Thread: Uncle Boonmee

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"What's that sound?"
"Some tart using a catfish as a dildo."

I just watched the acceptance speech.

He thanked all the ghosts and spirits in Thailand.

Some much needed good news for Thailand.

Well done! :clap:

Originally Posted by Number 42

Some much needed good news for Thailand.

Well done! :clap:

It's banned innit?

Anybody seen this flick?

Originally Posted by Camel Toe

Originally Posted by Number 42

Some much needed good news for Thailand.

Well done! :clap:

It's banned innit?

Probably. It might show Thailand in a bad light.

Tards?????

Can he tell his future as well

Originally Posted by Camel Toe

Originally Posted by Number 42

Some much needed good news for Thailand.

Well done! :clap:

It's banned innit?

Bunch of clowns . . . when will Thailand grow up . . .

Just watched the trailer on U2B with wifey. Her comment afterwards was, "What was that about?" Looks fairly soporific.

A darling at Cannes, a field hand in Thailand
Patrick Winn
August 6, 2010

Leading actor of a lauded film finds that a prestigious award changes little to nothing back home.


Thanapat Saisaymar, a Thai day laborer and occasional actor, on the set of the Cannes Palme d'Or winner "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives." As the film won the festival's top prize, Thanapat was working as a plantation hand in Thailand. He now tends a fruit farm for less than $250 a month.
(Courtesy of Kick the Machine Films)

BANGKOK, Thailand — In late May, Thanapat Saisaymar was toiling in Thai-Burma hill country. By day, he hacked sugarcane to pay off family debts to a local godfather. By night, he bunked with up to 40 other workers in a small village.

Thanapat, 42, seemed to be just another machete swinger eking by. But on May 24, word raced across the plantation, via TV morning news, that he’d starred in a film that just won some illustrious contest in France.

The award was Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or. The film was “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” Thanapat hadn’t mentioned to the other cane harvesters that he played the title role in a movie competing for cinema’s highest accolade. They didn't even know he had ever acted.

“I didn’t see any good reason to bring it up,” Thanapat said. “I’m not much of a braggart.”

Before “Uncle Boonmee,” Thanapat was unknown. He appeared in local bank commercials, a few soap operas and one forgotten horror flick. He got into acting only several years back on a whim after hearing about a need for extras in a war movie.

The Cannes victory, however, was not the moment that propelled him into a life of fame and fortune. For Thanapat, in fact, the critics’ fawning has changed almost nothing.

Thanapat is the son of rice farmers. His jobs over the last 12 months include roof welder, actor and plantation hand — in that order. He now lives outside Bangkok with his wife and small child on a fruit farm, which he tends for less than $250 a month.



His $5,300 take-home pay for “Uncle Boonmee” was enough to buy a home in his native Sri Sa Ket, a farming province in Thailand’s poor northeast. It was instead spent on partying friends, an ailing mother’s medical bills and a second-hand European car, which has since broken down.

“I basically spent it all during Songkran,” he said, referring to a boisterous week-long Thai new year’s festival in April. So little was left from that splurge that Thanapat was back in the fields by the time “Uncle Boonmee” screened the next month at Cannes.

“Even now, I’m back on a fruit farm because there’s no acting work,” he said. “At least my boss is nice. He’ll let me leave if I land a part.”


Thanapat Saisaymar, a Thai day laborer and occasional actor, on the set of "Uncle Boonmee."
(Courtesy of Kick the Machine Films)

That Thanapat is unknown, and so devoid of movie star pretense, is the reason Apichatpong Weerasethakul, an experimental Thai filmmaker, chose him for “Uncle Boonmee.”

In the film, a man stricken with kidney failure beholds his possible previous incarnations — buffalo, princess, ex-soldier — as he slips towards death. He is visited by a long-lost son, transformed into a “monkey ghost” with glowing red eyes, who warns that the end is nigh. His dead wife returns to comfort him along the way.

The film anchors this other-worldly voyage with Thanapat’s character, Uncle Boonmee, a kind-eyed, commonsensical farmer.

Thanapat’s acting agency typically promotes him as a smiling hayseed. “I could tell this guy is used to playing the bumpkin,” Apichatpong said. “I liked him. I needed a real person, not a caricature.”

Thanapat also strongly resembled the real Uncle Boonmee, a non-fictional man reputed to have seen past lives while meditating in rural Thai temples.
In trading experience for rawness of character, Apichatpong knew his lead actor would stumble. The director’s dislike of polished actors is legend. He often fills lead roles with strangers he approaches in nightclubs, restaurants or Bangkok’s Victory Monument, a hectic bus depot and teen shopping mecca. Though seldom commercially successful, his work is devoured by experimental cinema fans. Two previous films, "Blissfully Yours" and "Tropical Maladay," have won smaller prizes at Cannes.

“I was hard on him, I confess,” Apichatpong said. “He had this set idea of acting that was very soap opera.”

Thanapat struggled to mimic a dying man’s movements: the weak gait, the hunched back, the whispery dialogue. One night, when filming was 30 percent complete, he prepared to flee the set without telling the crew.

“I thought I would just run away,” Thanapat said. “I was so ashamed.”

Instead, Thanapat took a chance on the supernatural. The wife of a crew member claimed she’d seen the real Uncle Boonmee’s spirit hovering around the set. While filming at night, technicians claimed they felt the dead man was near.
“I was desperate. I prayed to his spirit, saying ‘Please stay with me. Make me become you.’”

It worked. The next morning, the actor limped onto set as if transformed. “I wasn’t acting anymore. I actually was Uncle Boonmee. Every action pleased the director greatly.”

Thanapat is not the only “Uncle Boonmee” actor who has returned to a mundane life after the Cannes win.

