My article on Bangkok’s Kitsch Cat is in the newest issue of Theme Magazine.

Read article online at Theme or in the vault.

If you haven’t already heard the cats and their brand of 80s pop madness, check out their packed site, download some special tracks (and a mix over on Asian Man Dan), and keep up with their blog (including obligatory MJ Tribute). Also you can order the CD/shirt no matter how far away you live from the BTS…

(Cyndi Seui, one of the beat wizards behind Kitsch Cat, performing in Bangkok, 2007)

Title: “Kitsch Cat is the Cat’s Meow”
Publication: Theme Magazine
Date: Fall 2009
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Take a quick spin through Siam Square or Chatuchak Market and it’s clear: Bangkok’s youth culture knows how to do retro. From deadstock sunglasses to modernist furniture, the past is not only present, but lovingly curated and feverishly consumed. The cool kids behind the Kitsch Cat project, however, are taking an obsession with a previous decade (namely the ’80s) to a whole new level.

Kitsch Cat was born a year ago when Thai electro-pop fixture Cesar B. De Guzman (aka Cyndi Seui) and graphic designer/musician Peera Suk-a-Suk (aka Yuri’s Nominee) began brainstorming on a music collaboration—something personal and separate from their day-jobs at indie label Smallroom Records. Soon their friend Jaree Thanapura (aka Gramaphone Children) joined in, and over weekly dinners at a Thonglor ramen joint, the concept evolved: a mini-label to push the electronic music envelope, through compilations, T-shirt design, a blog, and any other means necessary.

“We didn’t expect it to come out so ’80s,” Thanapura explains, “but it ended up that everyone was doing something relating to ’80s music, and it just snapped into place… kinda like velcro.” Velcro is cited as an influence in the liner notes of the first CD compilation, alongside “8-bit video games, vinyl toys, Rubik’s cubes, calculator watches, and spandex.”

The six artists on the compilation remix their reference points into something fresh. Juicy synths and shiny horns are chopped almost beyond recognition in D.J.S.C.P’s dense composition, while Gramaphone Children’s “One Pink Saturday” is a tweaked John Hughes film theme song. The King of Pop is alive and well in Cyndi Seui’s tracks, cross-shuffled and sped up for an impatient age.

After the CD’s release last fall, Kitsch Cat won admirers in France, Japan, and beyond (swamping De Guzman with lots of remix work for electro acts like Astrolabe and Freaku). Ironically, the local scene is discovering them from the outside-in, through international music blogs. Meanwhile the Cats are working on upcoming live shows, the next CD compilation and corresponding T-shirt, and perhaps even a custom-designed “Kitsch Cat” effects filter. Their grand plans to “create electro madness on the dance floor” are well under way.

I later realized that on a trip in 2007, I had hung out for an entire afternoon under this same bridge while some friends were filming. It was lovely – fried fish from the barbecue stand, little dogs and teen skateboarders zigzagging past each other, and at 6pm sharp, the requisite group aerobics. But at the time, the tranquility freaked me out slightly because it reminded me of the riverbank scene from Bong Joon-Ho’s “The Host” (”Gwoemul”), right before the monster surges out of the water. Now, unfortunately, Rama VIII is temporarily tinted with a more genuine creepiness.

Beijing was still covered in snow when I left, and grey when I returned. Just like “The Wizard of Oz,” BKK remains the Technicolor in the middle.

Full photo set here.

Profile: Ourself Beside Me, Theme Magazine, Issue 17, Nov/Dec/Jan 2008/2009 Eureka!

Theme: Dreamchaser, Theme Magazine, Issue 17, Nov/Dec/Jan 2008/2009 Eureka!

Title: “Critic’s Picks: Tomyam Pladib”
Publication: Artforum Online
Date: May 2008
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“Tomyam Pladib”
JIM THOMPSON ART CENTER
Jim Thompson House, 6 Soi Kasemsan 2, Rama 1 Road,
March 19–June 5

Organized by Gridthiya Gaweewong, founder of Project 304 and curator, with artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, of 2006’s beleaguered exhibition “Saigon Open City,” “Tomyam Pladib” brings together Thai artists who love Japan and vice versa. The title, inspired by a magazine column by Bangkok-based Japanese writer Ryota Suzuki, refers to an imaginary fusion of Thai spicy soup and Japanese sashimi. Luckily, the included artists resist such binary combinations.

