31/08/2026
The Friese-Greene Club
September 2026 Schedule
Three years ago Warner Bros decided that Coyote vs Acme, a finished film, would be worth more as a tax write-off than as a film, and shelved it. It has just been released by somebody else and is sitting at 95 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. William Goldman said the only thing anyone in Hollywood knows for certain is that nobody knows anything, and it is still the truest sentence ever written about the business.
So Fridays this month are flops that became cult classics. Blade Runner, The Thing, The Big Lebowski and Donnie Darko all died on release. And The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was pulled from cinemas after a week, and which we show in memory of Tim Curry, who died last week at eighty.
The rest of the month:
Tuesdays are comedian biopics: Lenny, Man on the Moon, Stan & Ollie, Dolemite Is My Name, and The King of Comedy, which is not strictly a biopic, but Rupert Pupkin is more real than most comedians.
Wednesdays, David Cronenberg, from Scanners through Videodrome, The Fly and Naked Lunch to A History of Violence. Exploding heads on the 9th, if that helps you plan.
Thursdays are films shot in a single take, or made to look that way: Russian Ark, which really is one 96-minute shot through the Hermitage, Victoria, Boiling Point, 1917 and Birdman.
Saturdays are anniversaries. Blue Velvet is forty on the 19th. Also My Man Godfrey at ninety, The Day the Earth Stood Still at seventy-five, Trainspotting at thirty and Mulholland Drive at twenty-five.
And Sundays, 1962, which on this evidence was a vintage year: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Jules et Jim, Ride the High Country, To Kill a Mockingbird and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Bookings are up at fgc.in.th.
* * *
Before I get on to this month's rant, two disclaimers, so that I can plead innocent in advance to the various crimes I am about to be accused of.
The first is racism.
We are now told that we are all one people, multicoloured and multidimensional, shades of the same basic core, and that to point out the weaknesses of a nation or a culture, or even its strengths, is to make a racial generalisation, which is not only inaccurate but the sort of thing that would get your statue pulled down, if you had one. So we are taught to treat everybody as if they were exactly the same.
I'm not sure this is always helpful.
It has always been said that the English refuse to learn foreign languages and simply speak English louder. That is largely true. But it's not as bad as the Americans, who don't even bother speaking louder. And I would argue that American foreign policy has been failing for seventy years on precisely this principle: the belief that economic self-interest will drive every nation towards a sensible response. It doesn't. There are cultures in which some things matter more than money, and Americans flatly refuse to believe that anyone could think such a thing.
So my argument is that cultures do have real differences, in priorities, in behaviour, in what they are good at, and that rather than pretending otherwise, we should appreciate a world in which we are not all the same.
The second disclaimer concerns my wife.
When I speak about Thai people, you must understand that my principal specimen of Thainess is my wife, who comes from Korat. Please note: Korat. Not Isan. Heaven forbid you should call her Isan. Korat is the gateway to Isan, which is not the same thing as being Isan, in the way that Dover is not France. She speaks Korat language, you understand, not Isan language, even though it sounds exactly like Isan language and shares 99.9 per cent of its vocabulary. The people of Korat are a distinct and superior race, and the fact that nobody outside Korat has noticed is entirely their loss.
As an aside, and a story I love to tell: the great heroine of Korat is Ya Mo, whose statue stands in the middle of town. There are several versions of what she did. This is the one I like, and if you know a truer one, I'd rather you didn't. In 1826 the Lao army of Vientiane slipped past the governor and his men and arrived at an undefended city, where only the women remained. The soldiers, presumably, were looking forward to a jolly good ra**ng. Ya Mo decided that the only possible solution was not to fight but to throw a party. She brought out the youngest and prettiest women, the strongest moonshine and the fattest pigs, and put on the party of all parties. The Lao had never known the like. They drank and danced themselves into a stupor, whereupon Ya Mo led the women out with the kitchen knives and cut every one of their throats.
I mention this only so that anyone who still imagines Thai women as dainty, docile angels who exist to serve their menfolk should bear in mind that they are quite prepared to slit your throat at any moment.
But back to my wife. I don't want you to think my feelings towards her are anything other than adoration. But I am convinced of one thing. If she were green with six arms and four eyes, and I were a sort of mauve jelly with a hat (some might say I'm heading that way), we would be constantly astonished by how similar our thoughts, aims and desires turned out to be. We would recognise that we were utterly alien species, thankfully with enough in common, and small enough mouths, not to eat each other.
