Bluedeed's Great and Terrible Films

I'd like to start a thread for my musings on films instead of starting new threads or commenting on old ones for my thoughts. What inspires me to write about films is usually an extreme, something I think is great, or something I think is terrible, hence the name, but I'm also interested in films that have an interesting reaction from this community, the critical film industry or the market at large and so those films (most of which I usually find a bit mediocre) will also make their way into this thread. Without further elaboration, I'd like to go into my first piece about Apichatpong Weerasethakul's (to be further referred to as Joe, his ludicrously simplified nickname) magnificent 2004 film, Tropical Malady.



Whenever I read something about Joe's films, I feel that the writers to quickly gravitate to the more obvious conventional tosses that he uses (the frequent second half shift, the deadpan supernatural events, the sometimes lingering black screen), all of which, while important, isn't what makes me love Joe. Joe is certainly one of the most interesting visual artists working today, but he's also perhaps even better at sound. Tropical Malady opens with some of his signature brand of offbeat humor with soldiers gathering to take a picture around a body that appears to have been mauled by a tiger (one of them says "make sure I look pretty for my girlfriend"). The soldiers then flirt with an operator over the radio who says she'll play a song for "all of you lonely guys." This is where Joe makes his first interesting and great move. As the soldiers disappear from the shot, the camera starts one of its brilliant slow pushes through some grass that had been mildly framing the shot, and some Thai pop begins to play, and unexpectedly non-diegetically, and there's a strange feeling of elevation, which is completed in the next wide-view shot. Like so many of the director's greatest moments, it's fairly indescribable why some Thai pop music I've never head before made this sublime impression. It's not exactly a clear match to the environment, which is a field within a jungle, nor is it great music, but from the slow building initial drum beat (something he'll importantly repeat later on) to the soothing singing it works unexpectedly, or perhaps because it's unexpected.

What follows begins part of the regular narrative that's obscurely related to this opening scene. It concerns the flirtations of a Thai army member, Keng, with a small town guy Tong (played by AW regular Sakda Kaewbuadee). Their scenes of flirtation are some of the most naturalistic portrayed in film. It addresses without explicitly addressing their feelings for each other, reservations, social climate, and familial issues all with poignancy. It's at once natural, simple, inconsequential, and heartbreaking to see Tong shy away from Keng repeatedly, held back by his fears. As many people know, Joe is a homosexual and often deals with homosexuality and thus this first half feels at least slightly autobiographical, which contributes to the film's graceful realism. And it's of course important, like I initially said, to note the sounds. Joe graces his film with beautiful sounds of forests, a mildly violent but relaxing rainy day, and the equally lulling sounds of motor vehicles. All of these sounds may not have a significance thematically but they work wonders for entering the film's rhythm.

I said that the film feels autobiographical, which is very true to a very specific point. At earlier points in the film, it may be hinting at what happens later. Tong's mother tells a folk tale about fishermen who become too greedy, less relevant in theme than in tone (it is, by the way, a wonderful story, one of the reasons I love Joe), the obvious breaking point in the film and the centerpiece of all critical analysis of the film occurs at nearly the midpoint. As the rhythm of the film is settled and you feel comfortable with the characters, Joe quickly pulls out the rug, at least for a brief time.



After a lovingly composed shot of Keng standing alone after Tong has rejected his flirtations again (which is always in a very shy or light manner), the screen goes black. Slowly and elegantly revealed is an old painting of a tiger that will serve as a backdrop for the ensuing narrative. The second half of the film grounds itself in both folklore and the first half of the film. Presumably Keng goes off into the woods in search of a cow and a man that went missing from his town. As he enters the forest, he is hunted by Tong, who transforms into a tiger at night. This may sound like supernatural thriller material, but Joe handles it with the same calmness as the rest of the film. It all feels grounded in the past in two different schemes. When the two do have their encounter, Joe anti-dramatizes it by eventually obscuring them from our view, refusing to cut towards the action.

This narrative bifurcation is what then makes the film be received at extreme ends. Many people citing the same nonsense that they had 3 years earlier at David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (Joe's film is actually an appropriate kissing cousin of Lynch's work) of the film being inscrutable at the film, Tropical Malady is inscrutable only to the closed minded. The film is (like Mulholland Dr.) a clear eyed and intimate vision of love wholly throughout. Knowing of Joe's frequent narrative bifurcations (he's explained his love for contrast), I wasn't taken as aback as some people may have been at the film's shift. But at that point in the film, I was so engrossed in the film and had such confidence in Joe's filmmaking that he could've kept the screen black with nothing but cricket sounds and I would've watched until the end, but it's to his credit that he so lightly intertwines these stories which seem at first in contrast, but very quickly the second story reaches a sublime climax that coincides (thematically, not physically) with the first half. It's masterful filmmaking. A half told love story told twice, Tropical Malady is a wonderful film.

