No Iron Pussy

Kong Rithdee, the film writer for the Bangkok Post, today took the Bangkok International Film Festival to task for dropping from its lineup a film called The Adventure of Iron Pussy, saying the snub deprives "local viewers of one of the most interesting movies of the year".

The reason given was that the movie was shot digitally and was planned for release straight to video. So technically, it isn't a film. But, as Kong points out, other, more prestigious festivals have shown digital movies, so the precedent cited by the Bangkok film festival holds no water.

Kong's story should be up for the next week or so on the Bangkok Post's RealTime page. Check it out if you can.

For those of you who don't make it to the article before the link expires, I'll quote a bit of it:

This lovably lunatic movie (with a gratifyingly kinky title) was set to become the bona fide scene-stealer of the BKK IFF before that short-sighted removal. Check this out. Adventure of Iron Pussy is the story of Iron Pussy, a homosexual superhero, a super-spy in oily makeup and glamorous toupee hired by the Thai government to spoil a megalomaniac's evil scheme. His campy espionage takes place in a melange of Technicoloured musicals and 1950s Thai melodramas, complete with greatest-hit cliches culled from the nostalgic cinema of Lavo Pappayont as well as Renoir's Rules of the Game and Burton's Batman. Don't imagine. You only have to see it.

And this is no schoolboy's show-off, no cheap shot at hip film-making by wannabes. Iron Pussy is directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the indie ace who won a top prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2002 with his enigmatic Blissfully Yours. A conspirator in the project - actually he's the seed of the crazy inspirations for the whole she-bang - is Michael Shaowanasai, an artist extraordinaire who plays Iron Pussy with unforgettable flourishes. As he chirpily puts it: 'Hey, how many days in a life does a 40-year-old gay man get to land a leading role in a musical in 2003!'.