Highly Overrated But Still Good

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

This film tells the story of a farm owner who lives in a rural village in Thailand. He has kidney problems and needs to have peritoneal dialysis, and he thinks his end is near. One day, his wife's ghost and a furry creature who claims to be his late son visit his home.I have wanted to watch "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" for a long time because it is hailed to be great by film festivals. In just the first few minutes, I was already bored to death. It shows a cow wandering in the wild, and that lasted for minutes. It does not get any better from then on, nothing happens in the film. It is so slow in pace, and the still shots do not help. The story is so lacking that it could be told in ten minutes. The rest of the 100 minutes were fillers with no real substance. It is truly horrible, I wasted so much time on this film.

This film is about all life everywhere right now. All of us. The other reviewers are right about Uncle Boonmee reliving many of the memorable occurrences and changes in his life, as shown by historically-set allegories. But the main thrust of this movie is the end.The director/author/persona/protagonist (Boonmee in the previous scenes), having died, finds his story fades away and is replaced with a clearer, more basic level of reality. He has always been a quiet Thai kid, dutifully training at a monastery. He is calm and focused enough to see outside of his own sphere. But he has this self control only because his mother bought him the freedom to do this, by sending him to the monastery. It is his sensitivity that allows him to see life in terms of stories about himself and others, and his sensitivity is apparent when he talks about his feelings toward the monastery. He also moves and showers mechanically because he is still, at base, afraid of this world.When he gets ready to leave the hotel room, he realizes that he has left a version of himself, a "scene" from his life, in that room. It shocks and dismays him that the thread of life is so flimsy, and his identity is so subjective. The persona, or viewer, is dismayed to realize that the base level reality feels fractured even more than the myths and legends.When he and his mother go out to the restaurant to connect more, they wind up not talking at all. And while they sit in a booth, more disconnected than ever, he hears heartfelt, sentimental, music playing from a computer where a similarly zombie-like man sits, staring blankly.This song is the denouement. It expresses all of the love, life, happiness, and soul that the modern man has tried to seek, quantify, and trap in a bottle (computer), while our species has completely lost the ability to live those themes in reality. The people in the restaurant listen to a beautiful, soulful, human song and it doesn't even inspire them to look at each other.The final shot is back in the hotel room where another version of himself is also disconnected from his family, this time without even anything "fun" going on. The family unit remains exactly as disconnected in this setting as in the other. In the booth, the mother sees her son's discontent with the real, modern world, but has no answers for him. In the hotel room, she doesn't even notice it enough to look at him.This movie is deeply sad and regretful of modern (future) society in all its forms: technology, distraction, the sharp decline of pure human interactions. If you will remember the beginning of the movie, primitives in a field at dusk, the family unit is so close to each other that the camera doesn't even need to focus on them or pick up their conversation. The cow walking away is the most interesting (i.e. distracting) thing that happens in the scene. It takes them a while to notice this, and even when they do they fail to notice spirits walking in the woods.Because they are happy, and just aren't pressured to care.Wild.

I finished watching "Uncle Boonmee" a little less than an hour ago, and I'm still not really sure how to describe it. It certainly is a strange film, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I'm not sure if I should recommend it.Many people seem to really hate the film, and I kind of understand why. It is a really, really unconventional and slow film that many people who aren't used to this type of film will instantly call pretentious garbage. Is it pretentious garbage? Not through my eyes (although it does feel a little pretentious at times). To me, this is a very fascinating film, full of magic, mystery, and wonder.It doesn't have much of an actual story, it is kind of just about the last days of a man named Boonmee, and how he sort of prepares for his death. Add on top of that spirits, creatures known as the "monkey ghosts", an erotic scene with a catfish, an absurd and deadpan sense of humor, among much more bizarreness, and you have this film.Many people are upset that the film has gotten so much acclaim, and you can't really blame them since this film has a style that will not attract most audiences. Not even mainstream audiences, just audiences in general.If you know what you're getting into and like slower, weirder movies, then I think you should check it out, but be warned, it is very unconventional.

If you're looking for a film with no clear plot, unmemorable characters, minutes at a time of dead silence, boring dialogue, and a film that just all round is incredibly boring, you found it! Very rarely do I have a moment where I'm saddened by a thought that I may have wasted some time that i'll never get back. However, this film raises these emotions, having watched it I genuinely felt that I had wasted my time that could have been better spent doing LITERALLY anything else. Of all the things that I could get stuck up and angry about in this film - and trust me there are many things - it is the incredibly stiff and unconvincing acting. For the 113 minutes of this film, there's maybe 30 seconds, at the most, of any emotion that isn't like that feeling you have when you've just woken up but are annoyed at the fact you have to wake up. I'm sure this movie has some beautiful and profound statement of life and death or something like that but it is so heavily disguised in just plain boring nothingness that you can't be bothered to find the messages of the film. Good films create a partnership with the audience; i'll give you this many clues, and you fill in the gaps. Instead Uncle Boonmee gives the audience a bunch of meaningless unrelated scenes and expects them to do all the work, like a 1000 piece puzzle where none of the pieces actually fit together.The films jumps so erratically between genres, one minute it is a terrible film about the mundane life of a Thai farmer, the next minute it is terrible fantasy film about a talking catfish. The point of a film is to tell a story, but a story can't possibly be good if you can't follow or comprehend it. Harry Potter would have never been successful if every second chapter was erased. Uncle Boonmee is like looking after a really annoying 5 year old. It's hyper-actively running around everywhere, knocking over everything on every shelf, while screaming and giggling at the top of his lungs while you chase after it, picking up all of its mess. That is what Uncle Boonmee does to the viewer's brain. The films runs around making a mess while the viewer's brain runs around picking up all the scenes sprayed on the floor and tries to put them in some comprehensible order. The only consistency in Uncle Boonmee is that it is consistently crap for the whole 113 torturous, painful minutes.