CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR

I dunno. A movie where everybody's asleep in a hospital. There are all sorts of interesting ideas in the movie but I had great difficulty settling in for the ride. The reviews all outdo each other with proclamations of magnificence, marking CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR as some kind of cinematic revelation. Hey, it must be the first movie maybe ever to prominently feature CPAP machines, so it has that going for it. But there is a scene, which I noticed none of the numerous reviews I'd read mentioned, about halfway through the film that just did it for me, in terms of making me tune out to the film at least in terms of taking it seriously: in CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR we are shown a man, facing away from us, squatting in the middle of some tropical brush, and before you realize what he is about to do or why he is squatting, he just goes and defecates, right there onscreen, and we get to watch the whole damn thing for an uncomfortably long period of time. Remember the scene in one of the AUSTIN POWERS movies where Austin Powers, just released out of cryogenic freeze, is being revived in a lab, and in a funny scene, stands there and pees forever, and just when you thought he was done, nope, there's more? Well, imagine a serious Thai art film where director Apichatpong Weerasethakul shows us someone defecating... without any blurry modesty wall (as in Austin Powers) to block the direct view, but instead, we get to watch the whole thing. For way too long. Okay, thanks filmmaker. And your message is? Thought so. SCORE: 49.