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Mubi

Now I have to watch it. I even started some time ago, but all of sudden subtitles had ended and I couldn't finish it.

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San Franciscan lesbian dwarves and their tomato orgies.

Interesting post. I should see more of his films. I've only watched Uncle Boonmee, and not having read anything about it, I may be wrong about some specific meanings, but I came up with some of my own. If you care to read and comment, my post is here. I'll comment on this after I see it.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

I read your review, but I haven't seen the film, although your writing and clear love for the director certainly makes me want to do so.

I actually managed to record Uncle Boonmee on Film4 (a British film channel) a few weeks ago, and I plan to watch it very soon, maybe even tonight, so this article (coupled with Mark's review of the film) makes me even more eager to finally watch it, so I might try to tonight. Then I will keep an eye out for and try to watch Tropical Malady

While it can be enlightening to read about Apichatpong Weerasethakul since Thai cinema is very uncommonly exported and their culture less known here, I think it's very interesting to not read anything like you have. Joe has a very distinctive and singular way of filmmaking that's unlike anyone else I can recall working today. Thus, it's open to a much greater amount of interpretation than say an American mainstream or independent film which have pretty clear origins and movements associated with them.

I think you'll find Tropical Malady more coherent and compelling that Uncle Boonmee, but I think both are great films. The great thing about the latter is the way it makes you become aware of life without being overly delicate. There's scenes of beauty in nature and the beauty of Boonmee's life, but also scenes of Auntie Jen calmly killing a bunch of insects with an electric racked. It doesn't make us feel horror, but keeps us aware of the cycle of death and rebirth in many ways.

This is for Bluedeead, Mark and whoever else has seen the Uncle Boonmee...

Sorry for this continued use of this thread as a discussion for Uncle Boonmee (I hope you don't mind, but this seems a fitting place for discussion), but I have just finished watching it, certainly a fascinating/mesmerising movie that I definitely enjoyed, but I won't pretend I understood it all. I have lots of questions and things to potentially discuss.

First of all I will ask about your perception of the ending, what was happening, what was the meaning? Even in a film filled with mysteries, this one seemed to stand out to me and I'm not quite sure what to make of it right now.

interesting, might try this sometime, though I haven't had much time these days

It's just like PMMM except it's not like PMMM at all (not that I would know, though you'd be happy to know I have looked for it to watch but haven't been able to find it).

Notice the sudden change from languid camerawork to hand-held camera during the cave scenes, which I believe is about process of rebirth. Rebirth from countryside to modernity, the underlying issue explored in many of Apichatpong's films.

Interesting, the end café scene seemed very surrealistic too me, and would definitely fit in with what you were saying, it looked modern and stylish, there were bright neon lights and other stuff, as well as the modern pop song playing in the air.

I don't think it matters what the whys are or even if there are any. The bewildering ending and several other scenes seem to be presented as mysteries of life which are beyond explanation. I don't think it's presented as a puzzle which you can "solve" like a Lynch film. I do think that the surrealism goes hand in hand with the environment and culture though, but since I would be a foreigner to both, I probably have little right to judge.

Music definitely plays a great role in adding surrealism to film, especially Joe's aesthetically conflicting use of pop. It's important to note with his work that there are many contrasts, I mentioned earlier that he loves contrasts in his films. The color palette shifts greatly in the last bit of the film from some sort of divine naturalism to a clean modern aesthetic. The greens of the jungle are turned neon red in a cafe. I think the final scenes are more uniting than they are discordant from the rest of the film (and extremely goofy, he has such a strange sense of humor). The important thing about Joe's work is that he always portrays stark contrasts but never overstates the connection between them. I think that the last scenes build up towards rejecting the old ways and nature (via Tong's runaway monk) but the scene in the cafe give this another, more reasonable light. Modern life isn't wrong because it's still life as always. Tong is no more wrong in leaving his temple than a bull was in leaving his tree.

Mother



Bong Joon-ho is soon to release his international debut Snowpiercer in the United States. Rumor has it that the Weinsteins are once again trying to reel in a director that may be a little too much for American audiences a la Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster. What the Weinsteins don't know is that Bong Joon-ho has already made a film expressly designed for international audiences 4 years earlier. Mother is a great film to watch for those who've seen little Asian cinema (though this is certainly not all who will appreciate it) and is the perfect film for those who have seen only something like Oldboy.

