barometer reference

My etymology of a certain word beginning with 'c' has been cited by Sara Gwin in an article for today's issue of The Daily Barometer, a newspaper published by Oregon State Univeristy.

Daily Xpress

Today saw the launch of Thailand's first free daily newspaper, the Daily Xpress, published in Bangkok by The Nation. (The Nation is one of two daily English-language newspapers on sale in Thailand, the other being the Bangkok Post.)

The first issue of the Xpress has forty-eight pages. Even with ten pages of classified ads, it's an impressive total for a freesheet. 100,000 copies will be distributed every day. The emphasis is on features, human interest, and lifestyle, and the lead story in today's issue is an interview with Lydia (a singer who has been romantically linked with ex-PM Thaksin). The interview is quite a coup [no pun intended], though it boils down to only a few sentences of original quotes.

The Xpress does have a surprising amount of entertaining and original content. It is, however, disposable rather than informative, and it can't replace other titles as a news source.

To coincide with the Xpress launch, the Nation itself has been rebranded. It now styles itself as "Thailand's biggest business daily", and has shifted its focus almost entirely to business news. Politics and international news have been reduced to one page each, and sports news has been moved over to the Xpress. There is no coverage of general Thai news at all.

This is a risky decision, as it narrows the Nation's target market and takes it out of direct competition with the Post. The new business focus also makes it an odd bedfellow for the Xpress, as the two papers are aimed at opposite audiences. While the Xpress may attract young readers who pick it up for free, the copies bundled with the Nation will probably remain unread.

On Sundays, the Xpress will become the Sunday Xpress and "incorporate" [read: 'replace'] the Sunday Nation, meaning that there will be no general Thai news coverage on Sundays.

Indie Sex

Indie Sex is a series of documentaries broadcast on America's Independent Film Channel last year. Each episode deals with a different theme: Censored, Taboos, Teens, and Extremes. Each show features critics and directors discussing the history of (almost exclusively heterosexual) sex in cinema. Most of the film clips (with a few exceptions) are very tame, though the DVD includes more graphic sequences.

The first episode, Censored, gives a detailed history of American film censorship (and is less polemical than This Film Is Not Yet Rated). There is quite a lot of overlap, though, with the same points being made, and the same films being discussed, in several episodes. Among the directors interviewed are John Waters (discussing A Dirty Shame), Fenton Bailey (discussing Inside Deep Throat), Catherine Breillat (discussing Anatomy Of Hell), and John Cameron Mitchell (discussing Shortbus).

uncensored poster provokes death threats

The editor of a Swedish newspaper has received death threats after he published a poster featuring Satan defecating on Jesus.

The poster, advertising the Navar Igen IV: Punx Against Christ! festival, was censored by the local council, though the Ostgota Correspondenten newspaper published it uncensored yesterday.

Zgoda editor released

Aleksandr Sdvizhkov, editor of the Belarus newspaper Zgoda, has been released from jail. He had been sentenced to three years in prison, after his newspaper reprinted the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons.

Film Quarterly

The Observer newspaper has launched a new magazine supplement, Film Quarterly. Worryingly, the entire project is sponsored by Volkswagen; this means that there is no advertising, except for VW ads at the front and back, but the downside is that the magazine is written according to "a brief agreed with Volkswagen".

The lead feature in the premiere issue is an entertaining, extended interview with Jack Nicholson, though this is the only truly substantial piece in the magazine. Besides this, there's a long extract from a forthcoming book, and plenty of short filler articles.

The Observer's other themed magazine supplements (Woman, Food Monthly, Music Monthly, and Sport Monthly) are all monthly publications, whereas Film Quarterly will be published every four months. The first issue, at fifty-two pages, seems quite slim for a quarterly magazine.

complaint against Levant dropped

Syed Soharwardy has dropped his complaint against Canadian publisher Ezra Levant. Levant's magazine, Western Standard, printed the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons on 13th February 2006.

100 Best Films

Today, The Sunday Telegraph newspaper, in its magazine supplement Seven, has published a 100 Best Films list. The list was compiled by Catherine Shoard, Jenny McCartney, Alan Stanbrook, and Mike McCahill. It is divided into ten categories: drama, thriller/action, comedy, animation, horror, romance, kids, musicals, documentary, and world cinema. Each category has ten films, arranged preferentially.

Drama

1. The Conversation
2. Strangers On A Train
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Winter Light
5. Dogville
6. Raging Bull
7. The Godfather I-II
8. Double Indemnity
9. Apocalypse Now
10. Chinatown

Thriller/Action

1. North By Northwest
2. Raiders Of The Lost Ark
3. Manhattan Murder Mystery
4. Heat
5. The 39 Steps
6. Terminator II: Judgement Day
7. Once Upon A Time In The West
8. The Ladykillers
9. The Silence Of The Lambs
10. Die Hard

Comedy

1. Some Like It Hot
2. Annie Hall
3. Meet The Parents
4. Withnail & I
5. His Girl Friday
6. The Odd Couple
7. Zoolander
8. Stir Crazy
9. Gregory's Girl
10. Tootsie

