Bangkok Cinema Scene: Movies opening November 7-13, 2013

Thor: The Dark World

Tough luck if you don't like comic-book superhero movies. It's slim pickings this week as just one film is getting a big release in Thai cinemas – Thor: The Dark World.

Yet another entry in Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe, Dark World continues the big-screen adventures of Thor, the Mighty Avenger, in the aftermath of 2011's Thor and last year's The Avengers.

Chris Hemsworth returns as the man with the hammer, and joining the cast this time around is former Doctor Who Christopher Ecclestone as Malekith, the leader of an ancient race that's out to bring darkness to all the worlds. Also returning are Tom Hiddleston also returns as Thor's troublesome adopted brother Loki and Natalie Portman as Thor's Earthling sweetheart Jane. There's also Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgård, Idris Elba, Kat Dennings, Ray Stevenson, Zachary Levi, Tadanobu Asano and Rene Russo.

Alan Taylor, best known for his work on such acclaimed TV series as Deadwood, Rome, The Sopranos, Mad Men and Game of Thrones, directs. He landed the job after the original director, Patty Jenkins (Monster) bowed out over "creative differences". Additionally, Avengers helmer and TV's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. producer Joss Whedon was brought in for script rewrites.

Just like all the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, you'll need to prepare yourself to keep your seat when the end credits roll, because there will be two post-credits scenes. So don't get up and rush out at the end.

Critical consensus, so far, is mixed, leaning to positive. It's in converted 3D in some cinemas, including IMAX. Rated G.

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Also showing

Wonderful Town – Thai indie director Aditya Assarat's 2007 feature is the slow-moving but gripping tale of romance and class conflict in a small town. Set in an isolated Andaman coast town in the months following the tsunami, it's about a young Bangkok architect (Supphasit Kansen) who comes to develop a big resort. He falls for the young woman (Anchalee Saisoontorn) who runs the rundown hotel he's staying in. He comes into conflict with the woman's ex-con brother and his gang. Wonderful Town won dozens of awards all over the world, including the Tiger Award at Rotterdam and the New Currents Award at Busan. It also won Best Picture and a bunch of other trophies at the Subhanahongsa Awards – the "Thai Oscars" – establishing the indie director as a new voice for the industry to reckon with. It's in a special "off menu" screening this week at House on RCA.

The Friese-Greene Club – Screenings are fully booked at the private club for Censor Must Die, an instructive documentary on film censorship and Thailand's new movie-ratings bureaucracy. It's directed by Ing K., the outspoken artist and filmmaker, who made the film as a means of documenting the banning of her political satire and Macbeth adaptation, Shakespeare Must Die. As I said before, the screenings are fully booked. You can always stop by and see if there's a seat at the bar. Please check the website for details. On Sunday, it's another "early Hitchcock" film, with 1935's The 39 Steps. And next Wednesday, it's a classic from Rob Reiner, 1986's childhood drama Stand By Me. Shows start at 8pm. The FGC is down an alley next to the Queen's Park Imperial Hotel on Sukhumvit.

Días de Santiago (Days of Santiago) – After six years of violent military duty in the jungles of Peru, a young soldier named Santiago returns home to Lima. With his wife gone and his family seemingly uncaring, he struggles to get on with life as his friends try to lure him into criminal activities. Winner of dozens of awards and Peru's submission to the Academy Awards in 2006, this drama is the debut feature by Josué Méndez. It screens at 8pm on Monday, November 11, at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand. Admission is 150 baht for non-members plus 100 baht for anyone want to enjoy the wine and snacks laid on by the Runa Run Peruvian-Thai Association and the Embassy of Peru. And stay tuned for next Thursday, November 14, for an FCCT screening of the documentary, The Buddha's Forgotten Nuns.

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Take note

I've now been informed that movies will not be resuming at the Alliance Française Bangkok until December. They were due to start last month, and then pushed to yesterday (November 6), but it's taking longer than expected to fit out the auditorium at the new location on the former grounds of the Suan Lum Night Bazaar on the corner of Rama IV and Wireless Roads. Please consult the AFThailande website for further updates.

Also, brace yourself for next week. After several light weeks of new releases, there are around six titles lined up to make their bow next Thursday, and the World Film Festival of Bangkok opens on Friday, November 15 at SFW CentralWorld.

