This was a working weekend.  With a very large project for my job, I spent the better part of Saturday as well as part of Sunday working.  In between, though, Tawn and I managed to catch two movies, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

Outside of that, there were two other significant events:

Event One: Festival Found

I found out the that World Film Festival of Bangkok will be taking place October 11 through 23.  There is an interesting history here because Bangkok had a film festival for a dozen years but then five years ago the Tourism Authority of Thailand decided that Bangkok needed to become “the” film festival of Asia.  Scrapping the existing staff, they brought in advisors from Beverly Hills and for a reported US$ 4 million plus, have produced a series of glitzy festivals that have been all style, no organization and no substance.  One writer for the Bangkok Post was so upset at their disorganization that last year, less than a week before the start of the festival, he wrote a scathing article pointing out that the organizers had yet to release the schedule of films to the press, the public, or the cinemas showing the films!

Kriengsak Silakong, a francophile Thai who has long been involved in the local film industry, started working the The Nation newspaper to create a competing festival, described by the same Bangkok Post writer as a contrast between “the infamously rich [festival] in January run by tourism people [and] the poorer one in October run by film-loving people.”

The Festival does indeed prove to be quite good from both a programming and an organizational standpoint.  Tawn and I went to one of the cinemas to buy advance tickets and discovered that that cinema could sell us tickets for any of the shows at any of the three venues (all at competing cinema chains) from their box office.  The festival also capped tickets for any show at 100 baht (the “official” festival had tickets running from 140-200 baht with no discounts), 50 baht for students.  Plus, we discovered at the box office, we could buy a pack of five tickets, get a sixth free plus five coupons for free popcorn good at any of the cinemas. 

Here is a selection of some of the films I’ll see:

• Paris, je t’aime – A host of international directors from Wes Craven to Gus Van Zant to Alfonso Cuarón each helm a segment about love and the love of the City of Lights, arrondissement by arrondissement.
• The Banquet – Xiagong Feng’s epic-scale story of murder, betrayal and revenge in the Five Dynasties period, starring Zhang Ziyi and Daniel Wu.
• Sanctuary Rhapsody – Supucksarun Suwonnapraprad’s film about a girl who tries to enter the world of men, finding it more foreign than she imagined.
• The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros – Auraeus Solito directs this coming-of-age story by Michiko Yamamoto about a 12-year old gay boy growing up in the gritty, crime-filled slums of Metro Manila, and his crush on a policeman.
• At the End of the Journey – Director Tanwarin Sukkhapisit’s story of a teacher who hides his feelings for fear of losing his job, until one day a young man enters his life and slowly opens his heart.
• I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone – Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang returns to his hometown of Kuala Lumpur in this meditation on connection and disconnection.  After being robbed and attacked, Hsiao-kang, a homeless Chinese man, is rescued and taken in by some Bangladeshi workers. One of them, Rawang, lets him sleep beside him on an old mattress that he had found on the street. Later, when Chyi, a waitress at a coffee-shop, meets Hsiao-kang, she is filled with lustful desire. As Hsiao-kang slowly recovers, he finds himself caught between Rawang and Chyi – as well as Chyi’s female boss.
• Iklimler (The Climate) – Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan helms and stars in this story of the unspoken reasons that relationships collapse.  Isa (Ceylan) is a dowdy university professor inattentive of his younger TV business wife Bahar.  Both are lonely figures dragged through the ever-changing climate of their inner selves in pursuit of a happiness that no longer belongs to them.
• 12:08 East of Bucharest – This Romanian comedy about conflicting versions of history, set in a small village outside Bucharest, sixteen years after the revolution that ousted Ceausescu.   On the anniversary of that historic day, the owner of the local TV station invites two guests to share their moment of revolutionary glory.  One is an old retiree and sometime Santa Claus, the other a history teacher who has just devoted his entire salary to his drinking debts. Together, they will remember the day when they stormed their town hall shouting “Down with Ceausescu!”  But phone-in viewers dispute the claims of the heroes, who may have been boozing in the bar or making Christmas preparations rather than rebeling in the streets.
• Feast of the Goat – Based on the best-selling novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, Luis Llosa tells the story of Urania Cabral, a beautiful, kind, intelligent and independent Manhattan lawyer who, after an absence of 30 years, returns to the Dominican Republic to face the horrifying circumstances that altered her life forever when she was a teenager and Rafael Leónidas Trujillo a.k.a El Chivo (The Goat) was the iron-handed ruler of this country.
• Closing night offers a rare treat – a screening of Battleship Potemkin, the 1925 silent classic by Sergei M. Eisenstein about a Russian naval mutiny in the city of Odessa that is a standard text for film students everywhere.  This is presented with an added soundtrack by the Pet Shop Boys, proving to be a very interesting addition to this significant black-and-white work.  IMDB link.

