Muay Thai - Nai Khanom Tom
Reviewed by Simon Booth
Director: Paitoon Ratanon
Year: 2003
Starring: Panutat Rattanatrai, Shinta Sitthikul,
Boonthida Nakajareon
Time: 123 minutes
After watching the wonderful Ong Bak I was
quite in the mood for some more Muay Thai action, and as look would have
it I had another DVD lying around that promised some - "Muay Thai - Nai
Khanom Tom" (roughly translated as "Muay Thai - Something" )). MT-NKT tells
the story of a guy who gets beaten up by local fighters, and manages to
persuade a mysterious long haired man to teach him to fight. Once
he's learnt some skills he decides to go off to a forest that may or may
not be home to "Bang Rajan" and learn more skills to fight off the invading
Burmese.
He gets there and discovers the local fighters
are in a bit of a mess because of the rivalries between the schools - in
particular, one young fighter who is reckoned the best in the land and
his teacher have an ego problem that makes it hard for them to cooperate
with the other fellows. This fighter takes a real dislike to the hero,
because of the interest the town hotty shows in him. Conflict!
MT-NKT was clearly made in the aftermath of
Ong Bak and Bang Rajan, and attempts to combine the strengths of the two
into a strong Muay Thai historical epic. Except, on 1/100th of the budget
of either. More than just budget is lacking, in fact - all forms
of talent and experience in the art of filmmaking are also curiously absent.
The film manages to go beyond "amateurish", to the point where one is led
to speculate whether we are witnessing an alien invasion, by a species
that caught extraterrestrial transmissions of Ong Bak and Bang Rajan and
concluded that the Thai film industry was the centre of the world's power
base. The aliens, it appears, have the technology to replicate our
bodies almost perfectly, but they don't understand our ways of making film
at all.
Eventually, however, I concluded that the alien
conspiracy theory is probably not correct - it's just that the makers of
the film really didn't know what they were doing. Part of the problem
undoubtedly comes from the fact that most of the cast seems to be real
Muay Thai students, not actors - or even reasonable facsimiles of actors.
Or writers, directors or cinematographers.
Still, since Muay Thai action was what I was
really looking for, their skills do somewhat compensate for their weaknesses.
There are some fight scenes featuring the same kind of bone crunching full
contact Muay Thai that made Ong Bak so compelling - but the fighters are
clearly more trained for real Muay Thai competition, so there's none of
the stunning acrobatics and stunts that Phanom Yeeram pulls off in Ong
Bak - just people hitting and kicking each other quite hard. That
would be good enough for a time passer, but the film commits one further
huge mistake - it tries to incorporate sword fights too. The sword
fighting is so bad it's quite comical - they can't do the full contact
stuff, so it's really just a lot of waving swords around each other, filmed
in a totally unflattering manner. Unfortunately, these dreadful sword
fights make up at least 50% of the fight scenes. Muay Thai good,
sword fights baaaaad.
Further problems arise from the fact that the
film is *terribly* post-dubbed (perhaps making it a little unfair to judge
the acting), and the Thai DVD features truly atrocious subtitles.
Actually, the subtitles turned out to be a blessing in disguise - they
may not make a lot of sense, but they're quite entertaining. There are
a huge number of very quotable lines, which would probably have been totally
vacuous if they'd actually made sense. In fact, I think I had more
fun trying to decipher the subs than I did with the fight scenes in the
long run :)
So, all is not entirely lost in a film that scores
dismally on almost every "standard" criteria by which films are judged,
but the many flaws are enough that I can't really recommend seeking it
out. If you happen to find the DVD lying around when you've just
watched Ong Bak and you've nothing much else to do, then there is some
merit to be had in watching it. Of course, if the alien theory is true
it may be essential that everybody see this film - at least to ensure themselves
that our world film industry is safe even if we're all going to be alien
food additives in a few years :)
Film Rating: 4/10
Khunsuk
Reviewed by Simon Booth
Director: Tanit Jitnukool
Year: 2003
Starring: Worrawith Kaewpetch, Sawinee
Pookaroon
Time: 125 minutes
After a fun but disappointing experience with
Muay Thai - Nai Khanom Tom, I decided to chance my luck with one more Thai
film that promised some action. Khunsuk (aka "Sema - The Warrior
Of Ayodhaya") is a totally different ballgame, it turns out. It's
a historical epic that conforms much more to normal notions of cinematic
virtue. It has a strong script, great cinematography and decent acting
and the production values are quite high.
