Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

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  May 8, 2012

  aquateen2

  [img]http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/user/icons/icon14.gif[/img]
  
  A lot of people criticise Uncle Boonmee for it's lack of a solid narrative. Having one wasn't the film's primary focus anyway, but what it does have, simply cannot be explained in literal terms. This art ... read morehouse feature was created for spiritual enlightenment so naturally, it's not your average indie flick. Despite it's incredibly slow pacing, it's overwhelming. It doesn't let it's open minded surrealism disrupt the ideas and explanations of reincarnation, ghosts and the distances and borders between lives. Even in it's weirdest moments it's intelligent, enigmatic, and engaging and perfectly blends genres such as drama, comedy and horror. Visually outstanding, thought-provoking and delightfully otherworldly, it's one of the better films of 2010.

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• 
  
  January 27, 2012

  flixsterman

  I don't mind dead wives showing up for dinner as uninvited guests but when a Sasquatch starts to browse your old photo albums THAT is where things get a little weird.

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  September 10, 2011

  fb1216165431

  Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a fragmented, calm recollection of memories that ponders on life and reincarnation. Metaphoric to the evolution of cinema, its transformation and eventual extinction. Extremely stunning photography. Eerily beautiful.

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  July 25, 2011

  366weirdmovies

  Thai farmer Boonme meets spirits and ghosts and experiences past lives as he calmly prepares for his death. Unfortunately, this film will earn the title "Uncle Bore-me" from many viewers, thanks to the many laconic, uneventful scenes between encounters with money spirits and bou... read morets of catfish cunnilingus; the patient will be rewarded with marvelous, mystical sights.

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• 
  
  April 17, 2011

  dwt5411

  ***
  
  It's well known that peoples of the far east feel a closer connection to the afterlife than us westerners. As a result much of their cinematic output plays looser with ancestral or supernatural elements, and their ghost stories are easier to label as magic realism. Uncle... read more Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a thai film written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It won the Palm D'or at last years Cannes Film Festival, and despite its languid pacing and contemplative approach it is, above all else, a pretty juicy ghost story.
  
  Uncle Boonmee is a bee keeper on dialysis living on a farm in the middle of the Thai jungle. His sister-in-law Jen and her nephew Tong come to visit their ailing relative, and discover that the jungle has an otherworldly mysticism. Yet when Huay (Boonmee's dead wife) materializes out of thin air during dinner, nobody makes too big of a fuss. And when Boonmee's long lost son Boonsong makes a surprise visit transformed into an ape like figure called a "Monkey Ghost", there is hardly a raised eyebrow.
  
  How the film trivializes the extraordinary in such ways is what makes it such fascinating viewing. In me it recalled Mizoguchi's masterpiece Ugetsu -- another piece of far east film poetry about spirits and their rather opaque connection to the living. To easterners like Mizoguchi and Weerasethakul there is no "other side." The living and the dead aren't separate, but float in and out of each other's communal space like mist moving through a darkened jungle canopy. The jungle of "Uncle Boonmee" is a character in itself, one that knows not time of day nor man from beast. The director's camera lingers on haunting imagery turning the creature filled rainforest surrounding Boonmee's enchanted estate into the Western Woods of Sleepy Hollow. Out of the ever-dark landscape appear the red eyes of the ubiquitous Monkey Ghosts who stalk the land and keep watch.
  
  Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a pensive and visionary work of high art filmmaking. Those turned off by Tarkovsky style editing and camera work -- the kind that savors every image and detail so observantly that every frame becomes a challenging still photograph -- should steer clear. And viewers longing to be intellectually stimulated should bring their A-game because this is a puzzling, existential soul-search about life, death, and those pesky, red-eyed Monkey Ghosts guarding the space between.

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  April 16, 2011

  MidnightMadwoman

  Ghaaaaackkk. I really did not like this movie. It was long and it meandered, and I couldn't make sense of the plot. Nothing seemed to have any sense of continuity or causality, and the filmmakers spend tons of the film's running time showing you nothing. Minutes tick by as charac... read moreters trek through the forest or through caves, or just sit on a bench doing nothing. There were really only two scenes that I enjoyed: the princess in the pond and the prodigal son/weremonkey. But it was never clear how either tale fitted into the core narrative. Ugh. I wish this movie had been about twenty minutes long. that's as much plot as they had.