An actor portraying Boonmee’s younger relative, recruited at a night club, has been working at a 7-Eleven. The actress who played Boonmee’s wife is back to singing at a Bangkok restaurant. Many actors before them have failed to find commercial success after attention at Cannes, which honors the experimental and avant-garde.

“My regular actors all struggle,” Apichatpong said. “They have to understand I’m not offering any path to stardom.”

But Thanapat understood that from the start, he said. He appears largely unmoved by the prestigious award and has only minor regrets about the fast-blown money. He appears either too humble, or self-deprecating, to have expected a longer glimpse at grandeur.

“You know, cutting sugar cane, that’s exerting a lot of energy,” Thanapat said. “Really, acting is nothing.”

globalpost.com

Uncle Boonmee goes beyond talking animals
Chris Knight
Thursday, Sept. 23, 2010


This might not look too weird, but that’s just because he hasn’t turned into a hairy creature with glowing red eyes yet
TIFF

Three things you should know if you happen to meet Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It’s OK to call him Joe; he understands that his given name is a tongue-twister to many Westerners. It’s also OK to shorten the title of his latest film, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, to Uncle Boonmee. Again, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a bit of a mouthful.

And it’s OK if you saw the film and didn’t like it. Director Tim Burton and the rest of the Cannes jury may have loved it, but the polarity of audience response is on par with Earth’s magnetic field.

“There’s hardly any middle ground, which I’m really happy about,” says the 40-year-old filmmaker, in Toronto last week for the film’s Canadian debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. “It shows that the film has a strong personality. It shows that I’m not making films that please everyone. It’s impossible to do that.”

Weerasethakul’s movie tells the story of Uncle Boonmee, who is dying of kidney failure and moves to the Thai countryside to live out his final days. As death nears, he is visited by ghostly relatives: first his wife; then his son, who has transformed into a hairy creature with glowing red eyes.

This furry apparition is a reference to monsters in the Thai movies Weerasethakul watched as a child, he explains. “We have our own stream of cinema history.” And the eyebrow-raising sex scene between a woman and a catfish? “I have my own tribute to what we call royal costume drama, where there’s a story of a prince and princess with talking animals.” He merely had his animals move beyond talking.

There was an actual Boonmee, now deceased, the subject of a 1983 book called A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Weerasethakul started his film with the idea of dramatizing Boonmee’s life, but his research and interviews with the man’s sons didn’t provide enough detail. Instead, he drew on his own experiences (his father died of kidney failure) and Buddhist notions about the reincarnation of the soul and the mutability of time.

He also credits his pre-filmmaking education as an architect. “It really helped,” he says. “If I didn’t study architecture I might make different kinds of films.” In his opinion, buildings and movies both rely on a complex relationship between space, time and the viewer.

Uncle Boonmee represents the final work in a series of films and installations called the Primitive project. “Thank God,” Weerasethakul says with a sigh. “I feel like moving on.”

His next film will be a more overtly political look at life in the northeastern part of Thailand, which was also the setting for Uncle Boonmee. The country has been lurching from crisis to crisis for several years now, and Weerasethakul feels he has to address it. “With the political situation going crazy now, it’s impossible to ignore.”

Film Review: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2.5 stars)

This divisive film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, possibly for sheer weirdness. (The jury president was Tim Burton, after all.)

It tells the story of Uncle Boonmee, a man dying of kidney failure, who as his life draws to a close receives casual visits from the ghosts of his dead wife and long-lost son. The latter has the eyes of a Jawa and the body hair of a Wookiee, though this is apparently a reference to monsters in old Thai movies and not Star Wars. (Memo to George Lucas’s lawyers: Stand down!)

The film also contains the best woman/catfish sex scene in recent memory; and a bilocating monk — possibly one of Boonmee’s past lives, but maybe not. Described by the Toronto International Film Festival program guide as “a wondrous cinematic labyrinth,” its entertainment value will depend on how happy you are feeling lost.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is screening daily at the TIFF Bell Lightbox until Sept. 29. For show times, visit tiff.net.

nationalpost.com

Vulture Premieres the Poster for Cannes Hit Uncle Boonmee,
Designed by Chris Ware
2/8/11



When cartoonist hero Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth) was asked to create the poster for Palme d'Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, he knew it would be a challenge — and not just because Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Thai ghost story famously features a scene of princess-on-catfish coitus.

"I wanted to get at both the transcendent solemnity of the film while keeping some sense of its loose, very unpretentious accessibility," says Ware.

"This being a poster, however — and even worse, me not really being a designer — I realized it also had to be somewhat punchy and strange, so as to draw viewers in and pique their curiosity without, hopefully, insulting their intelligence."

Vulture is proud to premiere Ware's creation; the film itself is out March 2 in New York.

nymag.com

That's a great poster; I'd put it on my wall even though I haven't seen the movie yet.

It's an okay flick, a bit slow at times, but its okay, especially if you understand the culture (which I'm sure most of us do) of Thailand.

I tried watching Tropical Malaise, which is another one of his films, but it moves a bit too slow for me, I actually fell asleep watching it, I'll give it a try one day when I'm not so tired.

I've been trying to find a torrent - any suggestions
All the best
Kel

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES Jungle fever. In Thai, with English subtitles. Running time: 113 minutes. Not rated (mature themes). At Film Forum, Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - NYPOST.com

Originally Posted by Kel

any suggestions

btjunkie - the largest bittorrent search engine

Watched it last week with the mrs. Very slow at times, but, not a bad film overall. Im sure a lot of it will go straight over heads of most people who have little or no knowledge of Thailand and Buddhism/animism.

From what I understand it is not so much about that, as it is about creating a mood. I've seen many comments that a surround sound system is crucial to the experience. Not that I would know as I still haven't seen it myself.