Review: Buppha Arigato

• Written and directed by Yuthlert Sippapak
• Starring Supassara Thanachat, Charlie Potjes, Chalermpon Thikampornteerawong, Yok Teeranitayatarn, Aphichan Chaleumchainuwong, Thana Wityasuranan, Triwarat Chutiwatkhachorachai, Navin Yavapolkul
• Released in Thai cinemas on May 5, 2016; rated 18+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 3/5

Yuthlert Sippapak is one of the Thai film industry's more distinctive and prolific directors. His signature move is to throw all kinds of ideas into the blender and then somehow assemble them as mostly coherent films that I have more or less enjoyed over the years.

After a bit of a hiatus, he's back at it with Buppha Arigato (บุปผาอาริกาโตะ, a.k.a. Buppha Rahtree: A Haunting in Japan).

Not only does it blend the horror, comedy and romantic-drama genres, it's also an Asian cultural mix, with a blood-and-slapstick story about a Thai musician and a film crew visiting a winter resort in Japan, where they are haunted by Japanese-style ghosts as well as the ghost of a spurned young Thai woman. I also couldn't help but feel a bit of John Carpenter vibe, with perhaps a nod to Halloween.

Additionally, it is trading on a combination of well-known Thai movies, tying in with Yuthlert's own Buppha Rahtree franchise of ghost comedy-horrors and the hit 2003 film Fan Chan (แฟนฉัน, a.k.a. My Girl). The bulk of the cast are the boys from Fan Chan, all grown up, including that film's lead actor Charlie Potjes along with the schoolyard bully, Chalermpon "Jack" Thikampornteerawong. It's the first time all the guys have been reunited onscreen since they were children.

The story follows the familiar template of the Buppha Rahtree films, which dealt with the ghost of a vengeful heartbroken young woman haunting an apartment building, and mined comedy from the colorful procession of police, priests and shamans who are recruited to perform exorcisms.

Buppha Arigato changes things up by having the action take place in a rental lodge at a picturesque Japanese ski resort. And instead of one ghost, there are several. The most lethal is a knife-wielding mother and her creepy little boy, spirits of a family who stayed in the house years before but could not pay their rent.

Meanwhile, there's a young Thai woman named Buppha who comes to the resort on a solo trip to mend her broken heart. Seems she caught her boyfriend having sex with another woman. Somehow, she has passed away but her soul is hanging on at the lodge, and is drawn to Charlie and his crew because Charlie looks a bit like her cheating ex.

The lodge's shady landlord, a Thai expat portrayed by "Tar" Navin Yavapolkul, is aware of his property's status as a haunted house, and he has various clergymen brought in to get rid of the bad spirits. Among the bumbling exorcists is a Thai Buddhist monk who is hung over after having too much beer and a sake bomb the night before. His saffron robe is accessorized by expensive sunglasses and a designer handbag, reflecting an actual controversy about a jet-setting monk in Thai religious society. Later, a Thai Hindu priest takes a crack at the spirits. Neither are successful at much except getting plenty of laughs.

So it's up to Charlie, Jack and the rest of the gang to solve the mystery of why the ghosts are haunting the place.

It's a chance for the former child actor Charlie to stretch his dramatic chops, and to show his talent as an indie singer-songwriter. He gets an extended scene during the closing credits, with a stylishly shot close up of just him, his tenor voice and acoustic guitar.

Jack, now a ubiquitous TV personality and commercial pitchman, gets to play director, heading up the film unit that is comprised of other four other now-grown child actors from Fan Chan, namely Yok Teeranitayatarn, Aphichan Chaleumchainuwong, Thana Wityasuranan, Triwarat Chutiwatkhachorachai.

There is a passing of the torch, with former Buppha Ratree actress "Ploy" Chermarn Boonyasak putting in a cameo in a limbo dream sequence, and offering guidance to new-face actress Supassara Thanachat, who takes over the role.

But the real hero of Buppha Arigato is of course Yuthlert's long-time collaborator, actor and veteran film-industry hand Adirek "Uncle" Watleela, again playing a police officer as he has throughout the franchise, and in other films. Here, he's a Japanese cop, but helpfully speaks Thai, and he comes up with an unusual way of defeating the ghosts, involving the use of an umbrella and the Thai military's infamous divining-rod-like GT-200 "bomb detector".

Also, all the guys are required to strip down to their tighty-whitie underwear briefs, so at least these young emperors have a shred of dignity.

Review: Take Me Home

• Directed by Kongkiat Komesiri
• Starring Mario Maurer, Wannarote Sonthichai, Noppachai Jayanama
• Released in Thai cinemas on April 13, 2016; rated 15+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5 

The weird culture of Thai high society – entitled families whose perfect, luxurious existences are insulated from the ordinary working-class world – have long been the subject of the often off-putting and alienating films of ML Bhandevanov Devakula, the blue-blooded director of stage and screen who is better known as "Mom Noi" and is revered in the industry as the acting coach to most of Thailand's movie and TV stars.

With the new horror Take Me Home (สุขสันต์วันกลับบ้าน, Suksan Wan Klab Baan), Mom Noi's painterly, stagebound hi-so sensibilities are merged with indie grit, and the combination is surprisingly potent and enjoyable.

Mom Noi, who directed a string of lavish romantic dramas in the 1980s and '90s and then had a resurgence in recent years with a series of new adaptations of classic Thai novels that had been made into movies long before, is billed as a consultant on Take Me Home.

The thriller notably stars big-name talent Mario Maurer, who came under Mom Noi's tutelage in the dramatist's unique Thai take on Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, U mong pa meung, which was titled for the U.S. market as At the Gate of the Ghost. Mario then took the lead in Mom Noi's insanely epic two-part reworking of the erotic tale Jan Dara, which was all about bizarrely flawed rich folks and their oh-so-problematic lives.

But the driving force of Take Me Home is Kongkiat Komesiri, a writer-director who has helmed three very fine films, all slick-but-scuzzy crime dramas, 2007's Muay Thai Chaiya, 2009's Slice and 2012's Antapal.

Take Me Home is being touted as Kongkiat's "first horror", though his previous films, Slice especially, had horror elements, and he did take part in the "Ronin Team" collective effort behind the Five Star Production torture thrillers Art of the Devil.

Kongkiat came up with the story for Take Me Home and got help on the screenplay from Piyaluck Mahatanasab and the industry's go-to script surgeon Kongdej Jaturanrasmee. Piyaluck is also the producer, whose indie shingle North Star was among the imprints on Kongdej's critically hailed post-coup drama Snap, last year.

Mario portrays a young man who was in a coma around 10 years ago. He woke up with no recollection of his life except his name was Tan. While working as an orderly in the hospital's morgue, he's spookily led to clues about his family, and decides to investigate further. "Once you leave here, you can never return," is the administrator's prophetic warning he should've heeded.

The family estate is a modern architectural masterpiece. And he is warmly greeted at the gate by the family's doting maid Waew (Napapha Sukrit), who immediately recognizes him. Singing a soothingly unsettling Thai song, she gives him a lift in a golf cart to the main building, a stunning structure ripped from the pages of Architectural Digest. Inside, the welcome is as cold as all the tile, glass and stainless steel. A pair of horseplaying small children take no heed of Tan. The man of the house is the upright, sweater-clad snob Cheewin (Noppachai Jayanama), who has no clue who Tan is. Cheewin's wife, it turns out, is Tan's beautiful twin sister (Wannarote Sonthichai) Tubtim, whom Tan seems to barely recognize. And Cheewin states flatly that Tubtim never mentioned she had a twin brother.

