UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (2010)

What's the big obstacle to Apichatpong Weerasethakul becoming a household name for the global arthouse crowd? I've just said it. Has any contender for cine-canonization had such a jawbreaking moniker? I question whether even Thais have an easy time with it. Look at what another Thai did for comparison's sake. Panom Yeerum is more modestly named for starters. He might even have gotten by abroad with that tag, but as Tony Jaa he's instantly recognizable by martial-arts buffs around the world. But I suppose an auteur representing the high end of the Thai film industry shouldn't be expected to make such compromises. And in any event Weerasethakul has his shot now after his latest film, Lung Bunmi Raluek Chat, won the Palm d'Or at last year's Cannes film festival. He'd had a kind of cult following already, with some people regarding his Syndromes and a Century as one of the best films of the last decade. I'd given that film a shot, but I regret to admit that I quit a little past the halfway point, once it seemed determined to go nowhere. By now I think I'm a little less impatient for every film to "go" someplace, and the Golden Palm entitled Weerasethakul to another chance from me.

Tim Burton chaired last year's Cannes jury, and the supernatural content of Uncle Boonmee may have influenced his choice, though Weerasethakul's approach to such material isn't entirely like Burton's. In the Thai film, Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) is a widowed farmer dying of kidney failure, tended by an assistant who may be, like many of Boonmee's workers, an illegal immigrant from Laos. As an opening title explains, while contemplating his imminent death, Boonmee does, in fact, recall some past lives. A pre-credits sequence illustrates the power of suggestion. We see a water buffalo wandering the landscape after escaping from a noose and likely slaughter. Because we've been prompted to assume that this is Boonmee in a past life, we're more attentive to the beast's adventure, if it can be called that, than we would be otherwise.

Boonmee doesn't actually do much past-life recalling afterward as Weerasethakul focuses on a present-day visit by the farmer's sister-in-law Jen and her son Thong. There's a lot of realistically banal small talk as the visitors unpack and Boonmee gets his kindey drained. The director's approach is neorealistic, favoring long takes to create the illusion of immersion in authentic life. The family regathers at the dinner table and chatters away while a woman slowly materializes beside them.

The woman is Huay (Natthakarn Aphaiwong), Boonmee's late wife. She isn't Boonmee's delusion; his relatives react to her appearance and join him in striking up a fresh conversation with the new visitor, none of them alarmed by the presence of a ghost among them. They're hardly more fazed when a noise from downstairs is followed by the appearance of a pair of glowing red eyes in the dark stairwell. A wookie-looking fellow appears and announces himself as Boonsong (Jeerasak Kulhong), Boonmee's long-lost son who disappeared in the forest years ago. He brings his father up to date, explaining that he turned into a monkey man after falling in love with a monkey woman. Mother and son were both drawn home, presumably, by Dad's own impending demise. Like a good host, Boonmee breaks out the photo album to get his guests up to date on life on the farm.

This is probably the make-or-break scene for most viewers. I was intrigued (as I suspect Burton was) by the utterly matter-of-fact way in which Boonmee receives his spectral guests, but I felt that I didn't have enough information about Thai culture to guess the point of the apparently purposeful banality of the scene. Wikipedia informs me that Boonmee is part of an ongoing project in which Weerasethakul will chronicle in depth the northeastern Isan region of Thailand, but what, if anything, does the characters' reaction to the ghosts and monsters tell us about Isan? Would the people there really react that way if they saw ghosts? Do they claim to have seen ghosts, and to have reacted that way? Don't know, don't know and don't know.

Fortunately, enough's going on in Boonmee to invite alternate readings of the ghost scenes. For instance, I inferred a parallel between the character's bland welcome to the supernatural and Boonmee's blithe indifference to the legal status of a different class of strangers, the illegal immigrants who work for him. Later in the movie, Weerasethakul seems to invite a comparison of the spirit world from which Huay and Boonsong come with the spirit world of television that captivates Jen in a hotel room. Jen herself becomes a kind of spirit in a late scene when she splits in two, one Jen going out with an AWOL monk, the other staying in the hotel room to watch TV. Something is probably being said here about our divided consciousness and the different planes of existence we inhabit simultaneously, but that's just a guess I'm making.

