Apichatpong Weerasethakul

I hate those critics who "luxuriate" in a film's imagery, but I opened my shirt and luxuriated in Tropical Malady.

I giggled at the still shot of the futuristic monkey-creature surrounded by all those people in fatigues, like it was some kind of vacation photo--I think it was meant to be funny, but no one else in the theatre seemed to think so.

The same thing happened when I saw the movie. Me and my friend and a handful of other people laughed, but most of the theatre was dead silent.

watched Tropical Malady a few hours ago. was really into it through the first half, started fading during the second. paused it and took a half hour nap (was operating on little sleep). woke up a bit out of sorts and finished it.

basically FUCKING WOW. it's one that will haunt me. dude's onto something. i'm sure the groggy sleep state helped, but still...

Nobody laughed in the theatre I saw it in. Then again, there were like maximum 10 of us at the beginning of the movie and only 6-7 left by the time that picture came up.
Circa1916, everytime I've seen one of this guy's films I either fell asleep during the movie or was in a half asleep state as the movie went on. I find that that is one the things I enjoy most about his films, this tranquility that lulls you to sleep. Well that and the fact that there are some beautiful images that I remember long after I've seen the movie. Except for this last one, which left me a bit cold.

Just watched Uncle Boonmee - it was SPECTACULAR. I have honestly never seen anything like it before. Perhaps this is an overenthusiastic post-cinema reaction, and I'll realise that the film isn't really any good, but I'm coasting on good energy for now!

Funny, creepy, atmospheric and above all beautiful. Enter the Void meets Pandora from Avatar?

I watched Tropical Malady a couple of days ago. The first half was splendid, I really liked how joyful and light it was. I think it's my favorite depiction of courtship I remember seeing on film. We get to see them abstracted into myth on the second part. The forest looks incredible. The tiger. The opening credits with the soldier. I want to see everything by this man.

Mark Kermode asked the BBC Pronunciation dept about this (first reaction: 'Pronunciation unit?!' *googles* oh ok...) and the guy was all like: "you know they call him 'joe'".

Anyway kind of want to watch w/anything reincarnation related I want to bring more knowledge to this.

http://www.monologueaudition.com/image/red-dot.gifhttp://www.monologueaudition.com/image/red-dot.gif

Loved Uncle Boonmee, I can't think of another filmmaker doing anything similar at the moment, or ever really. Is there anyone? Really glad to see him getting more and more international acclaim these days.

really enjoyed Tropical Malady despite having to pause it halfway through to take a nap.

oh man, i didn't love this, i just liked it. parts of it anyway. the opening half hour is so seductive and resonant and strange and mysterious. i hated the princess and the catfish segment and i don't think it full recovered from there on although the cave section pulled it back to an extent before letting go again. pretty disappointed.

Was thinking of Stalker when that cave scene came on. Think it was trying to do a lot w/Buddhism and modernity and then the whole 'are they mad ghosts or are they dead commies' piece. Lots of stuff that was hinted at but not allowed to grow, even if its filmed with all the spatial stuff in mind.

Quite interested in the book it was based on.

oh man, i didn't love this, i just liked it. parts of it anyway. the opening half hour is so seductive and resonant and strange and mysterious. i hated the princess and the catfish segment and i don't think it full recovered from there on although the cave section pulled it back to an extent before letting go again. pretty disappointed.

― jed_, Wednesday, 24 November 2010 23:32 (5 days ago) Bookmark

wow, really? i don't really feel ready to totally cover all of it yet, but the catfish segment was next level, for me, and sat so nicely. like the gold/river part in tropical malady (or was it blissfully yours?).

cave section was pretty special - kinda reminded me more of the magic of the jungle content in his other films more than the jungle content in this one did.

I was disappointed by just how visually uninteresting I found this film. I was prepared for something slow, meditative and non-narrative like (or at least non-linear), but not for how underwhelming I found a lot of the direction and photography.

