Reduction is an intriguing, visual theory of what happens when one limits what thoughts they allow to enter their consciousness. The world around them becomes “reduced.”
Tag Archives: 2010
100. UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES [LOONG BOONMEE RALEUK CHAT] (2011)
AKA Uncle Boonmee
“Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me.”—Title card at the beginning of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
DIRECTED BY: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
FEATURING: Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Kanokporn Tongaram
PLOT: On his plantation in rural Thailand, the dying Boonmee is visited by living relatives and the ghosts of his past. As they ease him into death, the story is interrupted through vignettes that may represent his memories of past lives.
BACKGROUND:
- Apichatpong Weerasethakul considerately refers to himself as “Joe” when speaking to Western audiences.
- Uncle Boonmee is loosely based on a 1983 book by Phra Sripariyattiweti, a monk from Apichatpong’s hometown of Khon Kaen, Thailand.
- The film is a feature-length component of Primitive, Apichatpong’s ongoing multimedia project, which also encompasses a number of video installations and the short films A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Phantoms of Nabua.
- Received the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Jury president Tim Burton described it as “a beautiful, strange dream.”
- Sakda, who plays Boonmee’s nephew Tong, and Kanokporn, who plays his nurse Roong, played characters of the same names in Apichatpong’s earlier films Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours, respectively. In both cases, it’s unclear if they’re meant to be the same characters.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Though it’s chock-full of beguiling, whimsical imagery, the single most memorable sight in Uncle Boonmee is that of a princess in a lagoon, undulating with pleasure as she receives oral sex from a catfish. (Unsurprisingly, the words “catfish sex” became synonymous with Uncle Boonmee‘s brand of weirdness immediately following its Cannes premiere.)
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Critics sometimes identify Apichatpong’s style as a mix of
Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
surrealism and neorealism, and this is a handy skeleton key for getting at Uncle Boonmee‘s weird nature. The film contains plenty of enigmatic images and seeming non sequiturs, but they’re framed as natural, even welcome steps in the cycle of life and death. The characters accept them nonchalantly, going along with the film’s dream logic and implicitly entreating viewers to do the same. No clear border separates the mystical from the mundane. And two hours in, when it feels like you should be totally inured to Uncle Boonmee‘s disorienting twists, along comes a denouement that renders everything else normal by comparison.
COMMENTS: An ox, having escaped its tether, strolls through the forest at twilight. Eventually, Continue reading 100. UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES [LOONG BOONMEE RALEUK CHAT] (2011)
366 UNDERGROUND: VIXEN HIGHWAY 2006: IT CAME FROM URANUS (2010)
DIRECTED BY: Tony Watt
FEATURING: Tony Watt, Vivita, Amabelle Singson, James Taggart, John Ervin, Angela Faulkner
PLOT: I’m not really sure… see below.
COMMENTS: I’m not at all being snarky in regards to being completely unable to wrangle out an explanation of the plot of Vixen Highway 2006: It Came from Uranus. As far as I can gather, after multiple watchings, there are several strands of story involving (a) the escape of three female prisoners, (b) a female cop/bounty hunter, Divine Otaku (Amabelle Singson) who’s dispatched to capture the fugitives, all of whom have a fixation on (c) Rock legend Bobby Barzell, who’s waiting for a liver transplant to save his life and his ass from (d) Osiris (Tony Watt), an Alien Overlord who struck a bargain with Barzell for fame, money and sex in exchange for Barzell’s soul, and now who’s en route to Earth to collect.
Even more confusing is finding out that this film is an homage/reboot/requel to 2001’s Vixen Highway, written & directed by John Ervin (who co-wrote VH 2006), which apparently is a more straightforward version of the above storyline (probably without the alien overlord, I suspect).
Vixen Highway 2006: It Came from Uranus is a lo-budget, meth-fueled cousin of the NBK (Natural Born Killers) Aesthetic. This movie starts at the level of overkill, and then goes balls out turning everything up to 11. Everything is Too Much: too much on the sound fx, which goes way past cartoonish; the visual tricks, such as wipes, transitions, split screens—I think that all of the plug-ins of the editing program were used at least twice; the homaging and references, which are so thick, it’s like the filmmakers just poured everything from every grindhouse/exploitation/cult/faux-blaxploitation/mondo movie they liked into the pot; and IT’S TWO AND A HALF HOURS LONG!!
