Audience Member
I'd tell you the plot, but i'm not sure this film has one. The first 15 minutes are bizarre. Essentially you get to see a hefty man in Thailand have a shower, dry himself off then eat some toast. This sets itself up as some Warhol obsessed students graduation piece. And i'm sure this film is trying to take a leaf out of David Lynch's playbook, but doesn't have the supernatural elements or trust in the method that make the Lynchian universe somehow work. This really is on oddity with no discernible script or narrative, and it's not as deep as it'd like to be.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
01/25/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Not some gaudy, sleazy tale of excess set in Bangkok's notorious red light district, this is a decidly arthouse project focussing on the relationship between a fat Danish writer and his pregnant Thai girlfriend - shot in deliberately long takes, in B&W and with minimal dialogue. And then, 80mins later, it shifts Lynchian style into colour, focussing on the girl's gangster brother. Directed by Brit Thomas Clay, it's certainly different to most Thai cinema and is a bold, thought provoking feature. It will alienate many for sure, but I found it strangely hypnotic.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Quite possibly the worst film i've seen...and i've seen Don't touch the axe!
Truly painful!
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
02/18/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Calm viewing, slow minimalism with a little Lynchian burst.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/05/23
Full Review
Mike M
An obscenely tedious film: there's even a bit where Clay trains his camera on a businessman having a mobile phone conversation on a train ("I'm sorry about that, we got cut off; I'm on a train") for a full ten minutes - annoying enough in real life, let alone having to pay to see it reenacted. "The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael" at least took some care to set out its debatable thesis, but this is full of feints and ellipses - the final hour morphs into an altogether different movie, less "Tropical Malady" than a low-grade fever - that would leave you wondering, if you were still awake, what Clay was trying to say in the first place. Pity the poor fat white men Thai women don't enjoy having sex with? Bangkok is a place where some suffer for the pleasures of others? Stumped, I turned to the press notes, to find Clay in full voice: "The second part begins with a quasi-docu naturalism, but the picture is then transformed through a sieve of genre familiarity, narrative into fable, character into archetype, all moving inexorably towards a point where stasis is achieved, when the camera returns to the dolly and these have ceased to be characters at all, just as the narrative has drifted away in a puff of gunsmoke and we are left with only essence." Having encountered more than my fair share of pretentious film students in my time, and with a sudden and urgent need to track down the sieve of genre familiarity (where to, guv - Mordor or IKEA?), I'm simply calling "bollocks" on this.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
06/02/09
Full Review
Audience Member
Good drama, smart game with the audience, but somehow too over calculating. Anyway I don't trust creators relating those stories together. Brothers does not kill each other because of a fat man seems to be out of love. Yes, Thai girls should to be mercenary, European men are bumpkins, but our world is more complex, there is the deeper space for love between them.
P.S. That was my yesterday mistake. This day morning I catch the reference between two stories. Bravo! Itâs ideal gaming with drones like me. But I still fill that I don't trust the movie: Toby canât imagine such natural "work in the field" scene in his narratives.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/24/23
Full Review
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