So right away, nothing is adding up. And therein lies the suspense, as the reality of the house, Tan's family and their tortured history are gradually revealed. Seems Tan's and Tubtim's father was a respected architect who committed suicide. He had bought the house for a song years before, but the former owner felt betrayed. So there's much bad karma in the structure, along with all the right angles and spiral staircases. Tan is trapped, and has to live what appears to be a hellish, Groundhog Day-type existence, repeating fruitless escape attempts over and over.

Mario, the boyish Thai-Chinese-German actor whose career was launched with 2007's Love of Siam, gives what is perhaps his strongest (and sweatiest) performance yet. Noppachai is sure and steady in a supporting role. TV star Wannarote chews up her scenes as the increasingly unstable Tubtim.

With Mom's Noi's hidebound art-museum tendencies kept at arm's length, Kongkiat heads a production that vividly transforms the gleaming white modern home into a moldering, creaking haunted house. It's a welcome, worthy effort from one of the industry's more distinctive writer-directors.

In the meantime, Kongkiat has another feature in the works, the big-budget historical action epic Khun Phan, which stars Ananda Everingham as a policeman in the 1930s who is in pursuit of a roving bandit played by Krissada Sukosol Terrence. The picture, long since in the can, has been on Sahamongkol's release calendar for the past couple of years or so but has remained mysteriously in the vaults. Reportedly, Kongkiat is in the midst of reworking Khun Phan and updating the visual effects.



See also:

• The man who time forgot [The Nation]

Salaya Doc review: The Scala

Note: An encore screening of The Scala has just been added to the Salaya International Documentary Film Festival. It's at noon on Sunday, April 3, at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center.

"What if we're still doing this when we're 50?"

"It would be nice to have that kind of job security."

That exchange from young downwardly mobile tech professionals in the movie Office Space came to mind as I watched The Scala last weekend, the opening film of the Salaya International Documentary Film Festival. A documentary by Thai filmmaker Aditya Assarat, The Scala is an intimate and mournful portrait of Bangkok's last operating single-screen movie palace.

To put a relatable human face on the grand old lady of Siam Square, Aditya chose four theatre employees, all of whom have been working at the Scala since it opened in 1970. Like those Office Space characters, they probably never imagined they'd still be there more than 40 years later doing the same job.

Here are the characters:

• The Caretaker – From vacuuming the carpets to totalling up the day's receipts, the Caretaker does it all. A thin man in a crisp white button-down shirt, he's generally the guy who rips your ticket as you enter. He also washes the linen headrest covers, by hand. Remember that next time you think about wiping your popcorn-grease hands there, you slob. And the Caretaker is never very far away. He's always watching. After two marriages, he now resides with his true love, the Scala, and stays in an apartment on the cinema's roof.
• The Manager – Phuangthong Siriwan was put to work in her uncle's theatre when she was a young woman. Now with a bobbed mop of grey hair, she still carries a youthful gleam in her eyes, a bright spark to let folks know someone's there. She frets over the chipped marble in the Scala's signature curving double staircase, which has become worn under the billions of feet that have made their ascent to movie heaven.
• The Technician – The lights in the marquee. He keeps them lit. The sound in the speakers. He makes sure it's heard clearly. He's the guy behind the guy who ensures the Scala is running smoothly. He's also responsible for keeping the Scala's sister cinema the Lido spruced up. Take note of the new lights on the sign as you pass by next time.
• The Projectionist – Showing movies off a hard drive or satellite network just isn't as much fun as spooling up films for the projector, says the Projectionist, a thin, shaven-headed man who has weathered the recent changes in movie-going technology. He has to make a couple trips back and forth from his spiffy new digital system to the office to get a password to show the film. You will know his pain. Another resident of the Scala, with his own designated sleeping corner, he takes solace in his early morning bicycle rides around Siam Square.

A highlight of The Scala is the cleaning of the five-tier chandelier, a laborious process that requires all hands on deck. You won't believe how they do it, and it's something you have to see to believe.

Running a concise 50 minutes, The Scala overviews the history of the place, which opened in 1970 with the 70-millimetre John Wayne western The Undefeated. It joined a trio of similarly grand Siam Square movie palaces operated by Pisit Tansacha and his Apex group, the Siam, which mysteriously burned in the 2010 anti-government protests, and the Lido, which caught fire in 1991 and was converted to the three-screen multiplex we know today.

Back when the Scala opened, movie-going was something special, and all 1,000 seats in the theatre were filled with patrons, who had dressed in their finest for the evening out. Over the years, the number of seats has shrunk to around 700, with most of the seats taken out to accommodate a large stage that's used for concerts, talk shows and special events, which help supplement the Scala's dribs and drabs of income from movies.

Anywhere else, the Scala probably would have closed ages ago, but with the Tansacha family earning its bones from the Nong Nooch Gardens tourist attraction in Pattaya, the Scala and Lido remain in business out of sheer devotion to the theatres themselves and the loyal staff.

But there's a sinking feeling among the staff, as well as the filmmaker, that the Scala's days are numbered. After all, movie can be watched on phone screens, or at fancy mall multiplexes, all over the country. Siam Square landlord Chulalongkorn University has indicated it is keen on tearing down the old cinemas in order to build more shopping malls, though currently there's an agreement in place to keep Lido and Scala running through 2018.

Part of the Power of Asian Cinema documentary series commissioned for last year's Busan International Film Festival by KBS Busan television, The Scala is an enduring portrait of an endangered landmark. Following the one-off screening at Salaya Doc, Aditya says he's sold The Scala to TrueVisions' Thai movie channel, so keep an eye out for it there later in the year. He also reckons he'll one day screen The Scala at the Scala.

"My real hope is that one day, if the Scala does indeed close, I would hope they can show this at the farewell party," he says.

Related posts:

• Sixth Salaya Doc to open with The Scala
• Festival, festival! Masters and newcomers in Busan

(Cross-published in The Nation)

Review: Halfworlds

• Directed by Joko Anwar
• Starring Salvita Decorte, Nathan Hartono, Bront Palarae, Aimee Saras, Tara Basro, Ario Bayu, Arifin Putra, Reza Rahadian, Adinia Wirasti
• Series premiere November 29, 2015 on HBO Asia. Season 1 finale January 10, 2016

Southeast Asia's monster mythology and ancient spiritual beliefs are vividly drawn upon in the HBO Asia Original Production Halfworlds, which began airing its first season on HBO in Asia last month.

With all eight half-hour episodes directed by Indonesia’s leading filmmaker Joko Anwar, Halfworlds is set in the shadowy back alleys of Jakarta, where there exists a parallel world of ancient blade-wielding tattooed demons. Known as demits, they pose as humans, live alongside us and feed on our blood. Just as our own world appears on the brink of uncertainty, the realm of the demits is also at a crossroads, with a supernatural event known as “the Gift” fast approaching, and causing much anxiety.

It’s the most ambitious production for Singapore-based HBO Asia and its partner studio facilities just across the Strait, on Indonesia’s Batam Island. There, in a complex of soundstages carved out of a malarial mangrove, is where they made the adventure movie Dead Mine in 2012, the Australian-co-produced series Serangoon Road in 2012 and last year’s supernatural family drama Grace.

Halfworlds is their best yet, judging from the first two episodes HBO Asia provided for reviews.

