Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

[aox]

This is now streamable on Netflix!

I hope the Palme win didn't turn me into a contrarian, but I'll weigh in with people for whom this didn't work. I really loved Syndromes. Tropical Malady worked mostly for me in the first half, but as the more spiritual mythology took over, I began to lose interest. Still, I retained interest in the film because of how the film begged the viewer to interpret how the folklore related to the first half ...

Perhaps in the past, AW couched his spiritual underpinnings well enough as to make something like Syndromes, which I loved, accessible even to someone like me. But this film treats the afterlife and spirituality in such a direct and on-the-nose matter, both in how it's portrayed in the frame and treated in the dialogue. The title could've been a red flag if I hadn't enjoyed his previous film as much as I did. I felt like watching The Death of Mr. Lazarescu just to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Wow. You really knocked this one out for me. This is exactly how I felt about this film. I never felt connected to it, and I never felt grounded in its universe. There were interesting things about it for sure, but it never became the sum of its parts for me. I also felt the ending was tacked on and somewhat jarring considering the style of the film. I guess also, it didn't help that by the time the last scene plays out, I had lost interest.

[zombeaner]

The Blu-ray got pushed back "a couple of weeks" according to Strand PR.

[Grand Illusion]

Wow. You really knocked this one out for me. This is exactly how I felt about this film. I never felt connected to it, and I never felt grounded in its universe. There were interesting things about it for sure, but it never became the sum of its parts for me. I also felt the ending was tacked on and somewhat jarring considering the style of the film. I guess also, it didn't help that by the time the last scene plays out, I had lost interest.

I'm glad you dug up my post. I agree with you Re: the ending. But also like you, I was pretty far removed from any level of immersion by the time it was on screen.

[monk0nuggets]

The Blu-ray got pushed back "a couple of weeks" according to Strand PR.

Thanks for the update!

[aox]

blu-ray.com
Why would you encode a BD with MPEG-2?

[Peacock]

With forced subs and lacking lossless audio, so three things which just prove laziness.
The UK Blu has removable subs and DTS Master Audio. However it's 1080i interlaced 25fps. So neither edition are ideal and I doubt there'll be another Blu with eng subs for us to choose from.

[Guido]

Jesus. How hard can it be to put in a modicum of effort? Disappointed, but with Strand, I guess that was to be expected.

[Brian C]

Beaver says MPEG-4. And since both reviewers give good marks for the image quality, I'm guessing the Blu-ray.com review was incorrect. Certainly Gary would have had a cow if it was MPEG-2 even if it did look good.

The non-removable subs and lossy audio are both legit, though. That's too bad, although I'm not sure I'll be picking this up regardless.

[zombeaner]

Beaver says MPEG-4. And since both reviewers give good marks for the image quality, I'm guessing the Blu-ray.com review was incorrect. Certainly Gary would have had a cow if it was MPEG-2 even if it did look good.

The non-removable subs and lossy audio are both legit, though. That's too bad, although I'm not sure I'll be picking this up regardless.

From DVDBeaver:

"Uncle Boonmee doesn't appear visually overwhelming on MPEG2 Blu-ray from a visual standpoint."

[Brian C]

I swear he added that after I posted the link, and changed the specs up top. I say this with 100% certainty.

[manicsounds]

Yeah, he made the mistake earlier, but corrected it to MPEG2... I've often emailed directly to ask to change the mistakes.

It's like Strand just released a DVD and labeled it blu-ray....

[aox]

It's an easy mistake to make, and a completely understandable one, considering the question of who in their right mind would release a BD with a MPEG-2 codec. It should never happen. His mistake is forgivable though; theirs, not so much.

[Brian C]

True - I didn't mean to make it sound like this was some gigantic lapse on Gary's part.

I do think it's amusing, though, that his opinion on the PQ went from "fine" to "fine but should have been better." It appears that he did not notice anything amiss until someone pointed out to him that it was MPEG-2.

[denti alligator]

The caps don't look that bad, and if it's true that Gary didn't think anything was awry then that's a good sign. Mine is set to come tomorrow.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

With forced subs and lacking lossless audio, so three things which just prove laziness.
The UK Blu has removable subs and DTS Master Audio. However it's 1080i interlaced 25fps. So neither edition are ideal and I doubt there'll be another Blu with eng subs for us to choose from.