Released internationally in one of the weakest years creatively for American cinema in a good while (2010), Mother provided a breath of fresh air for taut classical filmmaking. The film is focused on a mentally retarded boy who is accused of committing a murder after a night of drinking, the trick being that he doesn't remember anything from the night. The film appropriates its stream of plot in this way that gives the style some actual significance unlike so many other thrillers. The boy, Do-Joon, spends his time in prison trying to think through the events he's forgotten with some occasional breakthroughs, but with always something missing.

Watching Mother causes you to slowly unwind your preconceived notions about what most thrillers build themselves off of. The brilliant part of Mother is how its final flashback (told stately through Bong's observant camera) shatters expectations in every sense, but also reveals the simplest solution to be the right one in a situation where other thrillers begin to get convoluted. This final revelation has more gravitas than that of any “mind-blowing” twist ending of such fanboy thrillers as Fight Club and Memento, shifting the attention away from singular revelation towards a much greater and more universal significance. Mother is an exercise in consistently sidestepping convention in a subtle way that makes it one of the most clear and concise thrillers in recent history.



I've seen Lynch, Jodoworsky and Bunuel. Not much really shocks me anymore onscreen, in the west that is. The only real horror I've experienced in film recently (outside of Ben Wheatly's solid horror, Kill List) comes from Korean and Japanese cinema. Bong Joon-ho seems to know this and plays off of his own cinema's world famous characteristics to add tension to every scene in the latter half of the film that involves Do-Joon's mother trying to free him of his unjust punishment. It comes to a peak in an extremely tense encounter with the mother and an eye-witness, only to further subvert our expectations of Korean cinema with an equally terrifying but more logically sound explosion of force. Bong is not interested in torture cinema, but moral cinema which invades every aspect of his film that remains remarkably entertaining throughout.

From its delightfully mysterious and lyrical opening shot, to the reprise of said shot, to the well timed at thought out ending, Mother is logical and intriguing cinema. Its revolutionary characteristics come not from innovative technique or plot structure, but from thoroughly analyzing its genre to find the most appropriate path to its haunting conclusion.

My god you liked it so much you reviewed it 4 times.

The tv version is on youtube (which is easier to understand because it is slower paced than the movie) but I don't think you might like it (it's quite like NGE but without the teenager angst). Also, it is similar with Tropical Malady in that both movies have a half about love between characters of the same sex but the execution may be slightly different.

Notice the subtle differences between posts. I think the second one was my best written

Nonetheless I will give it a fair shake and approach it earnestly like any other film and try to understand it fundamentally.

Ah, the thread is fixed with my plethora of reviews of Mother down (I can only hope that the excess of it caused more people to see it). I've been watching less movies recently because of school, but the ones I have been were very interesting. Notably, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's A City of Sadness, which I saw earlier this week was quite possibly the best film experience I've had this year (this doesn't imply that I saw it at a theater). I would love to write something about that film, but I don't feel confident enough to write about it yet (I plan on seeing it several times over). The film I'd like to talk about today is much less ambitious, though has a technical assurance to match.

Before Sunset



The sheer prevalence of the term "Spoiler" in our film culture suggests that this film ought not to have had the effect on me that it did. Before I watched any of Linklater's three Before films, I knew there were three, already a disadvantage. As a young film explorer with a burgeoning sense of elitism, I was burning through films in my boundless amounts of free time without taking much time to let them sink in or leave any lasting impact. When it came to Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, I felt no different. Though being of supposedly the ripe age for this film, my cynicism kept grinding roughly against the two protagonist's dog eyed hopefulness. The film was, and is a throwaway film for me in Linklater's oeuvre. Being a completionist (I refuse to watch Life and Nothing More and Through the Olive Trees until I can find Where is the Friend's Home) and, again, a cynic, I decided I needed to watch the second film.

The brilliance of the opening became apparent to me immediately. It begins with shots of all of the later locations of the film (something I'd catch on to early on), and quickly ushers us to an interview in a Paris bookshop with Jesse. I used to tell people that Before Sunset is a great film, but you need to see the film before it first for context, but I don't think this is true. As Jesse's interview becomes more of a surreal monologue in the last moments of timelessness before we're permanently grounded by the film's innate sense of time, we see everything we need to know for the film. Leave it to Linklater to be such an efficient storyteller (as I've said before, also on display in the third film). Not only are we seeing images from the first film that contextualize everything for us, most importantly about it, their youth. The final image of the previous film then forms a near spatial match of Celine in the bookshop, with her hair tied back in a similar but more unkempt fashion. It's the first great moment of Linklater's film, utilizing a very simplistic technique in an incredibly appropriate and naturalistic way that brings both films into the same space. It's prime Linklater.