And that’s thanks to Anwar, who co-wrote the series with Collin Chang. The director of a cult-hit, critically acclaimed string of film-noir-inspired thrillers, such as Dead Time: Kala (2007) and The Forbidden Door (2009), Anwar has an uncanny knack for combining moody lighting, highly saturated colors, comic-book-style framing and richly imagined characters in compelling ways.

At the center of the story is a young street artist named Sarah (newcomer Salvita Decorte). Like young Bruce Wayne in the Batman comics, Sarah’s destiny started when her parents were murdered. Unlike Wayne, Sarah is not rich. She has no butler nor a mansion. She squats in a flat but has a wealth of friends, including her tattoo-artist best pal Pinung (Aimee Saras) and young indie rocker boyfriend Coki (Nathan Hartono). They gather in a watering hole known as The Moth.

Sarah has been understandably haunted by her parents’ deaths, as reflected by the disturbing and graphic images that are alongside the tourist sketches in her portfolio. Like any other crime procedural, she has a “murder wall” of her drawings. Among the monsters she’s illustrated is the palasik, a female demon consisting of a floating head and entrails, similar to a well-known Thai ghoul, the krasue. There are also various figures lurking in the shadows, keeping an eye on Sarah, who they believe to be the “chosen one”, and this gives her a feeling of unease.

It’s those darker figures who make Halfworlds utterly watchable, and it helps that HBO Asia has tapped into Indonesia’s most-trusted film export, the smash-hit martial-arts franchise The Raid, to help complete that world. Among them are The Raid 2 alums Arifin Putra as a mysteriously handsome fellow in a hood who is dogging Sarah, and Alex Abbad as another troublemaking demit figure.

Other characters include veteran Malaysian actor Bronte Paralae as Detective Gusti, a weary lawman who has made the demits his personal beat. His intentions are unclear, as he appears to be under the thumb of demit head honcho Juragan (Anwar film vet Ario Bayu). There’s a killer female demon (Adinia Wirasti) with a cool bloody scene every episode. And Reza Rahadian and Tara Basro are a colorful demit couple.

Rahadian in particular has a stand-out sequence when he and his ladyfriend find a victim in a bar. He puts their mark at ease by posing as a nerd, with shaky voice, glasses, a turtleneck and scruffy beard to complete the look. As he lets the other guy steal his woman, Rahadian slowly sheds his quietly unassuming persona and plunges his blade into the guy. Soon, shots of blood are served up all around.

The action is among the highlights, even though it’s not on the scale of The Raid (after all, this is HBO Asia, not Game of Thrones). Among the stand-out scenes is a guy getting sliced in half. And there’s a cool fight in a men’s room, where the electric hand dryer blows a demon’s shirt, revealing his family tattoo. A knock-down-drag-out results in smashed bathroom fixtures and a load of red painting the walls.

Further eye candy is provided by a graphic-novel opening sequence, which is different each episode and furthers illustrates the mythical world of the demits.

While Halfworlds is a cult hit waiting to happen, just how this HBO Asia series will translate in other territories is unclear. Director Anwar offers one view, with a funny scene of a foreigner hipster getting a tattoo in Pinung’s parlor. Seems he made unwanted advances on the pretty tattoo artist and she decided to teach him a lesson in Bahasa Indonesia.

“I can’t wait to show my friends back home,” he says as he checks out the newly inked script between his shoulderblades.

“Nasi goreng,” the tattoo reads. “Fried rice,” reads the subtitle.

See also:

• No half measures [The Nation]

(Cross-published in The Nation)

Review: Snap

• Written and directed by Kongdej Jaturanrasmee
• Starring Waruntorn Paonil, Toni Rakkaen
• Sneak preview run in Thai cinemas December 24-30, 2015; wider release December 31, 2015; rated 15+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

Millennials wake up and smell life – unfiltered – in Snap (แค่..ได้คิดถึง, Kae .. Dai Kit Tung), a sharply observed romantic comedy-drama from writer-director Kongdej Jaturanrasmee.

Laden with the hashtags and color-saturated photos of social-media posts, Snap has young Thais reflecting wistfully on the not-so-distant past as pessimism emerges about their impending adulthood, and, possibly, about the future of Thailand itself.

Set just as the military declared martial law last year, Snap is the story of Pueng (delicate singer-actress Waruntorn Paonil in her feature debut), the daughter of an army colonel who is set to marry a junior officer. She is one of those people whose only joy is derived from photographing everything with her phone – the coffee she’s about to drink, the food she’s about to eat, the nature vista she’s just seen – and post the snapshot to Facebook and Instagram, all heavy with descriptive nonsense hashtags.

Before her own big day, Pueng accepts an invitation from high-school friends to attend their wedding in her former hometown of Chanthaburi. There, she’s reunited with her old classmates, including her ex-boyfriend Boy (the quietly intense Toni Rakkaen), a local photographer who happens to also be shooting the wedding.

Melancholy wells up as Pueng revisits her old high school and goes looking for the bench where she and Boy spent their days. The dusty old wooden seat, still with the graffiti markings on it, has been relegated to the school’s rooftop, and no longer holds any significance to the current crop of kids.

Turns out there is little of Pueng left for Chanthaburi locals to remember either, as she left rather abruptly some years before, thanks to a sudden transfer of her military father. As a consequence, Pueng’s picture has been left out of her high-school yearbook, but her presence is still felt by the inclusion of dotted-line-bordered blank spaces in group photos. A second dotted-line figure also appears in many photos, that of Boy, who as the yearbook photographer was behind the lens and not in the frame. They are ghosts in the photos, and those blank spaces represent holes in their souls. Pueng and Boy wonder if those holes can still be filled.

Here, Kongdej is also trafficking in nostalgia for the old film-photography days, and the tactile feeling of developing the rolls of negatives and making the prints. It’s a subject previously referenced in fellow Thai director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s abstract 36. There is also comment on the ridiculously epic proportions wedding-photo shoots have taken on in recent years, something Nawapol observed earlier this year in his Freelance (Heart Attack). Seems there is something on the minds of Thailand’s great movie makers.

The wedding couple are the a-dork-able bespectacled nerds Poo (Soifa Saenkhamkon) and her man Aey (Chakphet Goontong), who met on an online dating site. Poo tells the hair-curling story of their sex-filled first meeting, and rather than flash back to it, Kongdej lets the impact of their coupling register on the faces of Pueng and others.

Pueng, meanwhile, tells the group how she met her husband-to-be, the army officer Mann (Grisana Punpeng), who was her teacher at university, and they didn’t exactly hit it off at first. But Mann kept turning up, and really, he’s a sweet guy even if he's a bit clueless. He goes so far as to ask Boy to photograph his and Pueng’s wedding. Which probably isn’t the best idea. I mean, just look at Pueng and Boy, who seem drawn together like characters out of a manga novel. The connection between Pueng and Mann, on the other hand, appears strained.

Later on, Pueng wants to test the waters of her past relationship with Boy, and the two meet for a late-night reunion at Chanthaburi’s Kung Kraben Aquarium, where the swirls of ocean life and the bubbling water provide a dramatic backdrop for reminiscing.

“How come nothing is as good as it used to be?” That’s the utterance of the frustrated and profoundly depressed Pueng when the gravity of her situation – her own marriage, the junta, the pointlessness of sharing so many darn photos – hits her.

I can’t recall a Kongdej film, especially those of his late “indie” period, that’s looked better, thanks to director of photography MR Umpornpol Yugala, production designer Rasiguet Sookkarn and art director Manop Chaengsawang. In contrast to the movie’s sad, beautiful heroine, the look of Snap is cheery, colorful and pops right off the screen.