A restaging of Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s Everyone Likes Someone as You Like Someone, 2008, spills across half the gallery with its delightful, “relational” futon mountain, within which kids are encouraged to deposit their personal drawings, playing on an abstract notion of exchange. Comic wunderkind Wisut Ponnimit, now a star in his adopted country of Japan, teams up with Vachiraporn Limviphuvadh on an interactive animation piece in which viewers must don minimalist clothing to play a lo-fi video game. Similarly evoking this sense of a cultural “second skin” are kimonos by textile artist Jarupatcha Achavasmit, who weaves traditional Thai ikat into Japanese designs. A set of familiar Yoshitomo Nara drawings and Morimura Yasumasa’s gender-bending, uncanny photographs, including a homage to Frida Kahlo, are perhaps most interesting for the clearly Thai names of collectors on the wall labels—unintentionally referencing how one country “collects” another, anywhere on the spectrum from fandom to colonization.

The literal jewel of the show is a new video installation by well-known film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Titled Morakot (Emerald), 2007, its slow interior shots of a defunct hotel are overlaid with ghostly voices and CGI dust motes, creating a strange, melancholy energy. The piece has little to do with Japan, but that’s part of the point: The simple juxtaposition expands and expands, just like Weerasethakul’s virtual dust, lighter than air but full of a complex history.

Title: “This Old House″
Publication: South China Morning Post
Date: Aug 2007
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A Thai film has audiences jumping out of their skins, writes Samantha Culp

In the Thai horror movie Alone, an old-fashioned Thai wooden house replaces the classic gothic mansion as the setting for secrets, betrayal and things that go bump in the night. But this isn’t your average haunted house film. It’s the second collaboration between Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, the directing duo behind surprise hit Shutter (2004). Like its predecessor, it delights in pushing the boundaries of the scary movie.

The protagonist, a young woman named Ploy (played by pop star Marsha Wattanapanich), starts believing that her dead sister, Pim, is still with her – literally. Born as conjoined twins, they were separated as children, but only Ploy survived the operation. Now, after years living in Seoul, Ploy is called back to Bangkok, when her mother suffered a stroke.

Accompanied by her sym-pathetic boyfriend, Wee (Vittaya Wasukraipaisan), Ploy is forced to confront her tormented past in the creaking hallways and melancholy darkness of the old house. What she finds is one scare after another, but also some deeper, odder truths that go beyond the typical horror fare.

Experimentation is nothing new to the film’s producer, Mingmongkol Sonakul, whose refusal to differentiate between popular and art-house cinema has made her one of the most interesting figures in contemporary Thai film during the past decade. She’s one of the few in Thailand working with an independent production company. ‘I never think, ‘What’s the relationship between indie and mainstream?” Mingmongkol says. ‘Just as I would never ask, ‘What’s the relation between short and tall people?”

Born and raised in Bangkok, Mingmongkol studied film at the San Francisco Art Institute, and worked as an intern at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When she returned home, her father asked what she planned to do. When she told him she wanted to make films, he said, ‘It’s impossible – people don’t do that here.’

At this point, the Thai film industry was in a slump. Regardless, Mingmongkol teamed up with another Thai who had studied overseas, and produced his first feature film. It was a low-budget, black-and-white journey through Thailand asking people to imagine the next episode in a surreal story. It blurred fact and fiction into something strange and beautiful. The film was Mysterious Object at Noon (1998) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and one of the first important works of the so-called Thai New Wave.
Mingmongkol then went on to produce other milestone indie works such as Pimpaka Towira’s One Night Husband and Aditya Assarat’s short film Motorcycle.