One especially refreshing aspect to this programming is that Thai independent features and short films are given good visibility.  The “other” festival was notable for its exclusion of Thai films, a source of much complaint by the local film industry.  It would seem the Tourism Authority is more interested in having foreigners come here to shoot their movies than to support the local movie industry.

Event Two: Visa Run Dilema

As I come to the end of my one-year Type B Non-Immigrant Visa, I’ve spoken with my lawyer about renewing it.  Unfortunately, Thai embassies and consulates in Asia are reluctant to issue such visas and he has suggested that, short of returning to the United States, I should go to a consulate in Australia or Dubai.

My visa expires November 28, the day my parents are set to arrive for a visit.  I’ll have a ten-day window of opportunity before then in which to make a run.  The question is where and how – spending money on an airplane ticket is a distinctly disheartening prospect and I’m not keen to burn up miles on an award ticket, either.

Stay tuned for more updates on how this situation will be resolved.

Event Three: Planning for Visitors

With several sets of visitors queueing up for arrival in November and December – the first week of December may see as many as ten visitors including my parents – I’ve been working to pull together itineraries and make hotel arrangements.  The challenge is in getting a trip to Chiang Mai planned.  There is a gala flora exposition opening in November for three months and this looks to be the big event in Thailand over the winter.  Plane tickets and hotel rooms are filling up and I’m trying to find a place for us before spaces disappear!

Finally, the Movies

Tawn and I did have time for two films this weekend:

Cars

Pixar animation’s John Lasseter helms its latest animated treat, this one a little less compelling than all the others.  Perhaps it is because I just don’t care about cars all that much, whether or not they have voices and facial expressions.  But there is great detail in the filmmaking and Pixar films comes across as such works of art, in comparison to what we see released from many other studios.  Only Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli (“Spirited Away“) seem to equal the craftsmanship, and it is well known that Lasseter is a long-time admirer of master Miyazaki.

Voicing by Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt and Owen Wilson is strongly acted and there are enough subtle jokes (the insects in the tumbleweed town of Radiator Springs are little Volkswagen Beatles with wings) to keep you entertained even as the film runs about twenty minutes longer than necessary.

Films from Pixar are always of especial interest to me because my aunt Sandy’s brother-in-law Mark works at Pixar.  We begin to hear buzz of the films more than a year in advance and although he can’t say much about them, it is fun to hear about concepts and then finally see how they play out – so far, always successfully – on the big screen.

Reinas (Queens)

Starring five of Pedro Almodovar’s leading ladies, Manuel Gomez Pereira’s Reinas is less a story about gay marriage and more a story of the mothers of the gay sons who are going to participate in Spain’s first gay marriages. 

The range of characters is rich and neurotic, with very strong acting.  The stories are themselves a bit too simply drawn and become a tangled mess, sometimes winding up just a little too neatly.  But there is a lot of heart and it is an enjoyable film. 

One thing I particularly appreciated, something we see too little of in the United States film industry, is the appearance of actresses of a certain age who look to be that certain age.  Wrinkles and sagging busts lend so much authenticity to the characters, who all carry themselves with such dignity, whatever burdens they are struggling with.