Global Visions

Since few of us at The Nation speak Thai, I'm going to refer to my favorite filmmaker of the month as Joe, which is the name actually used in this country by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Joe hails from the northeast of Thailand--so writes my principal source, the American critic Chuck Stephens--and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he seems to have majored in Surrealism. Two years ago, he completed a feature titled Blissfully Yours, which I haven't seen. Almost nobody has in the United States; it's unreleased, and so it qualifies for the series "Film Comment Selects 2003," currently being shown at the Walter Reade Theater at New York's Lincoln Center.

The purpose of the series, curated by the editors of Film Comment magazine, is to screen what they consider to be the best recent films currently unavailable in the United States. If you can make it to the Walter Reade on February 11 or 12 (check schedule for showtimes), you'll probably find me in a seat nearby, sharing in the discovery of Blissfully Yours. If you can't get to those screenings, then let me tell you about Joe's first feature, Mysterious Object at Noon, which has just been released on DVD by the Plexifilm company (www.plexifilm.com).

Correction: Let me try to tell you about Mysterious Object at Noon, which comes so close to being indescribable that explanations run as long as the movie itself.

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