Bangkok Cinema Scene: Movies opening April 26-30, 2012

Lockout

Guy Pearce goes out of this world in Lockout, a sci-fi hostage drama that's set in a maximum-security prison in space.

In a scenario that closely mirrors Escape from New York, he's a government agent who's been falsely imprisoned and his only chance of freedom is rescuing the U.S. president's daughter (Maggie Grace), who's being held hostage in the space prison.

It's directed by Stephen St. Leger and James Mather from their script co-written with Luc Besson, who is also a producer. Peter Stormare also stars.

Critical reception is mixed, but it looks like a fun return to form for Pearce, the star of such movies as Memento and L.A. Confidential. Rated 18+.

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Also opening

Safe – Jason Statham is doing his gruff Jason Statham act again, only this time he's doing it while protecting a little Chinese girl who is a mathematics wiz. She's being pursued by Chinese and Russian mobsters, as well as corrupt officers in the New York police department. Statham portrays a second-rate cage fighter, who, it turns out, is an ex-cop – one of the NYPD's toughest. Critical reception is mixed, but if you're a fan of Statham's action movies, then you probably won't be disappointed by this. Rated 18+.

From Up on Poppy Hill – Nestling in comfortably with the nostalgic Always 3, which opened in cinemas last week, comes this Studio Ghibli anime adaptation of a manga about Yokohama schoolchildren working to save their clubhouse from destruction as Japan prepares to host the 1964 Olympics. Goro Miyazaki directs. Critical reception, so far, is mixed. In Japanese with English and Thai subtitles at Apex Siam Square.

Venom (อสรพิษ, Asoraphit) – A gifted boy shadow puppeteer's life is in danger after he's bitten by a cobra, but villagers believe the snake to be holy and will not help the boy. Based on the novella by famous Thai writer Danarun Sangthong, the movie is partially funded by the Culture Ministry’s Thai Khem Khang (Strong Thailand) project. Jarunee Thammayu directs. At Apex Siam Square.

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Also showing

New Spanish Film Week – As covered in a recent special blog entry, seven highly acclaimed Spanish films from the past year or so will screen for free at 7 nightly until Wednesday at Paragon Cineplex. The fest opens tonight with the Oscar-nominated animated feature Chico and Rita, a musical romance that follows a Cuban musician and a singer as they chase their dreams from Havana to Las Vegas. Other highlights include Balada Triste de Trompeta (The Last Circus), about a sad clown in a circus in the 1970s. That's on Sunday night. There's also No habrá paz para los malvados (No Rest for the Wicked), a fact-based thriller about the 2004 Madrid terrorist attacks, on Tuesday. Tickets are free and available from the festival ticket table from around 5pm daily.

A Costa dos Murmurios (The Murmuring Coast) –  Mozambique in the 1960s colonial era is the setting for this 2004 drama by Margarida Cardoso. A young woman leaves Lisbon to join her fiancé, a soldier in Africa. Soon, she finds he's not the same man she fell in love with. The screening at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand is courtesy of the Embassy of Portugal, which will provide wine and snacks. Admission for non-members is 150 baht. The show time is at 8 tonight (Thursday, April 26).

Hong Kong Film Festival – As covered in a recent special blog entry, ten recent critically acclaimed hit Hong Kong movies will unspool from Friday through Monday at SF World Cinema at CentralWorld. Highlights include director Ann Hui's A Simple Life, which has won many awards this year for performances by Andy Lau and Deanie Ip, portraying an aged servant who is cared for by her master after she has a stroke. Check the schedule at the SF Cinema website. Line up a half hour before showtime to get your free ticket.

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Sneak preview

The Cabin in the Woods – Before Joss Whedon started work on The Avengers, he co-wrote and produced this horror-comedy that you're not supposed to talk about. It's wildly popular and much acclaimed and is in sneak previews this week at around 8 nightly. Rated 18+.

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Take note

The UMG RCA lobby. Photo via Khajochi Blog.

It's been rumored that the UMG RCA will close on May 1, but now I've heard it may remain open another week so that it may show the upcoming blockbuster superhero film The Avengers.

One of Bangkok's older multiplexes and owned by studio Sahamongkol Film International, the UMG RCA has seen dwindling audiences in recent years as mainstream movie-goers, especially teenagers and young adults, have been drawn to the bigger and flashier shopping-mall multiplexes.

RCA Plaza suffers from a lack of public transport connections – neither the subway nor the City Link rail line stop there, nor do any public bus lines serve the area, leaving personal cars and taxis the only way to visit the place.

The location is also home to the popular House boutique cinema, which was carved out of the formerly five-screen UMG RCA multiplex, but I have been assured that House will not be closing, at least not right now.

Bangkok Cinema Scene special: New Spanish Film Week, Hong Kong Film Festival 2012

You'll have hard choices to make next week as competing cinema chains stage competing film festivals – New Spanish Film Week at Paragon Cineplex and the Hong Kong Film Festival at SF World Cinema at CentralWorld – both boasting line-ups of recent award-winning movies.