The trouble is that we look alike. Two eyes, two arms, two legs. It's deceptive, because it reinforces the idea that we are the same species. I am writing to tell you that we are not.
* * *
There are many examples I could give, but the one I've been finding interesting lately is this: Thai people do not have our obsession with the future.
The whole of an Englishman's life is arranged around the future. He works through the morning to get to lunch, and through the afternoon to get home. He works Monday to Friday to get to the weekend. He works through the year to get to the fortnight when he can lie on a beach in a country whose language he refuses to learn, and he works through his life to get to retirement. At which point, remarkably often, he promptly has a heart attack and dies. Shell Oil studied its own employees and found that the ones who retired at fifty-five died sooner than the ones who retired at sixty-five. It turns out that the only thing keeping the Englishman alive was the next thing he was working towards.
In Thailand it's different. I'm going to quote Kung Fu Panda here, because it is my main source of knowledge about Buddhism, and the tortoise put it better than I could: "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."
I'm reliably informed that this is actually in the scriptures, though less snappily. The Buddha told his monks not to chase after the past or place expectations on the future, because the past is gone and the future hasn't arrived. And Ajahn Chah, the great Thai forest monk, put it this way: "If you let go a little you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely you will have complete peace."
Now, the words "let go" are anathema to the Briton. We do not let go. We hold on. We hold on to grudges, to umbrellas, to the receipt in case it needs to go back, to our place in the queue, and to the stiff upper lip, which is really just a way of holding on to your face. In the year to March, doctors in England wrote 92.6 million prescriptions for antidepressants. We are not a people at peace. We are a people with a plan, and a plan B, and a small notebook in which plan C is written down in pencil.
Whether or not living in the present is in the scriptures, I can certainly tell you it's in Thai daily life. In our house, the electricity bill is paid at precisely the moment the man arrives with the big cutters for the meter. Bus tickets are bought in the queue for the bus. The birthday cake is bought five minutes before the candles are due to be lit. Umbrellas are only ever purchased at a 7-Eleven, while it is raining, by someone who is already wet. According to the World Health Organisation, 21 per cent of motorcycle pillion passengers in Thailand wear a helmet. The other 79 per cent are living in the moment, and the moment is doing about eighty.
And the economists have noticed. Thailand has the second-highest household debt in the Asia-Pacific. Nearly half of Thai pensioners have no savings at all, nearly half are in debt, and nine out of ten have little or nothing put by for old age. Which makes perfect sense, if you think about it, because old age is in the future, and the future is a mystery.
My wife once noticed that I seemed worried, and asked what I was worried about.
"Everything," I said.
She did not understand at all. So I gave her the list. It took about twenty minutes and ran, in ascending order of magnitude, from whether the air-conditioners were overdue for cleaning, through the electricity bill, the projector bulb, the crack in the bathroom tiles, the exchange rate, the price of eggs, a possible downturn in the Thai economy leading to widespread poverty, the collapse of the international order, and finally global thermonuclear war.
I then asked what she was worried about.
"Nothing," she said.
I pressed her.
"Why worry? We can't change the future."
I am not saying either of us is right. It is a lovely idea to enjoy the present, to seize the day, to make hay while the sun shines. And I do sometimes think the Western mind can ruin the most beautiful sunny day by noticing the clouds on the horizon and going indoors to check the forecast.
* * *
However, there is a downside to living in the present, which is that the future does turn up eventually, whether you've been expecting it or not, and it may arrive to find that you have spent all your money, smoked and vaped until your lungs resemble a Swiss cheese, and drunk your liver into an early grave.
Take Thailand's politicians.
In recent years a surprising number of very rich and very powerful Thais have gone to prison. Not five-star prison. Actual prison.
Thaksin Shinawatra, twice prime minister, billionaire, former owner of Manchester City, spent eight months in Klong Prem after the Supreme Court decided last September that the six months he had previously served in a VIP suite at the Police Hospital, recovering from a trigger finger, didn't count. Reuters described the conditions: three blankets to sleep on, an open bathing area, bland food and the constant risk of violence. He was grouped with the elderly political prisoners, given a prison haircut, and his daughters were allowed to put money into his prison account so that he could spend up to five hundred baht a day on snacks. Five hundred baht. The man used to fly to Chiang Mai by private jet for the weekend.