The UK BD is progressive. It's encoded at 1080i50 because BD doesn't officially support 25p -- but all they did was apply 2:2 pulldown to a 25fps master, and most if not all setups that can handle 50i content should be capable of inverting the pulldown and recovering the original progressive frames. It's kinda like how you can get a progressive image from a DVD even though technically it's encoded on the disc as an interlaced stream.

That said, the UK BD is still problematic, given that there's no evidence the film was made at 25fps, not to mention the compatibility issues.

[Lost_in_Crafton]

Tropical Malady worked mostly for me in the first half, but as the more spiritual mythology took over, I began to lose interest.

Uncle Boonmee didn't give me the grounding that I got from the other two AW films I had seen.

And this is the hugely problematic part of the film. So much of Uncle Boonmee is constructed around the imminent demise of Uncle Boonmee, but he doesn't react in any human way. When facing the vast nonexistence that is death, not even the staunchest believers have the kind of objective proof of afterlife/reincarnation/whatever that AW provides for Boonmee. So the dear uncle just smiles and waits to pass on. And there's no empathic entryway to this viewpoint. Nobody on Earth experiences death like this. I can't imagine this illuminating anything about the human condition. Maybe the space monkey condition. The film itself is inhuman.

In regards to this film, and several others, I'm finding that I have a Wacky Shit Principle. The WSP works much like the uncanny valley. The wackier the shit, the more believable it is. Space monkeys? Sure. I can accept that. Why? I'm not so sure. Maybe because I think that nobody in their right mind actually believes in space monkeys, so that makes it easier for me to shut down my defenses and just take in the Wacky Shit.

But when a woman is communing through the afterlife to her dying husband, and he reacts as if dying is the most pleasant thing since his village discovered irrigation, then my sirens go off. I think that the director may actually believe this, and that makes me reject what's being shown. And if he doesn't believe in it, then I see no artistic reason to present death, the most existential and feared concept in human existence, as such a non-factor in a man's life who faces it imminently.

But this film treats the afterlife and spirituality in such a direct and on-the-nose matter, both in how it's portrayed in the frame and treated in the dialogue.

Long time lurker here, but i felt compelled to register after reading this post. I've seen TM, S&C and UB and found TM and UB to be more resonant based on the "spiritual mythology" factor. These two movies, more than any other films I've ever seen embody my understanding of death. for far too long i've experienced the supernatural as sinister or evil and AW work is quite refreshing.

Nominally I'm a Telugu Brahmin by birth (and there is evidence that Telugu Brahmins founded kingdoms in western Cambodia in the 5th century) and have always been haunted by the "search for truth through ritual."

The way Uncle Boonmee approaches death with nonchalant detachment as if "dying is the most pleasant thing since his village discovered irrigation" is the way i hope to eventually approach death myself. I think what I'm trying to say is that as an American so far removed from the culture of his parents but steeped in their mythology to an even greater extent than they are, UB blew my mind and AW is the only active director than can speak to these issues that swirl in my mind even thought his vision of the world is to a degree hermetic and so far from my own.

I think I'll try to write more about this, if i can compose my thoughts.

[Grand Illusion]

The way Uncle Boonmee approaches death with nonchalant detachment as if "dying is the most pleasant thing since his village discovered irrigation" is the way i hope to eventually approach death myself.

I'd like that for myself as well. I just don't buy it, neither character-wise nor as a worldview I can share the slightest bit of empathy for.

Welcome to the forum.

[repeat]

The New Wave thread bump just made me remember something, but it belongs more properly to this thread:

Does anyone here have the New Wave DVD of this film? On my copy, all through the film, the entire speech track seems to have this weird flutter that sounds a bit like a random-LFO filter, if that makes any sense. It's not always noticeable on softly spoken bits, but it's very pronounced on louder and longer vocal sounds (and especially in the vocals of the song at the end). It's present on both the stereo and the 5.1 track. I could understand it as an effect on the song, but it runs through the film from beginning to end; I can't imagine it being supposed to sound that way, but it's so prevalent that it's not much easier to imagine it wouldn't have been noticed while preparing the release. I've tried to Google this but found nothing, so maybe my disc just has some kind of a freak defect?

If anyone could be so kind and check it with their own copy, it's very clearly audible for example in the dinner scene about 18 minutes into the film.