The next few cuts tease the relationship between the two, not in a way to delay their meeting, but to add to the anxiety that comes from Jesse's obligation to the interview and seeing the woman he just wrote a book about. Once the two of them make first contact, we're now in the film, the clock has started. The characters know this, and we're given this explicitly by seeing Jesse sort out his plans before leaving.

What follows after this scene is what we've come to expect from Linklater since his also wonderful debut film, Slacker, an extended two person conversation. This portion of the film takes up the vast majority of the run time, and there's a few things I don't like about it. While most of the walking scenes are done, of course, with a tracking camera in front, or behind the two (in a better way, I think, than the method popularized by Aaron Sorkin via The West Wing, also it's far more interesting than Sorkin's dialogue, which is basically punchline dialogue), the stationary scenes are broken up to much into closer, single shots than I think is necessary, and I think it would've added to the film's sense of time and space if these scenes were done in more in extended two-shots. This would also allow the actors, who clearly seem capable of this, to feel out their performances more holistically, this could be a great film about body language if they gave them the opportunity. Forgive me for not talking about the content of their conversation, I think it's a highly subjective undertaking, and while it's extraordinarily interesting, I'd like to talk about structure more (Linklater has expressed concerns that nobody talks about the structure of Slacker, only the content of the conversations).

Once Celine and Jesse sit down at the coffee shop, all we get are over-the-shoulder shot-reverse shot patterning...


besides an interruption from the waitress

Granted, these shots aren't tight close-ups, but I still think they're a little at odds with the rest of the film's extended two-shots. The similar patterning in the last scene of the film could be considered a flaw, but the framing is much more relaxed and open, and therefore feels more natural to me.

How long have I been writing? Anyways, the last thing I'd like to talk about in the film is the exquisite ending. This scene clearly begins with the ascent of the staircase towards Celine's apartment. Until that moment, the film's trajectory could have shot in any direction, but once the silence falls while the two walk cautiously up the staircase, the final location is determined. This plays along intimately (as most of the film does) with the meta-context that we get from having he ability to see what point in the film we are at. Being a very time conscious person, I cannot watch a film without knowing how much of it is left because I know I'll be very busy (or plan for another movie to watch immediately) once the film is over. Before Sunset is the one film that I feel was aided by this ability, and made the ending that much more shocking and definite.

The film expertly juggles the final scene. I remember thinking the first time through that Celine getting the guitar was going to ruin it, and maybe it should have for its explicitness (and more forced awkwardness), but I was too enraptured by the film's prior mastery to be taken down by that, and what follows is as sublime an ending as can exist to a film like this. I cannot stress how perfect this slow, premature fade out is. I was struck immediately by how much longing and beauty Linklater could pack into a simple reverse shot. As the film before it crafted an ending and played it out at peak emotional intensity, this sequel lets the ending just kind of float over that final image, causing the film to both end much at odds to our expectations, and also far before we know it. This fade is by all counts definite. It reflects an almost immediate slowing down of the film to nearly a halt, and clearly indicates through a formal technique that hadn't been used prior that what we're seeing is different from everything before. It is the end of the film, but Linklater stresses that it is only that. Our time bearing witness to these lives is over, as much as we yell at the screen and demand more. Again, simplistic formalism in the most appropriate and naturalistic setting is Linklater's brilliance.



Thus, the sequel to a film I found entirely forgettable became one of my favorite American films of the last decade. Linklater is no where near as ambitious as my other favorite working American filmmakers (Lynch and Malick), but he reflects an innate knowledge and exact utilization of the basic tools of cinema and creates films that reflect the possibilities of Hollywood cinema with only slight reevaluation. I'm not saying his films are perfect (I still find the emotional climax of Before Sunset to be slightly off due to Celine's initial outbursts and yelling at the driver in English, not French), but, like I suggested about Bong Joon-ho Linklater represents a wholesale alternative but not rejection of Hollywood romance and the sequel, and the possibilities are a marvel to behold.

Sunset and Midnight were amazing. Sunrise left something to be desired for me however.

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Letterboxd

“Except for markf, you’re all a disgrace to cinema.”

I always think the best lists are very personal ones, so it appears you are on your way to developing one so I applaud it and you. My favorites would be Sherlock Jr., Days of Heaven and Sunrise. I haven't seen Satantango and Tropical Malady, though I will, but it's hard for me to believe they can be more poetic than Werckmeister Harmonies or Uncle Boonmee. I know you have certain muses (filmmakers and critics) you trust, but after you follow them, remember to try some you haven't thought much about and maybe even seem to be for hoi polloi because there's really no way for people to honestly know their personal tastes if they're only exposed to a limited spectrum of film, whether their brows are high or low. I'm not speaking of specific people here.