Yeah, I don't understand people who compliment the cave scene, because to me it looked only like amateurish, shaky handheld shots of... a cave. Someone compared it to Stalker, but Stalker at least made its nature scenes feel incredibly hypnotic and beautiful.

there's a very arresting image of the ghost/wife emptying boonmee's catheter while the nephew tries to avoid the stream of the waste. it's almost like a religious painting. i thought that was very beautiful. arresting. that single scene is more interesting than the whole of most films.

but i just couldn't get with the catfish segment. it seemed too obviously mythical or meaningful or something. whereas i almost died of wonderment when boonsong showed up at the table. it was so strange but the way he describes his "journey" toward becoming a monkey ghost spirit makes it seem even more mysterious. e.g. his specific reference to his mother's PENTAX camera, which seems to ground it in modern reality and therefore makes it, somehow, ever stranger than it already is.

also the aunt, the first thing she asks boonsong is "why did you grow your hair so long?" !!!

I agree that the table scene was wonderful and mysterious, but I was let down by the final third of the movie (the cave scene and everything that followed it). I just couldn't figure out why it was so lifeless and grey and boring compared to the beginning of the movie. Even the weird and potentially interesting segment with the soldiers and human apes was made boring by having it look like a Powerpoint slideshow. If final third was supposed to contrast with the mystical mood of the first third, I'm not sure why.

Just saw Syndromes and a Century and I don't know what happened but it felt good.

It reminded me of Stalker as in it had a similar idea of people going to a place that feels end of the world to find themselves. But yes it was filmed differently.

It was often funny, including the powerpoint slide, couldn't figure out if some of the laughs were intentional or not.

Also liked how it often grounded the events in an everyday world - soap operas, karaoke, guerrilla warfare, cameras, etc. - the scene at the end where the monk to be can't wait to come back to a world of computers from his retreat.

It had the Buddhist thing where you actually did want to find out more about it.

A lot of slack is being cut for this film by reviewers on the grounds 'it had this Buddhist thing'.

For example, Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian needs to be booked in for a quick chat with Richard Dawkins:

"It's the most persuasive and beguiling account of mysticism and religion that I've seen in the cinema recently, or perhaps ever."

There was not much of an argument as such -- however it does display people who are at ease with modern objects and cling to old beliefs. I doubt it was trying to persuade anyone of anything. And i felt the monkeys were DEAD COMMIES.

re: 'Buddhist thing'. It had certain scenes (the Catfish scene, which I found quite funny at first then hated, like jed) where it lingered on after and I wanted to know a bit more as to what was behind it, hence I like to get hold of the book it was based on.

Usually its just a bit of reincarnation over here, karma over there blah blah.

i think i'm going to go see uncle boonmee tomorrow night. i am in the mood for a meditative film. but i'm pretty tired this week; i hope i don't fall asleep... also i hope i like it.

Robyn never reported back.

still asleep

totally agree about the scene where the guy is trying not to let the piss get on his shoes. awesome. and i never would have expected it to end with that song.

Am going to see uncle boonme this week in Glasgow. Never seen any of his other films.

missed this :(

three whole showings! did you go see on of the 60-odd screenings of it's a wonderful life instead?

some posters:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/2661

forgot first showing, had an hour of sleep the night before the next showing so was asleep before it started, went for dinner with some friends for the next one. I really like it's a wonderful life and think its status as quintessential christmas movie is fairly justified but i'm never sure who is going to see it at all those showings at the gft every year.

Your guardian angel was watching over you. A narrow escape.

if i were to find it crap i really wouldn't mind. i have waded through lagoons of shit celluloid. I have seen that film Mafia! starring Jay Mohr.

I'm just to desperate to see if someone share the same view as me: if you are going to be surrealist film-maker. at least be interesting,competent, and have some visual sensibility.

i don't think he is a surrealist or is even trying to be.

but interesting, competent with a visual sensibility? yes and much more.

i didn't like this film all that much at the time but i can't stop thinking about it.

when i saw this film he said at the Q+A that he switched gears plotwise with every reel (the standard 35mm film reel being about 20 minutes, so the film goes through about six reels), but you don't even really notice that kind of structural experiment when watching it, or i didn't

how are crowds at Film Forum, anyone?

Missed it at Film Forum but saw it at Brooklyn Heights Cinema. No one there on a Sunday night, but that's a weird little theater anyway and often half empty.

I think it's also playing somewhere in the Village.

this movie is unbelievably strange, i couldn't make heads or tails of it tonally and otherwise..

[SPOILER, to the extent a movie like this can have a SPOILER]

The whole dying sequence, where they go into the cave, I think is one of my favorite sections of any film of recent years. Almost no dialogue, and for a while almost no anything, but so carefully and almost perfectly made.