Animation

1. Dimensions Of Dialogue
2. The Jungle Book
3. Spirited Away
4. Toy Story
5. Composition In Blue
6. Grave Of The Fireflies
7. The Secret Adventures Of Tom Thumb
8. Finding Nemo
9. Perfect Blue
10. Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs

Horror

1. Psycho
2. Frankenstein
3. The Exorcist
4. Night Of The Living Dead
5. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
6. Dead Of Night
7. The Wicker Man
8. The Blair Witch Project
9. Vampyr
10. The Kingdom I-II

Romance

1. Before Sunset
2. Head-On
3. I Know Where I'm Going!
4. Brief Encounter
5. The Lady Vanishes
6. The Quiet American
7. Hannah & Her Sisters
8. Bringing Up Baby
9. Days Of Heaven
10. Casablanca

Kids

1. Back To The Future
2. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
3. Babe: Pig In The City
4. Freaky Friday
5. Addams Family Values
6. Mean Girls
7. Anne Of Green Gables
8. Clueless
9. Enchanted
10. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit

Musicals

1. West Side Story
2. The Sound Of Music
3. Cabaret
4. Top Hat
5. Chicago
6. Mary Poppins
7. Singin' In The Rain
8. Nashville
9. Woodstock
10. My Fair Lady

Documentary

1. American Splendor
2. The Sorrow & The Pity
3. American Movie
4. Touching The Void
5. Capturing The Friedmans
6. Spellbound
7. To Be & To Have
8. Hearts & Minds
9. My Kid Could Paint That
10. Neil Young: Heart Of Gold

World Cinema

1. Battleship Potemkin
2. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
3. The Rules Of The Game
4. Tokyo Story
5. The Seven Samurai
6. Pather Panchali
7. Smiles Of A Sumer Night
8. A Man Escaped
9. Andrei Rublev
10. The Colour Of Pomegranates

The animation section is surprisingly diverse and even avant-garde, but that's the exception rather than the rule because, in general, this list is terrible.

Dividing the 100 titles into ten rigid categories is asking for trouble. Manhattan Murder Mystery, for example, is listed as a thriller/action film (the third greatest thriller/action film, no less), but it's actually a comedy. Why it's listed at all is a mystery, because it's a pale imitation of Annie Hall. Bringing Up Baby appears in the romance list, even though it's one of the most famous comedies ever made.

The inclusion of so many very recent films is bizarre. Is Enchanted (released last year) really one of the greatest children's films ever made? Is There Will Be Blood (released this year) really one of the best dramas of all time? Is it really necessary for seven of the ten documentaries to be films made after 2001? Emphatically no, in all cases.

Why is world cinema relegated to only ten films, as if it were a genre? Are 90% of the 100 'best films' really English-language? No. The world cinema category whitewashes whole chapters of film history: no German Expressionism, no French New Wave, and no Italian Neo-Realism.

Oh, and the compilers seem to have forgotten about science-fiction and westerns altogether. D'oh! So there's no place for Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey (no Kubrick films at all, in fact), Metropolis, Stagecoach, The Searchers, or High Noon.

Finally, what about Citizen Kane? I'd like to think that the compilers were making a revisionist statement by omitting it, but I'm more inclined to believe that they simply forgot about it because it doesn't fit into one of their ten categories.

Jane [bleep] Fonda

On Thursday, Jane Fonda made an appearance on Today, a morning TV show in America. She was with Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues. Fonda explained her own involvement with the Monologues, and used the c-word on live television. That doesn't happen very often in the UK, and it hardly ever happens in the US. The host didn't even seem to notice, and continued with the interview, though she did apologise a few minutes later after she realised what had happened.

This is almost an exact replay of a situation on UK TV in 2002, when Caprice appeared on This Morning, also to discuss her performance of The Vagina Monologues. Caprice used the same word, and the presenters didn't notice, so the live interview continued.

Mohammed cartoon reprinted

The most controversial of the twelve Mohammed caricatures published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 has been reprinted today by various European newspapers. Kurt Westergaard's cartoon, of Mohammed wearing a bomb instead of a turban, came to symbolise the entire controversy. (He was filmed by the BBC drawing a new version of the image last year.)

Danish police have arrested three people who were allegedly plotting to murder Westergaard. To show solidarity with the cartoonist, and to defend free speech, his cartoon has been reprinted today by as many as seventeen Danish newspapers (including Politiken, Berlingske Tidende, and Ekstra Bladet, as well as Jyllands-Posten) and by newspapers in Spain, Holland, and Sweden. (All twelve of the original cartoons were reprinted extensively in 2006.) Politiken has printed a partially-drawn version of the Westergaard image on its front page.

Turkish cartoonists on trial

Two Turkish cartoonists, Musa Kart and Zafer Temocin, are on trial for defamation, after the Cumhuriyet newspaper published their caricatures of Turkish President Abdullah Gul. Kart's cartoon, depicting Gul as a scarecrow, was published on 28th November 2007. Temocin's caricature, of Gul in an envelope, appeared the next day. If they are found guilty, they face four years in jail.

editor jailed for reprinting cartoons

Aleksandr Sdvizhkov, editor of the Belarus newspaper Zgoda, has been imprisoned for three years. His 'crime' was to have published the caricatures of Mohammed which were first printed by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. Zgoda was one of many newspapers which reprinted the cartoons in 2006.

