13 BELOVED Gets An English-Friendly DVD!

When I arrived at this year's edition of the Fantasia Festival in Montreal head programmer Mitch Davis swore up and down that Thai thriller !3 Beloved was the best thing in the 120 film lineup. Being a programmer for the festival myself and knowing how strong a number of the films involved were I reserved judgment until seeing it for myself but, you know, I think he was right. A smart, savagely bleak satire about a man drawn into a reality game show that demands he perform more and more extreme acts if he is to proceed, the film is an unflinching dissection of human nature and our own natural voyeurism. It's by far the smartest smack down ever laid on the reality television phenomenon and a firm rebuttal to my own repeated assertion that reality TV does such a good job of parodying itself that there's nothing left for anybody else to say on the matter. It's also a film that was bought and buried by The Weinstein Company who, last I heard, have no intentions to ever do anything with the original version of the film and are just sitting on it so as not to spoil the punchline for western audiences when they do the remake.

All that to say hurray for Singapore! The film has just arrived on DVD there and the Singapore release is in anamorphic widescreen and includes English subtitles. I'm goin' shopping.