I saw his short - Phantoms of Nabua last year at BFI and it was great, loved it. I watched Uncle Boonmee just recently and it was completely lost on me.

I took it partly as a meditation on dying from something closer to a Buddhist perspective. I thought it was kind of funny that in the theater at the same time Biutiful was playing -- which appears to be a meditation on dying from an exceedingly vain and non-Buddhist perspective. I do think there were cultural and political references that were lost on me. E.g. I sort of gleaned that Tong became a monk temporarily as part of some kind of mourning tradition but I wasn't entirely clear on that.

There were certainly parts that I had no idea what to make of -- e.g. Tong and Auntee Jen going out and staying in at the same time. The princess sequence was sort of confusing, although I guess that was something of a "past life."

I assumed the still photo part was a Chris Marker homage, and the dream sort of foreshadowed the end, in which Uncle Boonmee does become a kind of "past person" and is forgotten. Definitely seemed like there was something in there about modernity and tradition, but I didn't take it as a standard lament of the former overtaking the latter.

I took it partly as a meditation on dying from something closer to a Buddhist perspective.

well yes, but that doesn't explain, say, the really, really odd final 10 minutes--the stuff in the karaoke bar, in the horribly-lit hotel room, etc.

the princess thing seemed like a tangent, which i guess is ok with me.

it's the still photo part that i found both bewildering and kind of annoying, for reasons i can't explain.

really--a chris marker homage? i'm not sure weerasethakul is really that much of a cinephile, honestly. he doesn't seem to go in for "homages." i think that's one thing that's sort of refreshing about his films.

I dunno, narrated still photograph montage about the future seems pretty Jetee to me. He did get a film MFA at Art Institute of Chicago, btw.

I thought there was something about afterlife as a part of memory and consciousness rather than a separate realm -- the wife says that ghosts aren't attached to places but to people. When he asks her where he'll go when he dies, she's silent. Maybe saying "from a buddhist perspective" is unfair, but more like using that as a jumping-off point.

I also thought there was something going on in the last ten minutes about technological "ghosts" -- disembodied images on the TV and disembodied voices/music in the bar. The relatively rudimentary technology is very jarring after the rest of the film (although there is one other scene with a television). Also something about the indifference of the young people to the death and to tradition.

i'm not sure weerasethakul is really that much of a cinephile, honestly. he doesn't seem to go in for "homages." i think that's one thing that's sort of refreshing about his films.

He has said that each reel of Boonmee was conceived as a pastiche of a particular genre or tradition, most of them, I think, Thai. This is easy to parse in a few of the segments -- the photomontage (which is adapted from 'Phantoms of Nabua'), the princess sequence, the cave, but, having only seen it twice anyway, it's hard to tell where some of the other reels end. I don't think this is really essential to the film, but it's silly to say that he's not a cinephille or that he doesn't do homage. He also made Adventures of Iron Pussy.

I don't really know that there's much to explain, plot-wise. As corny as it sounds, it is a kind of "meditation on dying", set within a particular religious tradition (which, if I understand correctly, isn't just 'Buddhist', but an Isaan-specific mystical Buddhism) made by a non-religious person. Apichatpong adapted the premise from a Buddhist tract, and I think the movie is an attempt to enact such accounts of ecstatic spiritual experience without really making claims about their truth or import either way. The hotel room/restaurant scene takes place outside of linear time -- he shows us parallel sequences involving the same sets of bodies, and you can accept what you're watching or not. The filmmaking is so fluid, and the formal textures so consistent, that I found it very easy to do so. If it didn't work for you experientially, though, I'm not sure there is much to argue about.

I was sorta thinking each segment of the movie was more or less a recall of a previous "Joe" film. I think maybe I saw a critic say about as much some time ago and never really got it out of the back of my head while watching it. Certainly didn't hurt to have some of the actors show up again, even with some of the same names ... ?

I think it has to be a lament on the passing of tradition. We see all these stunning images of the forest and the life they lead in the countryside and after Boonme dies that final room is just so sad and depressing. They only care about TV and computers but Tong decides to go back to the temple after some fast food so there might be some hope. I was as surprised as the lady. Notice how in Tropical Malady they definitely have fun at the karaoke bar and in Syndromes and a Century the dancing suggests a shared positive experience between people in the city. But now they stay indoors and also go out and it's all the same?