But she also wanted to get back behind the camera. In 2002, she directed I-San Special, a surreal Brechtian experiment set aboard a night bus rattling through the countryside. She says it’s an ‘experimental film, but quite entertaining’. Mixing theatricality and documentary, I-San Special follows the passengers on and off the bus as they act out a popular radio soap opera, and comments on postmodern contradictions of everyday Thai life. The film was shown at festivals and won prizes, including the Dragon & Tigers Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival. It also had local resonance because of its vernacular subject matter.

Mingmongkol says piracy and distribution difficulties are major problems for the Thai industry. They were such problems for I-San Special that she she started seeking new ways to distribute, especially for her own projects.

In 2005, Mingmongkol co-directed 3 Friends with Aditya Assarat and Pumin Chinaradee, a twist on reality TV and the ubiquitous starlet-exploitation VCDs sold across Thailand. It follows a young actress and her friends stuck on an island during a video shoot. With improvised dialogue, the cast blend reality and performance into an uncanny experience. After its festival run, Mingmongkol tried selling the film online.
Another major issue for the development of Thai film is a limited market for the avant-garde. Because most Thais are below the poverty level, ‘they can afford to see only one film a year. So when they go to a film, they want entertainment.’

Some of Mingmongkol’s more recent productions, such as Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s enigmatic ‘tropical noir’ Invisible Waves may be too challenging for local audiences. The Tin Mine, on the other hand, had wider appeal – the drama about a young urbanite’s trials at a mining camp in southern Thailand was the country’s entry for foreign language film Oscar last year.

What brought Mingmongkol to Alone was a curiosity about conjoined twins. Returning to the screen after a 15-year absence, Marsha plays both Ploy and Pim, and the story explores the mysterious bond between the twins. Alone also allowed Mingmongkol to put a spin on the overplayed cliches of Asian horror. ‘We tried to do something new,’ she says. ‘Otherwise, there’s no point in making it.’

Shutter was a big hit and show-cased a refined visual style. In Alone, that aesthetic has an even bigger canvas. The Bangkok house at the core of the story is a real house built specially for the film – and burned to the ground during the climax. Mingmongkol says she and the directors felt more comfortable dealing with real fire rather than CGI, and that the result is more realistic. Each frame looks glossy and polished, but the fire seems to lick at the smooth surfaces in a way that can’t be created by computer.

Alone was a hit in Bangkok this spring, where it was described as a worthy follow-up to Shutter. A distributor has bought the rights to release it in North America, and there are rumours of an Indian remake in the works. Shutter is also being remade in the US.
But is there anything that makes these films particularly Thai? Mingmongkol identifies the relentless nature of the scares as local. ‘If Thai people want to see a ghost film, they like to be scared sh**less,’ she says. ‘If it’s a comedy, they need to be laughing constantly. It’s like somtum [spicy papaya salad] – people just keep eating it and eating it and eating it.’ There are plenty of moments that make you jump out of your seat, but not too many to numb your thrill taste buds.

Mingmongkol continues to produce films that don’t always deliver the somtum effect. ‘I believe that each film is different,’ she says, mentioning a documentary project, as well as a pan-Asian script that she expects will take a while to develop. Perhaps the truest independents are those who don’t care for categories, and this is reflected in her tastes. ‘I like [Krzysztof] Kieslowski’s Red, White, Blue, and [Peter Greenaway's] The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,’ she says. ‘But I also like Anaconda.’

Title: “Festival Reels from Glitz to Glitches″
Publication: South China Morning Post
Date: Aug 2007
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The SF World Cinema in Bangkok is a typical shopping mall multiplex, with buttery popcorn, big screens, and even bigger blockbusters. But for two weeks last month, the fifth Bangkok Film Festival set up shop in this unlikely location, squeezing its diverse programme and competitions between Harry Potter and Die Hard 4.0.

Some movie buffs may have been disappointed by the scaled-back size and glamour of this year’s edition, or disillusioned by the controversy that surrounded it, but the Bangkok Film Festival has been plagued with problems since it started in 2003.