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  April 11, 2011

  SirPant

  Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is very personal film for writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It is the mixture of a lot of ideas and broken memories that he has acquired over the years and after the success of his previous films I guess he thought the time was... read more right, whether people like it or not. Many people don't seem to like. I'm not one of those people, for me it has shot to the top of my favourite films of all time list. Not many films have astonished me as much as this has. From the outset, Uncle Boonmee challenges your perceptions and haunts your soul. It may seem like it's a very free film, maybe even improvisational at times but it's not, it's very structured. It is constructed of several contrasting reels that each have their own agendas. It goes from documentary style, to sitcom, to classic Hollywood, to fantasy without the audience really knowing what has hit them. It's part day-dream, part folk-tale and part philosophical commentary (is time linear?) but it is never pretentious or boring. I dismiss the idea that people have been hypnotised into thinking there is something profound here and have therefore heaped it with undeserved accolades. Credit given where credit is due. Yes it is self-indulgent to a point but it is also a work of art, an often over used statement but a very true depiction of this film. Original, thought-provoking and a real breath of fresh air, not for everyone but then again who gives a damn about everyone, certainly not me. I do hope the majority of you will enjoy it as much as I did though, it is certainly an experience to behold!

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  April 9, 2011

  dunmyer

  "I loved it -- very strange and very beautiful." I heard a young man saying this to his companions with ecstasy in his voice as he walked out of a nearly sold-out screening of "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" last night in Manhattan. I had pretty much the same respon... read morese. "Uncle Boonmee" has flaws, but it is also uniquely moving and an artistic achievement of the highest order.
  
  The film, which won top prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival, was written and directed by Thailand's resident genius Apichatpong Weerasethakul. (It is said that his friends call him Joe. I will refer to him as AW.)
  
  Cannes continues to set itself apart as one of the greatest artistic organizations in the world. That a world-renowned festival would champion a film as radical as "Uncle Boonmee" is remarkable. Somehow the philistines have not been able to take over that festival, as they have taken over just about everything else in the world. The barbarians are at the gate, but true cinephiles so far have been able to keep them out of the Cannes castle. This is very encouraging.
  
  *************************
  
  Being highly avant-garde, "Uncle Boonmee" will no doubt be looked at differently by everyone who sees it. In fact, every person will surely see it from numerous perspectives. In the first hour, I saw the film as a celebration of traditional peasant culture. Intellectuals typically spurn rural culture quite vehemently. AW pushes against that tendency by going out to the middle of the Thai jungle and hiring a group of peasants essentially to play themselves.
  
  He gives them scenarios to enact that mix traditional Buddhist culture with classic peasant folklore, including ghost stories and fables about princesses and talking catfish. But there is also a bizarre storyline having to do with mysterious creatures with red eyes. This seemed way out of step with the rest of the film. The little bit of explanation that is given about these ape-like animals (from a man who becomes one of them) is that they are a new species mysteriously appearing on the earth.
  
  I wondered gravely for a while about this outlandish element that AW had introduced. Was he going off the deep end? Would UFOs enter the film next? But in time what I saw in this use of weird creatures was AW expanding his palette dramatically -- breathtakingly. Instead of just contemplating life as it is lived today by humans and other animals, his vision expanded to encompass life forms from the future as well. The dramatic span of life was on AW's mind -- not just the past and the present, but also the distant future. AW was contemplating life itself, including the open-endedness and unknowability of evolution.
  
  This breadth of vision captivated me in a way that a work of art never has before. I had never looked at life in quite this way. When I say that "Uncle Boonmee" is a major artistic achievement, I mean that it showed me a new way to think and feel about life. It also did it in ways that are radically original.
  