Snap is also possibly the most poignant and also the most ordinary film yet from Kongdej. His usual stock-in-trade has been unusual characters, such as a young woman running a smut magazine in Sayew, a taxi driver in love with a massage-parlour girl in Midnight My Love and the three-armed man on a road trip with a large-breasted woman in Handle Me With Care. The writer-director turned away from studio-driven projects to make smaller independent films with his 2011 feature P-047, which was perhaps his most unusual film to date, with an abstract story of a locksmith who loses the key to his identity. But he’s since become more grounded, covering Bangkok boys on the fringes in the drama Tang Wong and boys in Buddhist temples in his documentary So Be It. Fatherhood has had an effect (he made a short documentary, Udon, featuring his brilliant twin daughters) and Kongdej is viewing the world in ways that aren’t the same as before.

See also:

• 'Snap' judgement [The Nation]

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: Kyushu the Movie, Snap sneaks in
• Festival festival! Masters and Newcomers in Busan, premieres in Tokyo and Taipei, an award in Rio

 (Cross-published in The Nation)

LPFF 2015 review: Spotlight on Cambodia

The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock 'n' Roll

Cambodia's constant struggle to reconcile its bloody Khmer Rouge past with the ancient legacy of Angkor and the push for modernity in the 21st century were common threads running through five movies at the sixth Luang Prabang Film Festival, which made Cambodia the subject of its first “Spotlight”. It showed there is more to Cambodian cinema than the works of its multi-award-winning veteran leading director Rithy Panh.

Curated in part by Sok Visal, Cambodia’s “Motion Picture Ambassador” to the Luang Prabang fest, the Spotlight devoted a full day to the country’s re-emerging cinema movement, with a diverse selection of four films. The line-up included the documentaries The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll and Still I Strive, martial-arts action in Hanuman and melodrama in The Last Reel. Shown on another day was a fifth Cambodian entry, the cult crime-comedy Gems on the Run, co-directed by Visal.

Cambodia’s “code of women’s conduct”, masked killers and arranged marriages were among the common themes linking the films.

Still I Strive

Referenced in at least three of the entries, that book that holds that Cambodian women should be polite, quiet and dutiful, is promptly tossed out by domineering female protagonists. In Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll, a Phnom Penh bargirl undergoes a transformation from a mouse-like figure afraid of her own voice to a tigress-like diva rocker who could teach a thing or two to Cookie Lyon of TV’s Empire. In The Last Reel, a teenage girl jumps off the back of her gangster boyfriend’s motorbike to take up the mantle of movie producer and actress as she tries to reconstruct the missing reel of a 1970s historical epic. And in Gems on the Run, a plucky gun moll chooses love, and falls for the movie’s unlikely hero, a portly police officer who wants to be a singer.

A masked vigilante is out for revenge in Hanuman, which brings Cambodia’s ancient Bokator “pounding a lion” martial art out of the shadows. And it’s masked men who rob an armored car in Gems on the Run. Meanwhile, both the heroine in The Last Reel and the plus-sized leading man of Gems on the Run are seeking to escape from pending marriages arranged by social-climbing parents.

More martial arts are on display in the jawdropping and surprising documentary Still I Strive, which covers the orphan schoolchildren of the National Action Culture Association, an organization run by veteran actress Peng Phan. Having lost her own family during the Khmer Rouge years, she and her husband devote their lives to teaching arts to the orphans. With heartbreaking individual profiles of students, showing the hardships they faced in broken homes to a life of love and learning at the orphanage, the film follows their efforts to perform for the country’s arts-and-culture patron, Princess Bopha Devi.

Hanuman

Directed by Adam Pfleghaar and A. Todd Smith, Still I Strive has these remarkable youngsters acting in full-fledged dramatic segments, following a parallel quest in ancient times, in which their skills in music, dance, storytelling and stage combat are used to full effect. It's amazing.

The gritty Hanuman, meanwhile, is set in contemporary Phnom Penh, where a masked vigilante rises up to challenge the country’s culture of impunity and take revenge on criminals who killed his father. The masked man is also reunited with his estranged brother, a police officer who has been secretly trying to bring his father’s killers to justice himself. Directed by Italian filmmaker Jimmy Henderson, Hanuman is clearly inspired by The Raid, which vividly brought Indonesia’s pencak silat martial arts to world screens. Along with nods to Thailand’s Tony Jaa and Ong-Bak, Hanuman also revels in the lurid images of Italy’s spaghetti westerns and giallo slashers. It's not going to do for Cambodian action cinema what the The Raid did for its stars (who turn up in the new Star Wars), but it is the start of something, and I hope the Hanuman gang will regroup to make more of these types of films.

The Cambodian Space Project and The Last Reel both dealt with the vibrant Cambodian pop culture of the 1970s. Under the patronage of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, himself a multi-hyphenate musician, producer, director and star of his own movies, Cambodia’s cinematic golden age was paralleled by a rollicking music scene, which emulated American rock ’n’ roll. Both scenes were brought to an abrupt end in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over, emptied the cities and put the populace to work making the country into an agrarian utopia. Intellectuals and artists didn’t fit into that scheme, and were targets for persecution and death.

The Last Reel

The forces of music and film combined in The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll, which surveys the resurgence of Cambodian rock and its revival under an unusual band, the Cambodian Space Project, which began in 2009 when Australian pop-artist and musician Julien Poulson heard the extraordinary voice of bargirl Srey Thy performing karaoke. The two had little in common but music, but it was enough.

The band is similar to another outfit, the U.S.-based Dengue Fever, which were featured on the soundtrack to Matt Dillon’s 2002 made-in-Cambodia drama City of Ghosts and have been the subject of their own documentary. But while that band’s frontwoman Chhom Nimol was influenced by the slain 1970s Cambodian singer Ros Sereysothea, the Cambodian Space Project’s Thy has taken the more earthy and grounded vocalist Pan Ron has her major influence.

Directed by German Mark Eberle, The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll follows the band’s journey from the bars to Phnom Penh to music clubs in Sydney, Paris and Hong Kong. Clips include the band’s landmark performance at the Cambodia International Film Festival, providing live musical accompaniment to Georges Melies’ 1902 science-fiction epic A Trip to the Moon, the style of which was emulated by Cambodian filmmakers in the 1970s and by Eberle in fantastic animation sequences that imagined the photogenic Thy as an actress in an Angkorian sci-fi epic. Making the film turned out to be an epic undertaking for Eberle, who at one point was drafted to play bass in the band in order to keep both the band and his film project going.

It was a hit with viewers at the Luang Prabang Film Festival's daytime venue, who gave it the festival’s first Audience Choice Award.

Cambodia’s lost cinematic golden age, artfully covered in French-Cambodian director Davy Chou’s Golden Slumbers, unspools further in The Last Reel, a handsomely mounted melodrama that was the country’s official submission to next year’s Academy Awards. Directed by Kulikar Sotho, who rose to prominence as a location supervisor on Angelina Jolie’s made-in-Cambodia action romp Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Last Reel follows a young woman who discovers old film reels in a dilapidated Phnom Penh movie palace and realizes that the beautiful actress in the movie is her mother. Secrets of her family’s Khmer Rouge past surface as the young women sets out to recreate the movie’s missing final reel, with help from a motley crew of her biker boyfriend, the theater's elderly projectionist and film students.