Sponsored by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, the past four festivals were criticized for their focus on foreign celebrities and guests at the expense of local filmmakers and audiences. The organisers were also lambasted for overspending last year. Things were set to change this year, but last autumn’s military coup put paid to that.

“After the coup, our budget went haywire,” says festival director Chattan Kunjara na Ayudhya. With funding reduced to US$2 million from US$5 million, the festival replaced its Los Angeles-based planner, Film Festival Management, with a local organisation.

Then the Siam Paragon shopping mall and cinema, the main venue for the past few festivals, dropped out at short notice. So the festival’s dates were pushed back to July, at the Central World shopping centre. A few weeks before the start, the Iranian Embassy in Bangkok objected to the opening film: the award-winning animated feature Persepolis, which depicts the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and its aftermath through the eyes of a young girl. This was hastily replaced with Children of Glory, a water-polo drama set during the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

On July 19, the festival finally rolled out its red carpet to the Thai Crown Prince and celebrities such as filmmaker Chatrichalerm Yukol and Bollywood’s Hema Malini.

The festivals’ selections, comprising 100 films from 50 countries, had an Asian focus this year, ranging from a special programme on Okinaway animation to Chinese, Southeast Asian and Thai movies. In the competition for the three Golden Kinaree categories, the best international film award went to Argentina’s XXY, Malaysia’s Before We Fall in Love Again took the best Asean film title, and Japan’s Eternally Yours won best short film.

The Vietnamese action film The Rebel sold out all its screenings as the local press fawned over its handsome star, Johnny Nguyen. The Weinstein Company was later reported to have acquired the film’s US rights. Similar excitement surrounded two Thai premieres, the festival’s only launches: the arty Bangkok Time (directed by Santi Taepanich), which intertwines the stories of three lonely urbanites; and the closing film, Muay Thai Chaiya (directed by Kongkait Komesiri), a tale about male friendship and Thai boxing.

The international programmes seemed random and most had already toured the festival circuit. Choices included Fatih Akin’s recent Cannes winner Edge of Heaven and Amos Gitai’s Freezone from two years ago. The inclusion of Manoel de Oliveira’s Belle Toujours sparked a retrospective on Luis Bunuel, whose films are rarely seen in Thailand.
Similar excitement surrounds two Thai premieres (the only films launching at the festival)—the artier Bangkok Time (directed by Santi Taepanich), which follows the intertwining stories of three lonely urbanites, and closing film Muay Thai Chaiya (directed by Kongkait Komesiri), a tale of male friendship and Thai boxing.

The most energetic and freshest offerings seemed to come from close to home. “It was quite a good year for Thai film,” says festival programmer Kriangsak “Victor” Silakong. Two movies faced censorship issues, however. In April, censors demanded cuts to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century and then held the reels when the director refused to comply. Although the festival has a license to show films without the threat of being shut down, the organisers decided not to show Syndromes because of the tangles with the authorities.

Censors also wanted to cut Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Ploy, which had its debut at the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight in May. It was nominated for the Golden Kinaree, but the director insisted that his film would compete only if it could be shown in full. The festival agreed to show the uncensored version – but without publicising the fact, so as not to upset the authorities.

Censorship was central to a panel discussion on July 28 titled To Rate or Not to Rate, which highlighted a proposed ratings system that critics fear may be more prohibitive than existing official scrutiny. Asked about the pressure of censorship on the festival, a discouraged Kriangsak tried to see the silver lining. “It is scary, and there’s nothing you can do about it… But then look at Iran. With lots of censorship, they can still produce good films.”

Although Chattan expressed his hopes about new themes, new programmes and a continued affiliation with the Central World venue, rumours abound that this may be the festival’s swansong.

This year’s events seem to have changed the festivals’ reputation for imported, overpriced Hollywood glitz, as organisers courted local audiences. Many more films (including all of those in competition) were given Thai subtitles for the first time, and programme booklets listed “must-see films” and director question-and-answer sessions.

“When you see people coming to the theatre, it really untires you,” says Chattan. “You see people looking at synopses and buying tickets, and you think, ‘OK, this is why it was worth it.’”