Some may see these as good things, I realize. Frankenpimp (the director’s previous film) suffers from the same problems, only worse since it’s THREE HOURS LONG!!! VH:2006 at least has that tiny, tiny bit of restraint… But Too Much for Way Too Long feels like you’re being mentally bludgeoned if you try to take it all in at one sitting. The only way I got through both films was to take a little at a time—20-30 minute screenings. The best way to experience the films may be in the background at a party, where you sample the film in bits and pieces and you’re not hammered relentlessly by the constant overkill, and not bothered by the slow movement (or lack of movement) of the narrative.
DISCLAIMER: A copy of this film was provided by the production company for review.
CAPSULE: CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2010)
DIRECTED BY:Werner Herzog
FEATURING: Werner Herzog (narration)
PLOT: Granted unprecedented access, Werner Herzog takes his camera crew into the Chauvet
caves of Southern France to capture images of the oldest artwork ever discovered—Cro-Magnon paintings that date back approximately 30,000 years.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s essentially a very sober and serious documentary on an important subject, with the presence (and odd musings) of ultra-eccentric director Werner Herzog supplying the only weird connection.
COMMENTS: There are two things to keep in mind about Cave of Forgotten Dreams. One is that those of us who missed it in its theatrical run will probably never get the opportunity to experience the film as it was intended to be seen. Cave was originally shot in 3D, and for maybe the first time in film history, there was actually a reason to access that third dimension. The Chauvet paintings were drawn on rocky walls, and the artists incorporated the bulges and ripples into their sketches (Herzog comments on how, in flickering torchlight, the horses and lions drawn on the craggy walls might appear to move—comparing the cave itself to a sort of proto-cinema). The second thing to keep in mind is that this is an Important work; which is not to say that it’s not also Interesting, just that Herzog takes his responsibility to document these previously unseen caverns very seriously, and if it comes down to a choice between being Interesting or Important, he errs towards the latter. The Chauvet caves, which were hidden by a rockslide and preserved away from prying eyes for millennia before being accidentally discovered by spelunkers in 1994, are considered of such scientific and historical importance that only a small number of the world’s top scientists had previously been granted access. The crew was forced to film under restrictive conditions: they were only allowed access for a few hours each day, were confined to a two foot metal walkway so as not to disturb any of the primeval footprints or animal skulls littering the cavern floors, and could only use handheld cameras and low-heat lighting elements that they could carry with them. Since there are only a few painted panels of interest to amateurs, Herzog fills up the running time with interviews with scientists who gave us background on the caves and on Paleolithic man. While he does pick a few colorful characters to interrogate—most notably a guy who dresses in deerskin and serenades us with a rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” piped on a vulture-bone flute—these scarce quirky digressions aren’t as gonzo as some reports might have you believe. The focus remains on the artwork. Herzog passionately believes that when we look at these mysterious scrawlings of battling rhinos and half-buffalo women we are peeking at the first stirrings of the human soul, though through a cloudy window. In the quiet finale the camera lingers over the detailed panels depicting cave lions and horses, remarkably rendered figures etched one on top of the other to suggest movement, while Ernst Reijseger’s mystical score of cellos, flutes and a droning choir plays an imaginary primordial liturgy. It’s an intense tribute, and even a little trippy. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Herzog film without at least one totally incomprehensible moment. This time it occurs in a head-scratching epilogue. After finishing his tour of the cave, Herzog takes a trip to a nearby experimental biosphere where a tropical climate has been created using heated water from a nearby nuclear reactor. There, he films some albino alligators and proclaims them our doppelgängers, wondering how they would react to the caves. It’s an obscure personal metaphor that provokes an almost universal response: “huh”? But perhaps it’s the best way to end the documentary: we can’t completely understand what Cave‘s paintings meant to artists separated from us by 30,000 years of evolution any more than we can completely understand the peculiar vision of Werner Herzog.
Herzog made two documentaries screened in the U.S. this year, neither of which have been shortlisted for Academy Awards. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which certainly deserved a nomination, was ruled ineligible because it received a limited screening in 2010. His other film, Into the Abyss, concerned interviews with three unrepentant Texas death row inmates, did not make the shortlist of fifteen features despite excellent reviews.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
SATURDAY SHORT: THE MAKING OF GODARD & OTHERS (2010)
In recent years, “making of” clips have been primarily about the intricate details of scenes involving a surplus of special effects. The Making of Godard & Others, however, focuses on the dreariness of being involved in a low-budget film. And it’s fairly strange on its own…