Gems on the Run

The Last Reel strained my brain with its soap-opera leanings and a time-travelling story that omitted an entire generation between the Khmer Rouge era and the teenagers of today, whose grandparents, not parents, would have been Khmer Rouge cadre and captives. But for reasons of sentimentality, nostalgia and, I suppose, vanity, there was a compression in time that took away from the weight of the film's dramatic heft.

I liked Gems on the Run better, and I told Sok Visal so at one point during the fest. He thought I was kidding, but then he doesn't know me very well. Directed by Visal and his French friend Quentin Clausin, Gems on the Runs is exactly the type of film I actually enjoy, with its sprawling, shaggy-dog tale of a portly police officer who wants to be a singer getting mixed up with an estranged childhood friend, his ladyfriend and stolen diamonds. It is, essentially, a Coen Bros farce made in Cambodia. Visal, whose family made their escape to Thailand and then France during the Khmer Rouge era and made his return to Cambodia in 1993 to produce music, is a first-time filmmaker with Gems. The film was something of a flop on commercial release, though the soundtrack did well. It's got a cult following, of which I'm now a member. Visal, for his part, wants to do a horror film next, and I can't wait to see it.

The rotund leading man, Cheky Athiporn, was a photographer before he got put in front the camera for his eye-popping star turn in Gems on the Run.

Other actors provided more connections between the films in Luang Prabang's Spolight. Among them was actress Ma Rynet, star of The Last Reel who also appears in Hanuman. And the girl’s mother (or should it be her grandmother?) is portrayed by Dy Saveth, a Golden Age star. Saveth, who famously survived the Khmer Rouge era because she missed a Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Phnom Penh in 1975, also appears in Cambodian Space Project, imparting advice to the budding diva Thy.

Further talent ties are cemented by the appearance of hard-working actor Rous Mony, who plays the sneering villain in Hanuman, The Last Reel and Gems. I liked to think he was also lurking the background in Space Project and Still I Strive.

Here's Wise Kwai's ratings, for those keeping score:

The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock 'n' Roll: 4/5
Hanuman: 3/5
Still I Strive: 5/5
The Last Reel: 2/5
Gems on the Run: 4/5

Sok Visal talks about Cambodian cinema with Cambodian Space Project director Mark Eberle. Wise Kwai photo

(Adapted from an article in The Nation)

Review: Sway

• Written and directed by Rooth Tang
• Starring Matt Wu, Lu Huang, Kris Wood Bell, Kazohiko Nishimura, Ananda Everingham, Sajee Apiwong
• Limited release in Thailand on December 10, 2015; rated 18+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

Fragments from around the globe form a story in Sway, the ambitious debut feature from Thai-American director Rooth Tang.

In three cities, there are couples going through the motions, but are somehow stuck:

• In Paris, Chinese-American drifter Arthur (Matt Wu) has just landed at the airport. While trying to figure out his next move, he tentatively reconnects with his girlfriend Vivian (Lu Huang), a former TV star from China who is trying to make it as a serious journalist. Arthur then gets news from home that his parents might get a divorce.
• In Los Angeles, Amanda (Kris Wood Bell), the Caucasian second wife of widowed Japanese businessman Eric (Kazohiko Nishimura) feels she is on shaky ground with her husband's teenage daughter Grace (Miki Ishikawa). She is giving her young stepmum the silent treatment.
• And in Bangkok, well-travelled Thai hipster Palm (Ananda Everingham) romances less-worldly office girl June (Sajee Apiwong) and fills her head with dreams about future destinations. She also has a belly full of Palm's baby, and is afraid of what will happen if she tells him he's a father.

It's the first feature from Rooth, a graduate in film studies from the University of California, Irvine. He was raised in America by Thai parents, and took inspiration from his mum and dad, who had participated in the pro-democracy movement at Thammasat University in the 1970s, but then moved to the US. In short, he wondered, what was that like?

Filming started in Bangkok in August 2010, just months after the red-shirt anti-government demonstrations. At the time, Rooth was unsure whether his project would be a short film or develop into something longer. Thanks to a windfall and financial help from his parents, who are among the producers, the Los Angeles segment was added, and then to Paris, where filming wrapped up in 2013. After a world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, Sway has swung around the globe, with appearances in Taipei's Golden Horse fest and the Singapore International last year and this year's Shanghai fest.

Sway draws its influences from the expressionist palette of Wong Kar-wai's films, the globalized existentialist angst of Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel and the quietly simmering family dysfunction of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata.

Sway will also seem particularly familiar to fans of independent Thai cinema, thanks to its coincidental connections to two recent Thai indie movies that also dealt with brooding Asians who are adrift in the world - Aditya Assarat's Hi-So and Lee Chatametikool's Concrete Clouds. Both featured Ananda in similar roles of a rootless vagabond of sorts, and Hi-So actually featured both Ananda and Sajee. Both films were also by directors whose backgrounds are similar to Rooth's - they are all foreign-schooled Thai filmmakers seeking to express feelings of being caught between Eastern and Western cultures but not really sure which side to pick.

Those connections were further solidified in post-production, which was completed in Bangkok at White Light studio, under supervision of Lee.

Rooth is seeking to develop a style that is distinct from those he's influenced by, coincidental or not. With Sway, he drops you into people's lives mid-stream, but you don't need to paddle to keep up. Instead, it's best to just float along and watch the stories unfold.

The intended result is that the audience has the same ill-at-ease feeling as the characters, who themselves aren't really sure who they are or what they should be doing. Romantic chemistry is palpable, especially with the Paris and Bangkok couples. Dialogue is clipped and spare, with smoldering sidelong glances, angry grimaces or worried frowns doing most of the narrative heavy lifting.

It's left to minor supporting characters to finally and fully explain what motivates the main ones, with June's pragmatic Thai mother putting her at ease, and the Japanese-American teenager to explain why she's been so awful to her stepmother. In Paris, Arthur's mother turns up to reflect on her life as an immigrant and help point her son in a definite direction.

Real-world events place the three segments in different times and help ground them, with the political crisis of 2008 to 2010 providing the backdrop of the Bangkok story, while Barack Obama's re-election as U.S. president in 2012 is referenced in L.A. France's intervention in Mali is mentioned in the Paris segments.

Symbolism and metaphors crop up frequently, mostly noticeably in the Bangkok segments, where the small composite-plastic figure of a bird represents the ambitions of Palm, who thinks he can get rich making widgets from the hi-tech hybrid material. The bird is later found shattered on the floor, along with the possibility of broken dreams. But then another stork-like symbol emerges on the Bangkok skyline - a construction crane - representing hopes for the future.

See also:

• Sway on Facebook

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: Sway

(Cross-published in The Nation)

Review: Runpee (Senior)

• Written and directed by Wisit Sasanatieng
• Starring Jannine Wiegel, Phongsakon Tosuwan, Sa-ad Piampongsan
• Released in Thai cinemas on December 3, 2015; rated 15+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

After a five-year hiatus from commercial filmmaking, Wisit Sasanatieng has been coaxed back to the director's chair by the studio M-Thirtynine with Runpee (รุ่นพี่, a.k.a. Senior), an artfully directed ghost comedy that successfully merges old-fashioned horror thrills with contemporary teen romance.

Penned by Wisit, the story is about an outcast weirdo at a Catholic girls' boarding school. She has a special nose. Unlike the kid in The Sixth Sense, the olfactorily gifted girl Mon (Ploychompoo Jannine Weigel) can't see dead people, she smells them. More specifically, she can sniff out the troubled spirits who are still lurking in our realm.