Chuwit Kamolvisit, the massage parlour king who became an MP, did eleven months for having sixty b**r bars on Sukhumvit Soi 10 bulldozed at four o'clock one morning. "You're like a dog in a cage," he said afterwards. "It's not like in a Hollywood movie, one cell room with two people. No, no, no. This is Thailand. You have to sleep with a hundred, all together."
And Premchai Karnasuta, boss of Italian-Thai Development, the company that built Suvarnabhumi airport, spent nearly two years in Thong Pha Phum prison for shooting a black panther in a wildlife sanctuary. Also a pheasant and a barking deer. It was a camping trip, and men will be men!
I have read enough newspaper articles about the plight of British and Australian drug smugglers in Thai jails to imagine that all this must have been fairly horrific. And I would have thought that for men accustomed to chauffeurs, first-class flights and ch*****ne on demand, it would have been unbearable. People tell me, of course, that even though there is no such thing in Thailand as a white-collar prison, money and power can still buy certain privileges. Perhaps. But I doubt the Bangkok Hilton has ever had five stars.
Which reminds me of a small upcountry resort I stayed in some years ago. The owner was enormously proud of his establishment, which seemed almost impossible given its state of decrepitude. But he was so full of cheer that it seemed rude to do what I wanted to do, which was to get back in the car and drive away at high speed. Perhaps noticing my expression, he promised to show me the five-star room. We climbed the stairs to the top floor, the lift being obviously out of the question, and he showed me into a large, musty room in which nothing whatsoever could be described as luxurious.
"Lie on the bed," he said, "and look up."
I lay on the bed and looked up.
"Now you understand," he said. "Five stars."
There was a hole in the roof.
* * *
But here is what I find remarkable. Unlike the Westerner, who under those conditions would hang himself, or at least allow himself to be hanged while the cameras were off, the Thai VIP endures it. And when he gets out, he does not seem broken. He is not traumatised for life. He puts his suit back on and returns to the ch*****ne and the first-class flights, a little thinner and none the worse for wear.
Thaksin walked out of Klong Prem in May to three hundred cheering supporters, and his ankle tag comes off on the ninth of this month. Chuwit was pardoned in December, and within days was in San Francisco for his daughter's graduation. "Life is strange," he posted. "The other day I was in prison. Today I'm in San Francisco." He later remarked that prison had improved his health, because he ate and slept on schedule and nobody around him smoked or drank. Premchai came out on parole, and then the building his company was putting up fell down in last year's earthquake, and he is now on bail while the courts decide about that. The present, for these gentlemen, is whatever room they happen to be standing in, whether it comes with a butler or a bucket.
And it's not just the millionaires. During COVID, when Bangkok's businesses closed, something like two million people lost their jobs and went home to their villages. Within days, and I mean days, they were tending the buffalo, helping in the fields, eating sticky rice and nam prik, and not, as far as anyone could tell, terribly depressed about it. An Englishman who loses his job in Croydon does not, within days, take up farming in Lincolnshire with a smile on his face. He takes up drinking in Croydon.
So here is my theory. Thai people live in the present. And the price of not thinking about the future is not only that you must accept whatever future your lack of planning has made for you, but that when it comes, you must enjoy it precisely as much as you enjoyed the present before it. That, I think, is the deal. And it explains why the staff at 7-Eleven, on twelve or thirteen thousand baht a month, can still laugh as you burn your tongue off on a toasted cheese sandwich heated to 5,600 Kelvin; why the men who collect the rubbish, who must wrestle gigantic street rats by moonlight for possession of bags of refuse that have been rotting in the sun all day, can still smile; why the deaf girls outside the Nana Hotel can go off with a strange Westerner with whom they cannot exchange a single word, and come back laughing; and why my wife, asked what she is worried about, can say "nothing" and mean it.
The English, by contrast, are a people for whom the highest possible praise for any experience is: "Well, it wasn't too bad. Could have been worse, I suppose. All things considered."
I still worry. I can't help it. But I have come to think that living in a present which always somehow manages to be sunny is a wonderful thing.
Have a great September!