First up is Paragon's New Spanish Film Week, running from April 26 to May 2. Organized in collaboration with the Embassy of Spain, screenings will be at 7 each night. Admission is free. You'll probably need to look for a table in the cinema lobby to get your ticket. Most of the films, all from the past year or two, were big winners of the Goya Awards (the "Spanish Oscars") and their Catalan counterpart the Gaudi Awards.

Here's the line-up:

• April 26 – Chico and Rita. This Oscar-nominated musical animated feature is set in Cuba in 1948, and follows the romance between the singer Rita and the musician Chico. It won the Goya and Gaudi Awards for best animated feature.
• April 27 – Pa negre (Black Bread). In the post-war Catalan countryside, a boy finds the corpses of a man and his son in the forest and authorities want to pin the blame on the boy's father – so the kid sets about to find the truth, ultimately confronting the monster that lives within him. Winner of several Goya Awards last year, including best director for Agustí Villaronga and best film.
• April 28 – The Primos (Cousinhood). Three cousins revisit the village where they spent their summer vacations in their youth.
• April 29 – The Balada Triste de Trompeta (The Last Circus). It's 1937 in the midst of the Spanish civil war and the circus has come to town. Then, what nobody expected, the circus performers and rounded up and forced to join the fighting. Later, in 1973, the son of the clown from that earlier circus is struggling as the "sad clown" in another circus. It was nominated for multiple Goya Awards and won for makeup and special effects.
• April 30 – Mientras Duermes (Sleep Tight). This Hitchcock-inspired thriller is about a man who's obsessed with a woman who lives down the hall in his apartment building, and he sneaks into her room each night to lie with her and appease his fantasies. It won several Guadi Awards, including best director Jaume Balagueró.
• May 1 – No habrá paz para los malvados (No Rest for the Wicked). This fact-based thriller looks ties into the events leading to the 2004 terrorist bombing in Madrid.  José Coronado stars as a burned-out cop involved in a triple murder, who, in the process of trying to cover his tracks, uncovers an Islamist cell planning a terrorist attack.Winner of multiple Goya Awards this year, including best film, best director for Enrique Urbizu and best actor for Coronado.
• May 2 – Blackthorn Sin Destino. This western revisits the legend of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Sam Shepard stepping into the role made famous by Paul Newman. Here, the ageing criminal mastermind is hiding out in Bolivia and hopes to pull off one last job so he can return to the U.S. It won four Goya Awards this year, including Best Cinematography.

Down the road at CentralWorld, at the SF World Cinema, the Hong Kong Film Festival runs from April 27 to 30, with a line-up of 10 films, many of them critically acclaimed award-winners. Here's the line-up:

• The Beast Stalker – Dante Lam's taut 2008 crime thriller stars Nicholas Tse as a tough cop whose efforts to catch criminal caused a car wreck that left the wanted man in a coma, a fellow officer crippled and a public prosecutor's daughter dead. He's wracked with guilt, and then the criminal wakes up. Nick Cheung also stars.
• Soundless Wind Chime – This gay-themed romance is about a Chinese man who goes to Switzerland in search of the spirit of his dead lover, and he finds a lookalike guy working in an antique shop.
• Accident – Soi Cheang's 2009 crime thriler is about a criminal mastermind known as the Brain (Louis Koo) who stages elaborate traffic wrecks in order to cover up bigger crimes. After one of his accidents goes wrong and kills one of his gang, he becomes suspicious of an insurance investigator (Richie Ren), leading to paranoia and great tension.
• At the End of Daybreak – Actually a Malaysian film (though the producer is from Hong Kong), director Ho Yuhang's sneaking, slow-burn thriller is about a young man looking to escape the burden of living with his alcoholic shopkeeper mother (Kara Hui, who won many awards for this role). He enters into an illicit relationship with a teenage schoolgirl, and runs into conflict with her parents. It screened at the 2010 World Film Festival of Bangkok.
• Echoes of the Rainbow – Alex Law directs this nostalgic comedy-drama set in Hong Kong of the 1960s as seen through the eyes of a child in a family with a working class father, a happy-go-lucky mother and an aspiring, starry-eyed elder brother. Simon Yam, Sandra Ng and Aarif Rahman star.
• Night and Fog – A father becomes full of despair as he's unemployed and becomes increasingly abusive against his wife and daughters. The wife turns to social service agencies for help, but finds no solutions, not even from her own family. Ann Hui directs this 2009 drama, which stars Simon Yam and Jingchu Zhang.
• Breakup Club – An aimless young man (Jaycee Chan) takes up documentary filmmaking after he's dumped by his on-and-off girlfriend, recording his discovery of a magical website that promises to reunite lost loves if they are willing to break up another couple.
• Lover's Discourse – Four love stories are woven together in this omnibus. Each episode is independent of the next yet each is interconnected.
• A Simple Life – Director Ann Hui's fact-based drama has dominated the major Hong Kong and Chinese-language movie awards this season. Deanie Ip stars as a servant who's worked for four generations of a Hong Kong family and is now with the last remaining family member (Andy Lau) when she has a stroke. Giving ever more time and attention to his servants needs and pleasures, the man comes to realize how much she means to him.
• Quattro Hong Kong – Two compilations of four short films each were commissioned for the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2010 and 2011. The first Quattro had films by Hong Kong directors Fruit Chan with The Yellow Slipper, Heiward Mak with We Might as Well be Strangers, Herman Yau with Fried Glutinous Rice and Clara Law and The Red Earth. Quattro Hong Kong 2 from last year was Pan-Asian, with contributions from Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul (M Hotel), Malaysia's Ho Yuhang (Open Verdict), the Philippines' Brillante Mendoza (Purple) and Hong Kong's Stanley Kwan (13 Minutes in the Lives of ...). Six of the eight shorts have been combined for the Bangkok screening, omitting the segments by Ho Yuhang and Law. So it's really Quattro and a Half. 