Her unique talent leads her to develop a connection with a boy ghost (Bom Phongsakon Tosuwan) who was a student when the place was a business school in the 1980s, before it was a church convent. Together, they investigate a murder that occurred there some 50 years before, when the school was the palace home of a princess, who was found beaten, bloodied and very much dead in her swimming pool. Her gardener took the fall for the death, but there was more to the case than met the eye.

It's an old-timey Thai setting right out of Wisit's 2000 debut feature, Fah Talai Jone (Tears of the Black Tiger), and that western's trademark raspberry-jelly blood splatter is evident in key scenes. Runpee also has echoes of Wisit's 2006 Gothic horror Pen Choo Kub Pee (The Unseeable), plus the wry observational humour of his satiric Mah Nakorn (Citizen Dog).

With false scares and other cinematic sleight-of-hand tricks, Wisit keeps the audience guessing as he suspensefully strings along the story of Mon and her ghost friend Runpee, whose name means simply "senior".

Mon's abilities to sense ghosts has made her an outcast among her school's other girls. Everyone already thought she was a bit weird, but since Runpee came on the scene, she's especially bizarre, since she's given to carrying on conversations with her ghost pal, who almost no one except the audience can see. So it appears she's walking along, talking to herself. There are even street scenes, which I'm not certain were filmed on a closed set, in which passersby naturally react with perplexity to the odd girl who is flailing her arms and talking gibberish to an invisible friend.

At one point, Mon is talking and flailing during her French lessons, and the stern nun teacher punishes Mon by having her wear a sign and stand with her arms outstretched. Even then, she continues her conversation with Runpee.

The laws of physics are different in the ghost world, Runpee explains as they sleuth around the school property, searching for clues to the 50-year-old murder. For example, ghosts can't walk walls if the walls were built after they died. Industrial-like animated diagrams help illustrate. And, there are exceptions, of course. It's not quite Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, but then thank goodness it isn't.

Aside from the main story of the old murder case, there are other issues to pad out the tale and give weight to the characters. There's an annoyingly cheerful young doctor friend of Mon's (DJ We Raweeroj) whom Mon strings along long enough for him to be helpful to the murder case. Another subplot has Mon developing a selfie-fueled friendship with the school's other outcast, Ant (Kaykai Nutticha Namwong), who is shunned by the popular clique because she's been seen getting close to the male chemistry teacher – way too close in fact. He's a jerk, and gets what's coming to him in a vividly memorable scene that has him haunted by millions of eyeball-like CGI spirits.

Ant's story has parallels to the 50-year-old murder, which is intertwined with the school's history and the mysterious figure of "Baby Daeng", the heir to the princess' estate and the cause of conflict. What happened to Baby Daeng? That's the question that keeps coming back to haunt Mon and Runpee as they circle ever closer to a truth that was right in front of their eyes to begin with.

Figures from the past include an elderly doctor, portrayed by stage and screen veteran Sa-ad Piampongsan, who is a hoot to watch as he chews up scenes that grow meatier and meatier with each appearance.

Onward and upward, the action reaches its heights with Mon atop a bell tower, rescued by her personal Jesus Runpee.

It's a mix of actors from a bygone era of classic Thai genre films and fresh-faced youngsters making their debuts, which is something of a trademark for Wisit, who has a knack for plucking up fresh talents and dropping them in as the leads of his films.

Here, singer-actress Ploychompoo is an endearing heroine, rebellious and strong, placing her in good company with another superpowered young actress, Punpun Sutatta Udomsilp from another Thai movie this year, May Nai (May Who?), about a high-school girl who releases a strong electrical charge if her heart gets racing. Maybe one day Mon and May could team up to solve more crimes.

See also:

• Spirits and the soul [The Nation]

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: Keetarajanipon, Khun Thong Daeng, Runpee

Review: Vanishing Point

• Directed by Jakrawal Nilthamrong
• Starring Ongart Cheamcharoenpornkul, Drunphob Suriyawong, Chalee Choueyai, Suweeraya Thongmee
• Reviewed at premiere screening on October 16, 2015 at the Laem Thong Theatre, Bangkok; rated 15+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

What is the point of Vanishing Point (วานิชชิ่ง พอยท์)? That’s a question that has vexed me since I saw the film in a rundown porn cinema in Bangkok.

Directed by Jakrawal nilthamrong, Vanishing Point is the culmination of everything the artist-filmmaker has done up to now. It won the Hivos Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and has been selected for many other fests. Like another prominent Thai artist-filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jakrawal is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he’s much-respected in the art and indie filmmaking community. In his art installations and short films, Jakrawal explores strict Buddhist themes, reflecting on the dangers of greed and materialism.

An unapologetic art-house film, Vanishing Point is a cavalcade of experimental techniques and abstractions. The story, as nearly as I can make out, has two central characters, a journalist and a family man, whose lives run in parallel trajectories until they converge at that “vanishing point” on the horizon.

The film is also autobiographical in nature, since it opens with an image of a car twisted horrifically in half. The picture is from a 1983 newspaper report on a car being struck by a train, which left Jakrawal’s own parents with severe physical and emotional scars.

The wrecked car is something this Vanishing Point shares with the 1971 Hollywood counterculture film of the same title. Both movies are about existential crises, with the earlier film’s Kowalski at first having a purpose for driving his Dodge Challenger at flat-out speeds across the desert, but as that story goes on, he just drives for the sake of driving.

In Jakrawal’s Vanishing Point, the two central characters’ reasons for living are murkier. They are headed for the same destination as Kowalski – just far more slowly.

There’s also a sleazy 1970s vibe about the new Vanishing Point, an aesthetic that Jakrawal highlighted in choosing a cinema from that era as the venue for its debut in Bangkok. This business of life can be a dirty thing, and amid the mould and grime of Klong Toey’s Laem Thong Theatre, he wanted his audience to revel in it.

In the Thai universe of Vanishing Point, the fractured timeline shifts to the forest, where a reporter (played by Drunphob Suriyawong) is covering a police crime re-enactment. They have a suspected rapist acting out his deeds with a giant teddy bear. It’s a scene that will probably seem routine to Thais who see such things in the newspapers every day, but to foreigners it’s a bizarre situation. I too wonder just what these re-enactments really prove.

The reporter, who thinks the same, departs the scene to follow the police. He eventually turns up at a short-time motel, where he spends time with a senior hooker (Suweeraya Thongmee).

His visit is recorded on video by the movie’s other major character, a businessman (Ongart Cheamcharoenpornkul) who is in the midst of an existential crisis. He’s got a large stack of videotapes of hotel guests having sex, but appears to get no joy from watching them. At home he shares a meal in total silence with his wife and daughter. It seems there is no joy there either.

The guy, who runs a condom factory in addition to his sideline as the maker of amateur porn films, eventually turns up at a Buddhist temple, where a monk is meditatively sweeping the grounds. Played by the charmingly impish Chalee Choueyai, the saffron-wrapped clergyman launches into a long monologue that’s right up there with Robert Shaw’s USS Indianapolis story in Jaws.

In short, the monk’s lesson – and the movie’s – is that there are no easy answers. Not for the journalist, nor the businessman, nor me.

The ones who seem to fare best in Vanishing Point are the sketchiest characters – that monologuing monk and the senior hooker. They are at least honest about who they are and what they do, while the journalist and the factory owner seem only to be seeking merit or approval.