Weerasethakul has said that Boonmee is a film purposefully made in a medley of cinematic styles. That explains some of the gratuitous elements in it, including the movie's most artistically ambitious sequence, a mythological episode in which a princess makes love with a catfish in the middle of a stream. Is Boonmee the princess or the fish? Search me, but the sequence is brilliantly done, revealing that the relatively primitive approach of other episodes is a conscious directorial choice. More gratuitous still is an anecdote told by Boonsong of his capture by a mysterious band of soldiers. Related entirely through stills, it's an obvious homage to Chris Marker's La Jetee, but to what purpose?

Uncle Boonmee is like a portfolio of Weerasethakul's virtuosity submitted for global acceptance. There's a showiness to some of it at the cost of a greater rigor that I recognized, though I didn't exactly appreciate it, in Syndromes and a Century. The director's strategy dooms Boonmee to be less than the sum of its parts, but the sum is actually pretty impressive on its own. You do get the sense that you've been let into an alien culture, even if you don't comprehend it fully, and Weerasethakul's default long-take, immobile-camera approach works to achieve verisimilitude amid the phantasmagoria. If you can enjoy a movie, like I can, as an opportunity for virtual tourism, you'll probably dig a lot of Boonmee, and it may give you some food for thought as well. It's not a great film in my opinion, but an interesting film will often do just fine.

Thanks to Cannes, Uncle Boonmee may be playing in a big city near you. Here's a trailer for it uploaded to YouTube, appropriately enough, by trailers.

FIREBALL (2009)

Are you a sports fan? Do you get tired of team sports where they don't let defenders defend? Where the defense gets penalized for brushing the hem of the offensive players' garments? Well, the film industry of Thailand has a new sport just for you. It's "fireball," -- yes, that's what they literally call it -- and it adds to the existing thrills of basketball the extra excitement of that ancient custom of running the gantlet. The rules are simple: the first team to score wins. But won't it be over quickly? Isn't this basketball, after all? No, it's fireball, and that means if you want to score a basket you've got five guys in front of you to beat down before they beat you down. There's no shot clock, and given the people trying to punch, kick and elbow you as you try to line up a jumper it could well take a while to sink one. But the rules take that into account: if no one scores, then the team with the last man standing wins.

According to Thanakorn Pongsuwan's movie, fireball's been around since 1974 -- the league still has the original game ball -- but this is the first time it's been depicted on film. The release of Fireball may reflect a liberalization of the sport, since the film's expose of corrupt practices in management might not have made it past censorship during the period when most people didn't realize that the game existed. It turns out that league teams are run by gangsters who can make more money by making and taking bets than they'd earn in championship prize money. For that reason many games are fixed, and the players get in on the act sometimes for various reasons. One guy has his twin brother's medical care to worry about. Another's trying to pay his girlfriend's debts to avoid her relapsing into prostitution. Still another, half black, has a baby on the way to take care of. Things are tough all over in the world of fireball. Off court, a good deal of the action takes place in a sprawling dilapidated apartment complex, and given the dirty goings on the Fireball movie sometimes comes across like a cross between Gomorrah and Gymkata.

The film ultimately falls on the Gymkata side of that equation. For the country that aims to set the modern standard in martial arts movies, Fireball is pretty bad. The main problem is the director's frantic, edit-happy manner of shooting the film. The virtue of superior Thai fight films is our clear view of unwired action, but Thanakorn films Fireball like a music video. It's all too obvious that he has to fake most of the basketball action -- not that there's much of it. You'd expect shooting baskets to be filmed the way a decent Thai action director shoots fight scenes. Instead, Thanakorn will show a player heaving the basket, then cut to the ball sailing toward the basket. Then he'll cut to a reaction shot from someone. Then it's back to the ball coming in for a landing. Then another reaction shot, and then the ball finally goes through the net. At many points you can easily lose track of the action. In the middle of one game the guy with the ball eludes some pipe-wielding defenders, and as they ask where he went he seems literally to have disappeared from the game and the movie for a few minutes. Thanakorn reduces his game too often to just plain chaos.

Overall it's hard to follow the action because the sport as Thanakorn has imagined it really doesn't make sense. The rules change from game to game. The first contest we see opens with a jump ball, with the two teams on opposite sides of a midcourt line. But the next game opens with the two sides charging one another Braveheart style from opposite ends of the court as the ball is shot into play. Finally, for the championship game, the court (the cargo hold of a freighter) is littered with piles of pallets for the players to jump up and down from to attack each other. Throughout, the first-score-wins rule makes you wonder what the spectators expect to see. You'd think a marginally competent basketball team could pass the ball downcourt and sink the winning pill in a matter of seconds, perhaps before anyone hits them. But you get the impression that the fans, apart from having betting interests in the outcome, come out to see the teams beat the pee out of one another. The players certainly spend more time doing that than trying to score, and when foreign objects are thrown into the cage it's obviously not to help anyone shoot baskets.

