Drag Me to Hell

After detouring down the path of the blockbuster superhero movies with Spider-Man, and stumbling with the most recent installment Spider-Man 3, Sam Raimi has come back to his horror-comedy roots with Drag Me to Hell.

It's already being critically hailed as a return to form for the director of the Evil Dead series.

The story, about a bank clerk (Alison Lohman) who opts for career advancement over charity, has resonance in these financially troubled times. After Lohman's character refuses a home loan extension to a weird old woman, she finds herself cursed and doomed to be, well, dragged off to Hell.

At a Cannes press screening, critics squirmed and giggled as they watched Lohman mentally and physically tormented by an ancient curse. “The film is about the terrible effects of greed and how it can destroy you,” Raimi said in a recent Agence France-Presse article.

Also opening

Blood: The Last Vampire -- This is a live-action adaptation of a 2000 anime about a sword-wielding Japanese schoolgirl vampire who goes to work for a secret U.S. government agency, killing demons. The star is Gianna Jun, who is perhaps better known to Thai audiences as Jun Ji-hyun, the star of the 2001 hit South Korean romantic comedy My Sassy Girl.

Gomorra -- The Grand Prize winner of last year’s Cannes Film Festival, this film by Matteo Garrone intertwines five stories of lives touched by organised crime in Naples. It's a controversial film, as it has been both lauded and criticized for its realistic, gritty portrayal. Perhaps ironically, it's opening the same week as the Italian Film Festival in Bangkok (see below). It's in Italian with English and Thai subtitles at House on RCA.

Home -- In celebration of World Environment Day on Friday, June 5, French photographer Yann Arthus Bertrand and his producers Gucci and Puma showmaker PPR and EuropaCorp have debuted this documentary film in a multi-platform release. It's a gutsy, selfless move. They've put it in cinemas, on YouTube and on TV at the same time. For free, when possible. Arthus, who had his "Earth From Above" photo exhibit in Bangkok last year, specializes in taking photos of Earth from the air. The images are sobering. "We have a greater impact on the Earth than it can bear," he said in an interview published in Daily Xpress. We over consume and are depleting the Earth’s resources. From the air, it’s easy to see the Earth’s wounds." There is narration by Arthus but no interviews. The images speak for themselves. It'll be broadcast at 9.15am on Saturday on Channel 7. It's on the big screen at the Scala in Siam Square.

Pandemic -- Here's another film with resonance, in these swine-flu wary times. A Japanese doctor (Satoshi Tsumabuki) comes to realise a patient’s ailment is a bit more serious than a common cold. In Japanese with English subtitles at the Lido in Siam Square.

Also showing

Italian Film Festival -- 19 movies will be shown in a frenzied five-day run at SFX Emporium. Among the highlights is Il Divo, about Giulio Andreotti, one of Italy's most powerful politicians. It won a Jury Prize alongside another Italian film, Gomorra (see above), at last year's Cannes Film Festival. Another good one is 2000's Bread and Tulips (Pane e Tulipani), about a housewife who embarks on a journey of self-discovery after she's "forgotten" on a coach tour. Tickets are 100 baht and there's packages of five films for 450 baht. Call (02) 268 8888. The whole screening schedule is at www.ItalianFestivalThailand.com.

In memoriam

In the midst of compiling the post about this week's movie openings, I got some sad news, that actor David Carradine had been found dead in a room at the Nai Lert Hotel in Bangkok.

The Nation has a story about it, and I've been tracking news updates on my other blog, as well as on Twitter. I don't want to comment any further on details of his death, which are a cause for debate right now on the Internet.

Carradine, 72, was a cult figure for his role as the wandering half-Chinese fugitive Shaolin monk in the TV series Kung Fu, an eastern-western that I was perhaps just a tad too young to appreciate back in the 1970s, but I recently rediscovered it on DVD. It's pretty great, even if the role was devised by and meant for martial-arts legend Bruce Lee, but American TV executives were too gutless to give the part to an Asian man.

Nonetheless, Kung Fu loomed large in Carradine's career, and it was that austere persona as a stoic poet-warrior that he kept coming back to.

Also my movie collection, I have The Long Riders, the western in which he portrayed the outlaw Cole Younger, with half brothers Keith and Robert Carradine playing more Youngers, the Keach brothers James and Stacy as Jesse and Frank James, the Quaid brothers Randy and Dennis and the Miller brothers and even the Guest brothers, Christopher and Nicholas as the duplicitious Ford brothers.

Another one on the shelf is Cannonball!, a low-budget, B-grade car-chase movie from 1976. Robert Carradine is in it as well.

Other well-known movies for Carradine were Boxcar Bertha by Martin Scorsese and Bound for Glory, in which he played folk singer Woody Guthrie. A revival screening of Glory earlier this year led to a Q&A session with Carradine and filmmaker Haskell Wexler that went off the rails. This blog post is interesting reading about that.

Carradine was of course most well known recently for playing the titular character in Quentin Tarantino's sprawling action drama Kill Bill. The movie marked a comeback of sorts for Carradine, even though he'd never actually stopped working. He has more than 220 credits on IMDb.

He was seen recently in Bangkok cinemas in Big Stan, a Rob Schneider comedy in which he plays a martial-arts guru to teach Schneider how to avoid being raped in prison.

And Carradine perhaps parodies his Kung Fu role in Crank: High Voltage, playing an ancient, demented Chinese mobster who has a new lease on life because he's stolen Jason Statham's heart, literally.

Upcoming credits for Carradine include True Legend (Su Qi-Er), action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping's tale of China's legedary King of Beggars.

According to the BBC, he was in Bangkok working on a movie called Stretch.