Bangkok Cinema Scene: Movies opening October 31-November 6, 2013

Ender's Game

Harrison Ford competes for screen time with Ben Kingsley and his hilarious face tattoo as well as a bunch kids in Ender's Game.

The gruff sci-fi icon of Star Wars and Blade Runner is the commander of a space force battling a hostile alien race called "the Buggers".

To fight them, younglings are being trained at the battle school to fight the war like they were playing a giant video game. One of the kids, Ender Wiggin, is better than all the rest. He's played by Asa Butterfield, the child actor who starred in Martin Scorsese's Hugo.

Kingsley portrays the legendary hero Mazer Rackham, who turned the tide against an earlier attack by the Buggers.

Other stars include Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit), Viola Davis, Abigail Breslin and that weird kid from The Kings of Summer, Moises Arias.

It's based on the 1986 Hugo Award-winning novel by Orson Scott Card.

The director is Gavin Hood, the South African helmer of Tsotsi as well as Rendition and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

This is just being released in the States this week, but critical reception, so far, is positive. Rated 15+

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Also opening

Hashima Project (ฮาชิมะ โปรเจกต์) – After gaining notoriety for their viral fake ghost clip, five young filmmakers are invited by a TV show to record supernatural activity on Japan's Hashima Island, a "ghost island" off the coast of Nagasaki. And, surprise, surprise, the whippersnappers find out that the place really is haunted. It's directed by Piyaphan Chupetch and stars Pirath Nithipaisalkul, Alex Rendell, Apinya Sakuljaroensuk, Mek Mekwattana and Sucha Manaying. Rated 15+

Spiders – An old Soviet space station falls to Earth and crashes into a New York City subway tunnel, unleashing a gigantic mutated spider. It's up to a transit supervisor (Patrick Muldoon) and a health inspector (Christa Campbell) to prevent the colossal queen from uniting with her eggs and creating an army of massive killer spiders. Critical reception is mostly negative, but if you like your giant spiders looking incredibly fake and cheesy, than this movie is for you. In 3D. Rated 15+

Krrish 3 – Bollywood's superhero franchise continues as Hrithik Roshan takes on evil mutants. Priyanka Chopra and Vivek Oberoi also star. It's in Hindi with English and Thai subtitles at Major Cineplex Sukhumvit, Pattaya, Rama III and Paragon. Opens Friday.

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Also showing

The Friese Greene-Club – Filmmaker Paul Spurrier celebrates Halloween at his private cinema club with a rare treat – a special screening of his 2005 horror film P, in which a dancer at a Soi Cowboy go-go bar uses black magic to upstage the others. Weirdly, the film has never been screened publicly in Thailand. The November schedule also has some leftovers from October, thanks to a couple of programming changes – Louis Malle's Pretty Baby will screen tomorrow and another of Alexander Payne's men-in-crisis comedies, About Schmidt starring Jack Nicholson, shows on Saturday. Sunday is the start of an "early Hitchcock" series with Hitch's first-ever thriller, 1927's The Lodger. Next week, there will be special screenings of Censor Must Die at the FGC. Scroll down for details on that. For the rest of November, there will be "classic Rob Reiner" movies on Wednesday (Stand By Me, This Is Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing), "disturbing" horror films on Thursdays, the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Fridays and ghost love stories on Saturdays. Shows start at 8pm. The FGC is down an alley next to the Queen's Park Imperial Hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 22. With just nine seats, the screening room fills up fast, so please check the website to make bookings.

It Gets Better (ไม่ได้ขอให้มารั, Mai Dai Kor Hai Ma Rak) – Thai transgender director Tanwarin Sukkhapisit takes a broad, commercially appealing approach to addressing the issues of sexuality and gender with this romantic comedy drama that was the top nominee at the Subhanahongsa Awards. The movie is structured in three segments that increasingly intertwine. One story deals with an fiftysomething post-op ladyboy (played by actress Penpak Sirikul) who is touring around a small town in Thailand's scenic north. Another part deals with a young man who returns to Thailand after the death of his father and discovers the old man ran a ladyboy cabaret in Pattaya. He finds himself falling for one of the bar's staff. And the third story is about an effeminate young man who is shipped off to the monkhood after his father discovers him dressing up in his mother's clothes. The Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand screens It Gets Better at 8pm on Monday, November 4, with the director present for a post-screening question session. Entry for non-members is 150 baht plus 100 baht more for anyone wanting to sip the wines provided by Village Farm and Winery.