For a moment I thought Fireball was going to finish with a real flourish, with its chain-link basket becoming an improvised flying guillotine, but the film is not that imaginative.

In practice, the basketball side of fireball looks pretty superfluous. Perhaps it was imagined entirely in the hope of attracting an American audience. But it went straight to DVD in this country last month, so so much for that idea. Fireball is really a hopeless proposition. Its Thai fighting is second rate, and the only way the basketball angle would have meant anything to American audiences is if there'd been an American character in the movie. That leaves indiscriminate violence as the only potential attraction for anyone other than those on the alert for bad movies. I rented this from the Albany Public Library fully expecting a bad "new sport" movie, though holding out hope for something better. I suppose I wasn't really disappointed, since I expected it to stink, but unless you're into utterly mindless violence that doesn't even stink in a memorably entertaining way you can abandon hope before renting Fireball.

The film does have it's admirers, and if you want a second opinion here's a review from someone who's seen more Thai films than I have. And here's an English-subtitled trailer, uploaded to YouTube by richyjac:

SPIRITED KILLER (1994)

Mill Creek Entertainment continues to expand into the licensed property racket after a long sojourn in the public domain by picking up a trilogy of three Thai supernatural martial-arts comedy horror films, more or less, featuring Panna Rittikrai, the fight choreographer and mentor of Tony Jaa, who appears briefly in the first film in the set. Of course, if you want to believe there's more of Jaa in this set, Mill Creek isn't going to go out of its way to disabuse you, but I kind of figured it out from their own synopses. Not that the box copy exactly inspires confidence. Mill Creek proudly proclaims that the other two films in the set are in the original "Taiwanese" with English subtitles. After sitting through Spirited Killer itself, which is dubbed into English, you might cheer news of subtitles, but this extraordinary dialogue track, which makes the Italian or Chinese exploitation films of sainted memory sound like they were dubbed by the Mercury Theater, makes the film a must-see for all lovers of international film trash.

Speaking of not exactly inspiring confidence, how do you think I felt when Spirited Killer opened with untranslated Thai credits which nevertheless prominently featured the number 4? What the hell? It turns out that the "first" Spirited Killer is the fourth in the Plook Mun Kuen Ma Kah series. That title apparently means "Wake Up to Kill," but the films are also known as the "Forest Man" series. No doubt being set in forests has something to do with that.

The credits roll over someone preparing a potion. He proves to be some sort of snake-oil salesman with a flair for presentation. His concoction explodes like a cartoon version of Dr. Jekyll's potion, the better to impress the rubes. And here's the pitch: this stuff will make you immortal and restore the old to youth. It's good karma to drink it, the pitchman claims. One crone is eager to pay up so she can attract a new husband, and another idiot follows her. But before the third sucker can take his dose someone notices that the first two are dead. "You murdered them!" young Pyak protests, "You bastard!" Yes, the dubbing is like that, rendering Thailand a land of Bills and Teds. And yet I get the feeling from the action on screen and the work of the actors that this is a spiritually faithful translation of the original script. But more on that later. For now, Pyak is going to tell on the mean old patent-medicine man, which means that the poor doctor is going to have to kill them. He takes down two out of three before Pyak flees across a river, moons the villain, calls him an asshole, and makes good his escape. Pyak was lucky, because the doctor can run at superhuman speed. Who is this guy? I wasn't sure, didn't want to believe at first, because I was certain that a victim referred to him as "Doctor Dong." That would have been too good, but the rest of the cast refers to their enemy as "Doctor Duong." It's a moot point anyway, since Pyak and the chief put together a posse, chase down the dude who can run superhumanly fast (but apparently forgot to), hack him to within an inch of his life with machetes, and dump him into the river. End of Act One.

Some time passes, though my ignorance of Thai prevents me from telling you how much. A group of twenty farmers are transporting some goods when they find their path blocked by some guy in a Member's Only jacket with his back to them. When he won't get out of the way they insult him more vigorously. "What the hell do you want, freak?" one asks as the stranger turns to face him. The director probably thinks this moment is on the level of James Whale's reveal of Karloff in Frankenstein, but we just see a surly looking little guy. Then he attacks. He disarms men and kills them with their machetes. This guy is a wrecking machine.

Only two of the original group manage to escape to the same village from Act One, where the same guy is still chief. Pyak is still around, also, trying to impress the chief's daughter Faa.