The plot has some resemblance to that of MT-Thingy,
in that it follows the fortunes of a young lad called Sema who decides
to try his chances as a soldier and runs into conflict with an egotistic
fighter over the attentions of an attractive young female. I guess
that is not exactly an uncommon story though. Despite the "historical epic"
trappings, the film is mostly a personal story of rags to riches to rags
to... well, that would be telling. Sema has some good friends and
a nice sister, and falls for a girl outside his social caste. The
film focuses mostly on the love triangle this creates, and the friendships
between the characters - the political/military stuff is kept very much
in the background - the canvas on which the story is woven, perhaps.
The story of Sema does not present any radically
new or profound ideas into the world of film, but it is well told using
the full arsenal of cinematic technique. It's a well-crafted film
that balances the "historical epic" with the personal quite well, comparing
reasonably favourably with the recent Hollywood effort THE LAST SAMURAI
for instance.
The one problem with the film may be more of a
problem with this viewer, in that I don't really have any knowledge of
Thai history in the period this film was set. Because the film focuses
more on the personal stories, it doesn't explain much of the historical
and social context. The film features a number of huge battle scenes
that are beautifully filmed, but I found that I didn't actually have any
idea who was fighting who or why. I knew who the "good guys" were
and was able to root for them and enjoy their success and feel sorrow for
their failures, but lacking any understanding of the underlying reasons
for the battles robbed them of some impact. Still, they were *very*
nicely filmed, with lots of the old claret spilled and sprayed. (NOTE:
on going through the film again for screen captures, I realised that the
first 5 minutes does try to set the historical stage - if I'd paid attention
to names the later battles might have been a bit clearer!)
Final verdict - whilst not a "masterpiece", Khunsuk
is a very worthy entry into the historical epic field, and certainly one
of the better Thai films of recent years.
Recommended! 8/10
Province 77
Director: Smith Timsawat
Stars: Pete Thongchua, Metinee Kingpayom,
Mike Kingpayom, Charlene Amatavanich, Jeremy Thania
Time: 114 minutes
Year: 2003
It’s the Thai Songkran Festival and the children
are celebrating by squirting everyone in sight with water pistols. This
isn’t Thailand though, it’s Los Angeles. Thai Town. It’s a small six block
neighborhood off of Hollywood Boulevard that houses most of the 50,000
Thais living in the city. Thai Town is the first stop off for most Thais
moving to the United States and it has acquired the status of being termed
Thailand’s “77th Province”. Like most new waves of immigrants, it is tough
– working hard to make it, dealing with generational conflicts and the
inevitable culture clash. As the young female narrator states in the film
“All of us Thai people living in L.A. are out here trying to survive. Trying
to make a living. Trying to hang on to our roots.”
The story focuses on one extended family in Thai
Town – a father, his three children and their grandmother. Much to the
father’s concern his children have become more Americanized than he would
like – the eldest daughter (Metinee Kingpayom – a Thai super model) has
left home to live with a non-Thai, the son (Mike Kingpayom) is slowly being
pulled into the gang life and only the young daughter (Charlene Amatavanich)
seems to be holding on to her traditional Thai values. The father only
wants to hold his family together, but in this new world he feels almost
lost and has little control.
The film jumps off to a rat-a-tat beginning as
Mike is being chased by a gang through the streets of L.A. and when they
finally bring him to ground, the gang leader (Jeremy Thana) pulls out his
gun and shoots him point blank in the chest. Flashback time. The father’s
restaurant is in financial trouble and the I.R.S. is pounding on his door
for back taxes – so Mike thinks joining a Thai gang is the answer to come
up with some quick money – and for a while it is as he starts piling up
the loot along with a willing busty blonde. From the appearances of this
film, Thai American street gangs seem to take on the same trappings of
Black street gangs in their fashions, music and language. In the downstairs
apartment, a mysterious FOB (fresh off the boat) has moved in and he is
addressed by the second generation Thais with little more than contempt
– but he (Pete Thongchua, who also produced the film) has his own back
story of violence and revenge that soon impacts the entire family. Charlene
watches it all slowly unfold in potential tragedy and reaches for a gun.
There have been hundreds of films made depicting
the problems of immigrants coming to the United States and in a large percentage
of these it seems that gang life is a part of it. In that sense, there
is nothing new here that we haven’t seen in those other films – the same
problems, the same hopes – but having it centering on a Thai family is
certainly a different twist. Putting this lack of originality aside though,
the film is quite good with well-etched characters, a tense narrative and
excellent production values. For the most part, the film moves along at
a rapid pace and is helped enormously by a terrific rap/hip hop soundtrack
from the Thai group, Thaitanium.
My rating for this film: 7.0