  AW, having a limitless artistic imagination, even added something profound in the last 10 minutes. Just when you feel the film couldn't get any broader, AW expands his vision yet again. Throughout the film, we had been thinking about organisms in different time periods. At the end, AW suddenly presents the main characters as so complex that each cannot be thought of as just one thing. If you look inside just one organism, he seemed to say, there is as much multiplicity as when you look across hundreds of millions of organisms in different evolutionary epochs. If you want to see the vast expanse of evolution, just look inside yourself.
  
  I won't reveal how AW does this, but I can say that it made my audience audibly gasp. It also made the last 10 minutes of the film exhilarating. For some reason, it also made me start to cry.
  
  But what of the flaws? There are several. "Uncle Boonmee" is so slow paced that it can become boring in spots. AW was also working with such low-quality equipment that the picture can be quite muddy. In general, the film has a sloppy look to it. I sensed that AW couldn't afford to hire a crew to do the kind of immaculate set decoration, lighting and costumes that made his last film, "Syndromes and a Century," (which was on my top 10 list of 2007) so visually arresting. "Uncle Boonmee" is a feast of ideas and feelings, but visually it's pretty disappointing.
  
  The cinematography is also surprisingly dull. AW is known as a master of mise-en-scene, but here it seemed that the peasants he was working with were composing the shots. Often it seemed AW did little more than set the camera on a tripod and turn it on. The visual composition of shots was at times so flat as to be sleep-inducing. Combined with the slow pacing, this sometimes felt like Chinese water torture.
  
  It almost seemed like AW was deeply inspired when he conceived the film, but not so inspired during the shoot. It's got to be both. The cinematography's got to give you goose bumps, not just the ideas at the root of the story.
  
  But uninspired cinematography cannot sink "Uncle Boonmee." It is one of the greatest films of not just the year, but also the decade. It is the first truly great film of the 2010s. Thank you, Cannes, for ensuring that this film got a worldwide audience.

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• 
  
  February 17, 2011

  shortcartoonist

  A film of serene ambiance and naturalistic beauty, 'Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives' takes full advantage of its lush surroundings and distinct sounds - submerging its viewers in the Thai countryside. As a contemplative effort, the film is a slow meditation on spiritu... read moreal legends - karma and reincarnation - and becomes a hazy blend of animal and human connectiveness. The world of 'Uncle Boonmee' is shown as a shared one, and these two sides attempt to form a clearer understanding of human purpose and place.
  
  Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film is a labyrinth. I would be lying if I said that each turn in this deceptive maze was understood. His narrative is at times simple, but his plot points continually break any semblance of narrative and force themselves as a metaphor. Boonmee's past lives are given more as examples of an impact on those around him. In his dying days, the return of his son - as an animal - tends to act as a visual aid in Boonmee's next step into reincarnation, and another life. But the return of the ghost of his passed wife tends to complicate this with the notion of Boonmee's steps into the consequences of karma.
  
  The issue and benefit of the film is its airiness in the delivery of fact and hopes for interpretation. It doesn't give much to base theories on, but gives plenty of food for thought. And when your mind and soul are allowed to wander through this visual spectacle - it makes for a wonderful two hours.

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• 
  
  January 24, 2011

  blacksheepboy

  I arrived puzzled at the end of this film wondering if Uncle Boonmee could, after all, recall his past lives. Though the direction is steady and thorough, the story is loose and sterile, allowing for countless symbolic readings, even if to fill what appears to be a lifeless, empt... read morey fable.

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• Thanapat Saisaymar as Uncle Boonmee
• Jenjira Pongpas as Jen
• Sakda Kaewbuadee as Tong
• Nattakarn Aphaiwonk as Huay (Boonmee's Wife)
• Geerasak Kulhong as Boonsong (Boonmee's Son)
• Kanokporn Tongaram as Roong (Jen's Friend in Hotel)
• Samud Kugasang as Jaai (Boonmee's Chief Worker)
• Wallapa Mongkolprasert as Princess
• Sumit Suebsee as Soldier

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• • Huay (Boonmee's Wife): Heaven is overrated. There is nothing there

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