The schedule for this one is a bit trickier, but helpfully, it's been posted at the SF Cinemas website. Tickets are free. Line up a half hour before showtime in the cinema lobby to get them.

Bangkok Cinema Scene: Movies opening April 19-25, 2012

Home

Since 2007's acclaimed drama Love of Siam, Chookiat Sakveerakul has mainly contributed to short-film projects such as 4 Romances, Lud 4 Lud and Sawasdee Bangkok, and he's still in short-film mode of sorts as he directs his first feature film in five years, Home (Home ความรัก ความสุข ความทรงจำ, Home Khwam Rak Khwam Sook Khwam Songjam). Dedicated to his recently departed father, it's a heartfelt and sentimental collection of three stories, all set in his hometown of Chiang Mai, which ponders endings and beginnings.

The first story is set at night under the luminous glow of a Catholic high school, where a soon-to-graduate senior (Juthawut Wattanakampon) has set up his camera and is taking photos of the empty campus. He encounters an underclassmen acquaintance (Kittisak Pathomburana) and the two boys form a bond of friendship and perhaps something more over the course of the evening. But the morning brings a painfully awkward goodbye.

The middle section stars Penpak Sirikul, who solidly anchors the film as the widowed wife of a farmer who's still trying to solve the puzzle left to her by her husband, who died of throat cancer. In his last stages, after he could no longer speak, he was leaving notes for his wife, which she continues to find as she goes through his papers or looks in other nooks and crannies of their belongings. This dramatic section is lightened by Penpak's character's farmhand nephew and his dingbat girlfriend, who live with her. At the dinner table one evening, at Penpak's urging, the girl starts to talk about her sexual frustration due to her man being tired from farm work all day, and she reels off a endless stream of metaphors – her cobwebbed cave, her closed shop, etc.

The closing section is a wedding, with "Noon" Siriphan Wattanajinda as a northern bride who's marrying a wealthy factory owner (Ruangsak Loychoosak) from Phuket in the south. With her bubbly personality, she seems to be a poor fit for the rather stiff, close-mouthed guy. And after reuniting with her friends, she starts to have second thoughts. Classic romantic-comedy misunderstandings lead to tears and ritual public humiliation amid shooting gold confetti.

A longer review and links to other stories about Home are over at the other blog. Notably, most of the dialogue is in the northern Thai dialect, and presumably most cinemas will have dual English/central Thai subtitles. Rated 18+.

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Also opening

Always: Sunset on Third Street 3 – The meticulously detailed, unabashedly sentimental family drama series, based on a popular manga, continues with this third installment that unfolds the continuing stories of the tight-knit san-chome neighborhood near Tokyo Tower. Here, drama plays out against the backdrop of Tokyo's continuing post-war modernization as it prepares to host the 1964 Olympics. Takashi Yamazaki again directs. Check the review by the Japan Times' Mark Schilling for more details. If you're a fan of the series, you might have already known that House cinema on RCA had a revival run of the first two films in recent weeks, and now they are playing all three. A 3D version screened in Japan, but it's only 2D here in Thailand. It's at Apex Siam Square and House.

The Raven – John Cusack portrays author Edgar Allan Poe as he's called upon to solve a mystery involving a madman committing horrific murders inspired by Poe's darkest works. Poe joins with a young Baltimore detective (Luke Evans) in a quest to get inside the killer's mind and stop him from making every one of Poe's brutal stories a reality. Alice Eve, Brendan Gleeson and Oliver Jackson-Cohen also star. James McTeigue (V for Vendetta, Ninja Assassin) directs. Critical reception, so far, is mixed. Rated 18+.

360 – Director Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) offers a roundelay of stories that examine how sexual relationships can transgress social boundaries. Rachel Weisz, Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins and Ben Foster star. Critical reception is mixed. At Apex Siam Square and SF World Cinema at CentralWorld. Rated 15+.

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Also showing

À nos amoursSandrine Bonnaire stars in this 1983 character study as a promiscuous 15-year-old Parisian girl, who despite her age, engages in a number of affairs in reaction to her miserable situation at home. Maurice Pialat directs. It's at the Alliance Française at 7.30 on Wednesday, April 25.