Two Nights in Bangkok

Chocolate

If one night in Bangkok makes a hard man crumble, what does watching two Thai martial arts movies do? The first was Chocolate, which follows the violent adventures of a young autistic Thai girl named Zen who has the ability to learn any martial arts style just by watching it. Her ex-gangster mother is sick, so she pays visits to her mom's former clients to collect on their debts. When they refuse to pay, the fight scenes take over. Zin is played by Jeeja Yanin, who studies Taekwondo in real life. I thought the fights were fun to watch. My favorite is when she fights another twitchy autistic kid. After he knocks her around for a while, she learns his style for herself, twitching and all.

Ong-Bak

A few weeks before this movie came out, a friend of mine paid a visit to DC and stayed with me while he was in town. This particular friend is my most trusted authority on Asian movies. If it gets his seal of approval, it's good enough for me. When the 1994 version of The Legend of Drunken Master was coming to American theaters several years ago, I read some nonsense about it having a 20 minute fight scene at the end. Knowing he would have already seen it in Chinese, I decided to test Leon by sending him an email.

"Hey Leon. Should I go see the Drunken Master movie? Is it any good? I hear it has a 15 minute fight scene at the end."

"Scotty. Yes, it's good and you should go see it. And it's a 20 minute fight scene."

Now it's my favorite martial arts movie. Trust in Leon. So when he said, "Make a point of going to see Ong-bak. It's good.", I should have listened. I just never got around to it until the other night, when I watched it instantly on Netflix. It's really, really entertaining. There's not any sort of cringe-inducing injuries, just guys getting punched, kicked, kneed, and elbowed--especially elbowed--by Ting, the small village lad/Muay Thai expert who has to go to the big city to get his people's sacred statue's head back. We've all been there, haven't we?

The fights are great. Really great. Muay Thai doesn't show up much American theaters, especially compared to karate and kung fu. In addition to fists and feet, it makes use of shins and elbows as well. I don't think any of the cage fighters use it right now since their sport's more about grappling and "ground and pound" strategies than striking. (Lyoto Machida excepted) I sort of knew what it looked like, but the movie worked in a lot of athleticism and stunt work that really raised the energy level.

Ting seems like a nice enough fellow, and his fellow villagers are a sweet bunch of people. That's about all the analysis I have that doesn't involve something along the lines of "Holy crap, that was an awesome move." If you see one Thai martial arts movie this year, make it this one.

Google

Note: when I use the Google taskbar to search for something, I often stop in the middle of a word or phrase to see what the suggestions are going to be. Search for the lyrics to "One Night in Bangkok", I typed in "one n" and stopped. Three of the suggestions were about the Paris Hilton horizontal tango video, and two were for the song. A few weeks ago I put in "jon " with the space, and 8 of 10 suggestions were "Jon and Kate Plus 8" related. Now it's up to 9. The only intruder on the list is Jon Stewart.

If you have any suggestions for me to check out, let me know.