And perhaps that monk might not be a monk after all. Or perhaps Jakrawal is musing on what makes a monk. Is a monk still a monk once out of his robes? In this way, Vanishing Point offers more potent commentary on the state of contemporary Thai Buddhism that is potentially more controversial than the briefly banned Arbat, with its scenes of a misbehaving novice monk. That picture had to be toned down to get unbanned and was released as Arpat, but it didn’t really have much to say about Buddhism at all.

Dazzling cinematography by up-and-coming filmmaker Phuttiphong Aroonpheng is a highlight of Vanishing Point, and his work includes a bravura tracking shot that follows the businessman’s teenage daughter roller-skating through her small town, with the cameraman seemingly towed from behind and the girl’s knees framing the shot.

More technical prowess is displayed by score composer Pakorn Musikboonlert and sound designer Chalermrat Kaweewattana, who come up with an ominously hypnotic series of pulsating burbles and bloops to give the film a sickening heartbeat.

See also:

• Official website

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: Vanishing Point, Hor Taew Taek 5, Water Boyys the Movie
• Festival festival! Young Man in Venice, Vanishing Point in Sao Paulo
• Vanishing Point takes top prize at Rotterdam
• Vanishing Point – no, not that Vanishing Point – appears in Rotterdam's Tiger competition

(Cross-published in The Nation)

Review: SPL 2: A Time for Consequences

• Directed by Cheang Pou-soi
• Starring Tony Jaa, Wu Jing, Simon Yam, Zhang Jin, Louis Koo
• Released in Thai cinemas on September 19, 2015; rated 15+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 3/5

You know SPL 2: A Time for Consequences is going to be a different kind of Tony Jaa movie when the stern Thai martial-arts star is introduced wearing ice skates, and he promptly falls on his ass.

Indeed, the reinvention of Jaa's career, post-Sahamongkol, continues apace with SPL 2, Jaa's first, and much-anticipated, foray into Hong Kong action films.

In a supporting role alongside a cast of Hong Kong and Chinese stars, here's a Jaa who takes a page from Jackie Chan's playbook, playing the nice guy. He's immediately a sympathetic character, taking his young daughter to a Bangkok ice rink. After he falls down and is helpfully brought a comical penguin-shaped skating aid to stay upright, his character Chatchai's cute little girl turns around and has blood streaming from her nose. She is, of course, very ill, and in need of a rare type of bone marrow.

The only match, according to the movie medical database, is a Hong Kong police officer named Kit. And because this is a Hong Kong movie, a crazily elaborate plot must be constructed to put Kit and Chatchai on a collision course.

Kit has gone deep undercover in an operation to bring down Hung, a notorious trafficker in human organs who, perhaps not ironically, needs an organ transplant himself. Louis Koo milks his credit as "guest star" for all its worth, brandishing an evil cane and wearing a surgical mask as he orders his minions to do his bidding. On the verge of death, the Hong Kong kingpin is preparing to head to Thailand for an operation that will swap out his heart for the ticker of his own brother.

In Thailand, the Hung operation is overseen by a perfectly coiffed, three-piece-suited prison warden (Zhang Jin). He has an entire secret wing of his prison, where he keeps the victims of human trafficking under lock and key until their organs are needed on the black market. That seems to be a constant with foreign co-productions made in Thailand – there's often some angle involving organ trafficking or people smuggling.

Anyway, it's that very prison where Jaa's Chatchai works. To earn more money for his daughter's hospitalization, he agrees to get on the payroll of the corrupt warden, which sets him up for the meeting with Kit.

SPL 2 is a sequel-in-name-only to a terrific 2005 crime thriller that had Donnie Yen as a tough cop throwing down against the formidable Sammo Hung. The SPL sequel has been in development ever since then, and what has finally emerged is a completely different story. There's no Donnie or Sammo, but Wu Jing was in the first one, in a memorable supporting role as a blade-wielding thug, as was Simon Yam, as the head of the undercover police squad. Yam is back as a senior cop, but it's different character, overseeing the operation that sent Kit down the rabbit hole.

After a bit of running around in Hong Kong, and a big shoot-out at a cruise-ship terminal, the action shifts to Thailand, where Wu Jing ends up in prison, face to face with the guard who wants his bone marrow. Only Chatchai doesn't know that Kit is the potential donor. So a lot of time is eaten up getting the two to realize they have a much deeper connection than they ever imagined.

In the Thai-dubbed version screening in Bangkok, there was an added layer of unintended hilarity as Chatchai, in a prison cell with the bone-marrow donor he's seeking, uses an app on his phone to translate between Thai and Cantonese, to get Wu Jing's character to call the guy Chatchai thinks is still in Hong Kong. Because it's dubbed, even the Cantonese parts are in Thai, so all the lines are spoken the same twice. Hey, the audience needed a good laugh about then.

SPL 2 fares better when there's no CGI wolves or bits of bone marrow to clutter things up, because that's when the action takes place.

Aside from the Hong Kong shootout, there's a great scene in a doctor's office where cops have Hung's injured brother on lockdown. Here, a blade-wielding thug (Zhang Chi) is introduced to great effect.

Back in Thailand, there's a prison riot, giving the evil warden a chance to show off his martial-arts prowess.

Later, Yam's character is trussed up and taken to a scuzzy warehouse where bodies are hacked up. People in various states of disrepair are hanging around, as if they sold off a limb to be able to survive one more day.

In a scene that might have made his late mentor Panna Rittikrai proud, Jaa uses a prison bus to smash the place, and he acquires chains that he wraps around his arms, to add even more heft to his Muay Thai punches.

The big climactic setpiece takes place in a ritzy five-star resort hospital where Hung is to have his operation. Here's where the blade-wielding dude from Hong Kong comes back and joins in the mayhem along with the fierce warden. Wu Jing does his kung fu thing, with lightning-fast punches and sweeping kicks, while Jaa flies back and forth, all knees and elbows, as if he's being shot out of a cannon.

SPL 2 is the third in a trio of Tony Jaa movies this year, following his separation from the Thai studio Sahamongkol, where he made Ong-Bak and Tom-Yum-Goong. First was his big Hollywood debut in Fast and Furious 7, which featured him in short but crucial scenes with Paul Walker. Next to be released was the local co-production Skin Trade, which had Jaa in a leading role alongside action star Dolph Lundgren, as two rogue cops facing off a human-smuggling mobster played by Ron Perlman.

And though I enjoyed Furious 7 and Skin Trade, SPL 2 is my favorite of the three, and it's the type of thing I'd hope to see more of from the Thai action star.

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: Behind the Painting, No Escape, SPL 2

Review: Freelance (aka Heart Attack)

• Written and directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit
• Starring Sunny Suwanamethanon, Davika Hoorne, Violette Wautier
• Released in Thai cinemas on September 3, 2015; rated 13+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 5/5

Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's offbeat indie stylishness remains intact in his big-studio directorial debut Freelance, a comedy the GTH studio has marketed as a bright romance involving a man afflicted with a rash and his female doctor. But it’s not really “Doctor, doctor, give me the news” – it’s more a sprawling, dark satire on the creative life becoming enslaved to deadline pressures.

Sure, the pulse quickens as the young female physician played by Davika Hoorne asks leading man Sunny Suwanamethanon to raise his shirt. But the sweet, tentative friendship that develops between them is only a small part of a long movie that in Thai is known by the longer title Freelance ... Ham Puay Ham Phak Ham Rak More (ฟรีแลนซ์.. ห้ามป่วย ห้ามพัก ห้ามรักหมอ).