El Jueves cartoonists fined

Two Spanish cartoonists, Guillermo Torres and Manel Fontdevila, have been convicted of lese majeste and fined 3,000 euros each. Their 'crime' was to produce a cartoon (drawn by Torres and captioned by Fontdevila) for the satirical magazine El Jueves last year.

Bloody Cartoons

The twelve Jyllands-Posten Mohammed caricatures have finally been broadcast by the BBC in the UK. BBC2's Why Democracy? series posed the question Is God Democratic? in a Storyville documentary titled Bloody Cartoons on Monday evening. The programme opened with a new version of the most famous cartoon (Mohammed's turban as a bomb).

Algerian TV stations not guilty

Managers and journalists from two Algerian television stations (Canal Algerie and Algeria 3) were facing up to five years in jail after they broadcast the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons, though they have now been cleared by an Algerian court which ruled that the broadcasters did not intentionally offend Muslims. The cartoons have also been broadcast on Malaysian television, and reprinted in numerous newspapers and magazines.

Kwartalnik Filmowy

My website is cited in the footnotes of an article in Kwartalnik Filmowy (2006), a Polish film journal.

Goldin photo cropped in UK media

Nan Goldin's photograph Klara & Edda Belly-Dancing (removed from a UK gallery last week) has been published in The Sunday Times today, though the 'offensive' lower part was cropped. The image appears twice in the newspaper's News Review section, on page one and page seven.

It was also included, again with the lower portion cropped, in a BBC TV news report on Thursday. The report included a series of vox-pop reactions to the photo.

[The picture has previously been printed (also in censored form) in the tabloid News Of The World on 11th March 2001.]

There's a full-page, uncensored and uncropped, reproduction of the image in Goldin's monograph The Devil's Playground (2002), on page 115. The Thanksgiving exhibition at Baltic has now been closed, on the requests of Elton John (who owns the photos) and Nan Goldin herself.

Ofcom rejects Diana complaints

Ofcom, the UK broadcasting watchdog, has rejected sixty-two complaints from viewers about The Witnesses In The Tunnel. (The Channel 4 documentary featured a censored version of a notorious photograph of Princess Diana's car crash; the photograph has subsequently been broadcast uncensored by Sky News.)

Cute magazine 'obscene'

Thai police have seized copies of Cute magazine, branding its glamour photographs 'obscene'. They also (perhaps more understandably) seized copies of Penthouse, though both magazines are careful to avoid frontal nudity.

[Media Network on the ground floor of Robinson Ratchada currently stocks Cute magazine, as does Squeeze on the G floor of Siam Paragon, and both titles are currently available (at vastly inflated prices) from ethaicd.com.]

Bangladeshi cartoonist jailed

Arifur Rahman, a Bangladeshi cartoonist, has been jailed following publication of a cartoon in which a boy calls his cat "Mohammed cat". Rahman's cartoon appeared yesterday in Aalpin, a supplement of the newspaper Prothom Alo.

Swedish Mohammed artist death threat

Terrorist organisation Al Quaeda has pledged up to $150,000 as a reward for the murder of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who produced a series of pencil drawings depicting Mohammed as a dog. Additionally, a bounty of $50,000 has been placed on Ulf Johansson, whose newspaper Nerikes Allehanda printed the images on 18th August and has subsequently reprinted them twice (28th August and 16th September).

The cartoons have also appeared in other Swedish newspapers, including Aftonbladet (20th August), Sydsvenskan (24th August), Barometern (22nd August), Dagens Nyheter (22nd August), Expressen, and Uppsala Nya Tidning.

The artist has now gone into hiding, with police protection. A claim, brought by three Swedish Muslim organisations, that publication of the cartoons constituted an incitement to racial hatred, has been rejected by the Swedish Chancellor.

Sky TV broadcasts Diana crash photo

A photograph of Princess Diana receiving medical treatment at the scene of her car crash has been broadcast uncensored on UK TV. On 31st August, Sky News broadcast a report about the medical treatment Diana received after the crash, taken from American television channel CBS News, which included an image of her at the crash scene. (The CBS report was titled Could Diana Have Been Saved?, originally broadcast on 30th August.) Sky later apologised, saying that they had not pre-vetted the CBS report and would not have broadcast it had they known of its contents.

The Sky broadcast represents the only uncensored availability of the image in the UK. Previously, it had been reproduced by Channel 4 and The Sun, though on both occasions Diana's face was obscured. It has been published uncensored in France and Italy.

Thai papers receive police warning

Thai police yesterday wrote to the Thai Rath and Bangkok Today newspapers, warning them that their front-page pictures of scantily-clad women were inappropriate. It's scary that the police can intimidate the press in this way.

Guardian Monthly folds

Guardian Monthly, a glossy magazine launched by The Gua