Censor Must Die – Next week, from November 5 to 9, the Friese-Greene Club will host special screenings of Censor Must Die, a documentary by Thai filmmaker Ing K. that deals with the banning of her previous film, Shakespeare Must Die. It's an instructive look at a brand-new Thai bureaucracy – the Culture Ministry's Film and Video Board and its film-ratings system. Though the movie has been cleared for public screenings, Ing K. is still being a bit cagey about it, so the screenings are for card-carrying FGC members only. Membership at the moment is free. If you're not yet a member, you just need to get down to the club and put your name in the book 24 hours before you plan to see the movie. Also, for this movie, there is an admission price: 150 baht.

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Take note

The French films are due to resume on Wednesday, November 6 at the Alliance Française Bangkok, newly located on the corner of Rama IV and Wireless Road in the former location of the Suan Lum Night Bazaar. The showtimes will be at 7pm, rather than 7.30. They haven't yet listed the program on their website and I can't get any confirmation about what film is being shown.

Bangkok Cinema Scene: Movies opening October 22-30, 2013

Tom-Yum-Goong 2

Actors have excused themselves from doing the promotional campaigns for their films before, but perhaps none have done so in quite the dramatic fashion as Tom-Yum-Goong 2 (ต้มยำกุ้ง 2) star Tony Jaa has.

The latest martial-arts epic from Jaa hits Thai big screens in the midst of a feud between the star and his studio, Sahamongkol Film International. In the runup to the release of Tom-Yum-Goong 2, a contract dispute arose when it was announced that Tony Jaa had been cast in a sequel to the Hollywood car-racing franchise, Fast and Furious 7.

Sahamongkol honcho Somsak "Sia Jiang" Techaratanaprasert asserted that Jaa was under another 10-year contract with his studio and had to get his permission to take part in an outside project. He's threatened a lawsuit.

But Jaa, newly emboldened by the backing of a new Westerner manager, retorted that the contract was null and void and he was no longer a slave to Sahamongkol.

So Tom-Yum-Goong 2 opens today, the Chulalongkorn Day public holiday, without its star present to appear at premieres or make the rounds of press interviews. Instead, Jaa is in the U.S., filming Fast and Furious 7 and posting Facebook pictures of himself teaching Muay Thai to Fast and Furious leading man Vin Diesel.

Years in the making, Tom-Yum-Goong 2 is a sequel to a 2005 movie that was Tony Jaa's second major studio effort following his breakout hit Ong-Bak. Tom-Yum-Goong, a.k.a. The Protector, took Jaa to Australia, on the hunt for his baby elephant that had been abducted by gangsters. It was an aim to broaden Jaa's international appeal, setting up fights for him around Sydney landmarks with Vietnamese-American stunt performer Johnny Tri Nguyen and towering Australian wrestler Nathan Jones.

Tom-Yum-Goong 2 stays in Thailand, but still keeps the international flavor, bringing in hip-hop musician and kung-fu aficionado RZA as the main villain as well as American martial artist Marrese Crump. Jaa also meets on screen for the first time with Sahamongkol's other major martial-arts star, Chocolate actress Jeeja Yanin. She's paired up as a twin sister to another female fighter, Teerada Kittisiriprasert. Another featured fighter is Only God Forgives siren Rhatha "Yaya Ying" Pho-ngam, in her first action role. And Jaa's usual comic-relief sidekick Petchthai "Mum Jokmok" Wongkumlao reprises his role from the first Tom-Yum-Goong as a Thai-Australian police officer, now seconded to a major Interpol investigation.

The story again involves a stolen elephant, with Jaa's character on the run after being blamed for the killing of an elephant-camp owner.

Also, it's in 3D, the first by Sahamongkol and director Prachya Pinkaew.

The contract dispute between Jaa and the studio is just the latest bump in the film's rocky road to completion. The production has been beset by delays, including flooding in 2011 and Jaa's marriage to his pregnant bride last year. Also, Jeeja hooked up with an assistant director during filming, and is now married and a mother herself.