Pyak: I don't want to brag, but when it comes to fishing in Sidong village, everyone hails me as the master.
Faa: Oh yeah? So I guess that makes you the master baiter.

Be honest, readers: didn't the same joke occur to you sometime, back when you were twelve? But before this banter can go further, the two survivors of the attack, Boomay and Maha (all names approximate; IMDB doesn't help much here) meet them with their awful news, which they all take to the chief. I don't think I'll have to cite anymore dubbing samples after this extended exchange, which sets the tone for the whole film:

Boomay: I'm sorry to tell you this but a bunch of our people got killed. Me and Maha were the only ones to get away.
Faa: Wow...That's pretty impressive for just one guy! What does he look like? Is he handsome?
Chief: Hey, Faa, this is life and death, here. Don't joke around.
Maha: Chief, I'm scared! What should we do? I think that that thief is still out there in the forest. Our villagers must be in trouble.
Pyak: Bullshit! You guys can't take care of one lousy thief? You guys should be ashamed of yourselves. It's pathetic!
Boomay: Hey, man! This guy is really a monster. You didn't even see him.
Pyak: Well, he better hope I don't see him, 'cause I'll kick his ass for sure.
Chief: C'mon, guys! No more bickering. Things are bad enough as it is. We need to stick together....

Again, this seems to be a thematically accurate rendering of the actual Thai performances, and it may only be because the filmmakers have portrayed their own people as a pack of imbeciles that China did not declare war on Thailand when this film came out. It so happens that Sidong village is hosting two expeditions, one Japanese and one Chinese, who are looking for some legendary local "holy metal." The Japanese come off relatively well. One of their group, a kid named Shiba (or is that "Chiba" by way of homage to the master?) is actually the nearest thing to a pure hero the film has. But from this film's evidence the Thai people have a pretty poor estimate of their Chinese neighbors. The Chinese expedition includes two stunningly obnoxious comedy relief characters, one a dude in a safari suit who carries a battery-operated fan, the other a mute respectfully known as "Mute" who gibbers and gesticulates quite vocally through the rest of the picture. Why is Mute traveling with the expedition. As another Chinese explains, everybody wants to get rich, even a mute. And you thought they were unworldly saints! I guess you've learned an important lesson in humanity from this film.

Banliu Srisaeng as Mute (above) proves that the art of pantomime is not dead.

"Why does this feel like it hurts?" Actual dubbed dialogue from Thailand's notion of a comical Chinese person.

Once the two expeditions reach Sidong, the film becomes a series of skirmishes between the international idiot force and the individual whom we must apparently call the Spirited Killer. They attack and he kicks their asses, repeatedly. At times he seems to have iron skin, as machetes clang harmlessly on contact with his body. After several rounds of this you really have to ask yourself what the Spirited Killer has to do with the first part of the movie with Dr. Dong -- I mean Duong. I went back and checked and he was not one of the victims of the doctor's potion. But eventually the Doc himself reappears, all better from his early misadventure, to claim the Spirited Killer as "my immortal warrior." Since the doctor is now as invulnerable as the SK, Sidong village is seriously f*cked unless some hitherto unseen holy man should happen to show up with a sword made of holy metal for our heroes to use. And what are the chances of that happening?

I haven't laughed at a movie so hard in some time, and it has some halfway decent martial arts, too. This is definitely an early effort from the unit that now sets the standard for wireless fight scenes, but everyone performs enthusiastically, taking great bumps and happily slashing one another's shirts with their machetes. Spirited Killer, or whatever you want to call it, is exactly what I'm looking for a lot of the time from the wild world of cinema. It's a genuinely popular, unpretentious film from another part of the world, not aimed at art-house critics (Thailand has stuff for them as well) but for the native rabble who apparently like to see obnoxious young people get killed as much as the rabble of any nation. The only difference is that these kids fight back a lot. Imagine a Friday the 13th film in which everyone knows kung fu and you still root for the mindless killer and you get close to the essence of Spirited Killer. Add to that the utterly brain-dead dubbing and this first film alone justifies the bargain-basement $5 I paid for the entire trilogy. I think I can confidently commend the entire set to connoisseurs of cinematic garbage.

Here's a video trailer for the film under yet another title, desperately trying to hype Tony Jaa's brief appearance. It was uploaded to YouTube by abbottwhite

And here's a clip from the third film in the set, Spirited Killer: Ghost Wars. Such a parade of awesomeness cannot be missed.