It’s really about the ups and downs in the career of a freelance graphic designer.

Sunny is Yoon, a worker bee who spends his days and sleepless nights in his apartment, staring at a computer screen, retouching photos for magazine spreads and advertisements. So it’s cleverly ironic when the graphics guy who erases nip slips on fashion models comes down with a pesky skin rash. He at first goes to a private hospital and comes away with the requisite sack of overpriced pills that “may cause drowsiness”. These are of course less than helpful in Yoon’s all-work-no-sleep world, and are quickly chucked in the bin.

The rash persists and spreads and Yoon’s friends start to show concern, so he eventually ends up at one of those dreaded public hospitals. Here’s where Nawapol’s knack for observational humor really kicks in, as Yoon, turning up at the way-too-late hour of 6am, finds himself at the back of a vast intake queue that stretches through corridors and up a flight of stairs. It’s a guaranteed laugh for the audience because we’ve all been there and done that.

And there are a lot of scenes like that, based on the real-life experiences of writer-director Nawapol and his indie-filmmaking pals.

Another example has Yoon turning up at the funeral of a friend’s father. His deadline is looming, so he asks a monk for the temple’s Wi-Fi password and plugs in his laptop right by the casket. It sounds shocking, but some insensitive lunkhead somewhere has probably actually done that. And in the context of the movie, it’s hilarious.

After waiting an eternity in the hospital queue, Yoon finally meets his doctor. She’s Imm, a young resident who’s still studying her medical books. There’s a spark there, an unspoken recognition between the two that their lives are very similar. Although Imm already knows what Yoon is thinking, she can’t determine what’s causing his rash. She can only tell him things everyone knows – exercise, eat right and get plenty of rest. And, oh, don’t scratch.

Yoon makes small changes in his life, such as joining a gym, hitting the hay at a reasonable hour and laying off his beloved 7-Eleven shrimp puffs. But as soon as Yoon’s rash disappears, so do any feelings he might have had for the doctor. “It’s all good, doc,” he coldly tells her on a visit, opting to formally wai her instead of shake her outstretched hand. She’s visibly hurt. And soon Yoon is back to pulling all-nighters and subsisting on cocktails of Red Bull, soda and coffee.

The cast, as always with GTH films, is top-notch. Sunny, a reliable leading man in the studio’s comedy Dear Dakanda (in which he fell in love with a nurse) and last year’s I Fine Thank You Love You, fits the mold as Nawapol’s surrogate, no doubt with much help from the director, who loaned the actor some of his cool T-shirts to get into the role.

Davika takes a welcome turn in a contemporary setting, a more relatable shift from the period characters she’s played, like the ghost in Pee Mak and the tragic heroine of Plae Kao. In Freelance, she’s an achingly lonely figure, a medical student whose insecurity is of little help in the face of her inexperience. This is a view of hospitals and doctors more in line with the TV comedy Scrubs than how they are usually portrayed in Thailand, where the medical profession is held in high reverence.

There are many strong supporting characters, but the most valuable player is Violette Wautier as Yoon’s agent and level-headed best friend Je. She goes from enabling Yoon’s self-destructive work ethic to helping him get back on his feet.

Nawapol cast many other filmmakers in fun cameos in his indie feature Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy. Here, he has a couple of GTH talents. One is Pee Mak director Banjong Pisanthanakun, who steals the scene as a doctor substituting for Imm during one of Yoon’s visits. Another is Bangkok Traffic Love Story helmer Adisorn Trisirikasem, who appears in goofy photos as the soldier boyfriend of Je, and adds to his cult status as a quirky character actor, as also seen GTH’s Hormones TV series.

My only knock on Freelance is that, at two hours and 10 minutes, it probably runs too long. Nawapol knows this, but with a densely packed story that has so much to say, it’s hard to see where he and his editor Chonlasit Upanigkit could’ve made cuts. And Freelance is remarkable in that it sustains its level of interest and energy throughout. With most other commercial Thai films, the excitement tends to peter out after the first 30 minutes.

Freelance, also marketed internationally with Nawapol’s original and now-unnecessary title Heart Attack, represents a further blending of hip, indie-film street smarts with the corporate slickness for which GTH is known. While involvement with a big studio perhaps diminishes Nawapol’s hipster cred, GTH’s much-vaunted “feel-good” formula is subverted, and Thai film culture is much richer for that.

(Cross-published in The Nation)

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: Freelance, So Very Very

Review: The Blue Hour

• Directed by Anucha Boonyawatana
• Starring Atthaphan Poonsawas, Oabnithi Wiwattanawarang
• Released in Thai cinemas on August 6, 2015; rated 18+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 4/5

In his song “This Land is Your Land”, American folksinger Woody Guthrie had a verse that only he usually ever performed, about a “no trespassing” sign: “But on the other side it didn’t say nothin’. That side was made for you and me.”

The verse came to mind while watching The Blue Hour (Onthakan, อนธการ), in which a young man sneaks through a fence to the other side of a sign that says “do not enter”. Inside the cordoned-off property is a filthy swimming pool. Everything about the place must have audiences thinking “don’t go in there!” but the kid goes in anyway. And there’s no turning back.

Blue Hour, the feature debut for respected short-film maker and indie-industry figure Anucha Boonyawatana, takes its title from that magic time twice a day, in the morning and evening, when it’s neither dark nor completely light. But the tone of the film is pitch-black.

Atthaphan Poonsawas stars as the meek schoolboy Tam, a slim bundle of vulnerabilities. Bullied at school and unloved and isolated at home because he’s gay, Tam is coming into his own. He’s arranged to meet another boy at the abandoned pool, a masculine youngster named Phum (Oabnithi Wiwattanawarang). It’s an ugly place for romance, and their first coupling is rough, more resembling the vice lock of a mixed-martial-arts match than intimacy.

The boys also strip down to their briefs for a dip in the dirty pool, and they talk of people who have been taken by spirits and only reappear after they’re dead. The atmosphere is eerie, with mildew stains on the walls of the pool resembling human shadows.

Things get more surreal when the lads visit a garbage dump that Phum says his family used to own but was taken away from them in a land grab. I swear I could smell the putrid stink of the place as the mounds of trash wriggled to life.

A handgun enters the picture, and it’s the trigger for confusion, as writer-director Anucha and co-writer Waasuthep Ketpetch (and film editors Chonlasit Upanigkit and Anuphap Autta) aim to keep the audience as mixed up as possible while the suspense builds and the chronology of the story is shattered.

The overall foreboding mood is also thanks to the blue-tinged cinematography of Chaiyapreuk Chalermpornpanit and Kamolpan Ngiwtong, and the ghostly mildew shadows dreamed up by production designer Phairot Siriwat.

The Blue Hour has a similar vibe to the movies of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose influence looms large over all Thai indie films. Additionally, Blue Hour is part of a trio of strong gay-themed Thai indie films being released this year. It debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival, alongside another Thai queer entry, director Josh Kim’s How to Win at Checkers (Every Time), also known as P’Chai My Hero. The pair of films, which both had local premieres at the inaugural Bangkok Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, have been joined by a third gay romance, Tanwarin Sukkhapisit’s widely released Red Wine in the Dark Night, which explores similar themes of gays as outsiders thrown on the trash heap of society, but with a slightly lighter, fantasy-based tone.

Tam’s transformation is complete, and he’s crossed over to the other side. But what’s on that other side, and who is it for?

The Blue Hour might not be a movie for everyone, but fans of gay cinema and Thai art-house films will find something there.

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