Other behind-the-scenes drama comes from Jaa's tumultuous family life becoming fodder for the Thai press, which has reported news of Jaa's fiesty wife getting into fights with her in-laws.

In 3D. Rated 15+

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Also opening

The Kings of Summer – Three boys run away from home and build a house in the woods in this coming-of-age comedy-drama that premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The boys are the awkward Joe (Nick Robinson), who is being raised by his sarcastic widower dad (deadpan Nick Offerman from Parks and Recreation) and Patrick (Gabriel Basso), who is tired of his parents' overbearing niceness. They make a pact to run off together and fend for themselves by living off the land. They are joined on their journey by a strange kid named Biaggio (Moisés Arias). Weeks pass, and the disappearance of the boys becomes a story in the local media. Meanwhile, a girl (Erin Moriarty) enters the picture and tests the boys' friendship. Jordan Vogt-Roberts directs, making his feature debut. Alison Brie, Offerman's wife Megan Mullally, Marc Evan Jackson and Mary Lynn Rajskub also star. Critical reception is generally positive. It's at Apex Siam Square and some Major Cineplex branches, including Paragon and Esplanade Ratchada. Rated 13+.

Oshin – A remake of a 1983-84 NHK television series, this fact-based Japanese drama depicts the hardships endured by a seven-year-old girl from a poor family who is sent to work as a babysitter in the household of a timber trader during the Meiji period in 1907. It's at House on RCA, SF World Cinema at CentralWorld, SF Cinema City Terminal 21 and SFX Central Rama 9. With English and Thai subtitles. Rated G

Planes – Up in the sky in the world of Disney/Pixar's Cars, there are more talking machines. Released by DisneyToon Studios, the outfit responsible for countless direct-to-video sequels of Disney features, Planes deals with the world of airplane racing. Dane Cook voices the lead character, an agricultural aircraft named Dusty Crophopper. Despite his fear of heights, he hopes to become a top racer. Other voices include Stacy Keach, Brad Garrett, Teri Hatcher, Cedric the Entertainer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Priyanka Chopra. Critical reception is mostly negative – this is strictly to sell toys to the kids. In 3D in some cinemas. Rated G

Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods – Son Goku and the Z fighters must contend with Birus, the God of Destruction, who is seeking a worthy opponent. The first movie from the Dragon Ball manga series to get a theatrical release in 17 years, this is also the first to be released in IMAX cinemas. Unfortunately for the Thai fans, it's only at SF cinemas, so no IMAX. With Japanese soundtrack and English and Thai subtitles at CentralWorld, Emporium and Terminal 21. Rated G

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Also showing

The Friese-Greene Club – Tomorrow night's man in crisis is Bill Murray in Jim Jarmusch's dry-witted road comedy Broken Flowers. He's a guy named Don Johnston who finds out he might have a son and sets out to track down his old girlfriends. On Friday, go behind the scenes of one of the most epically disaster-plagued film productions, Apocalypse Now, in Hearts of Darkness. And on Saturday, it's 1987's classic teen comedy Some Kind of Wonderful, scripted by the late great John Hughes. And on Sunday, the month's final Bette Davis offering, watch her and arch-rival Joan Crawford tear each other apart in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Next Wednesday's "precocious" girl is Brooke Shields in Louis Malle's controversial drama about a girl in a New Orleans bordello, Pretty Baby. Shows start at 8pm. The FGC is down an alley next to the Queen's Park Imperial Hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 22. With just nine seats, the screening room fills up fast, so please check the website to make bookings.

Mirch Masala (Spice) – A determined housewife (Smita Patil) rebuffs the advances of a lusty subedar (tax collector, played by Naseeruddin Shah) in the solidly dramatic 1987 social-problem film by Indian director Ketan Mehta. Winner of three of India's National Film Awards, including best feature and supporting actor for Suresh Oberoi as the mukhi (village chief), Mirch Masala screens at 8pm on Wednesday, October 30 at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand. Admission for non-members is 150 baht plus 100 baht for anyone wanting the Indian wine, rum, whisky, and snacks laid on by the Embassy of India and the Indian Cultural Centre.