ong-bak Tagged Articles at Cinematical

What do celebrities really know about movies? Samuel L. Jackson, for one, demonstrates a good knowledge of recent Asian cinema with his selection of "favorite 10 New Classic Asian Films" from the past 25 years for Entertainment Weekly. The best part? He picks the type of popcorn action flicks that got me interested in Asian films in the first place.

A couple of his selections are easy to understand: John Woo's Hard Boiled and Ringo Lam's City on Fire are definite guns 'n' gangsters classics of late 80s / early 90s Hong Kong cinema. (Quentin Tarantino blatantly stole borrowed from the latter for Reservoir Dogs.) Jackson also includes the great Infernal Affairs trilogy, directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, a high water mark from 2002 / 2003 and later remade into the Academy Award-winning The Departed.

His Korean picks are Park Chan-Wook's diabolical, masterful Oldboy and the visually splendid, yet somewhat shallow Duelist, from 2005. Cut from the same cloth, he also endorsed Japanese swordplay dazzler Azumi by director Ryuhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train), and demonstrated his fondness for strong directors by selecting two films by Takashi Miike, the well-known, chilling horror flick Audition and the much less known Yakuza pic Family, which I confess I haven't seen.

Get ready for JiJa-mania! First, though, we have to decide how to spell her name. JiJa Yanin (as her name appears on a Hong Kong DVD, JeeJa Yanin as it's spelled at IMDb, Yanin 'Jeeja' Wismitanant according to film writer Wise Kwai) is a whirling dervish of a woman warrior in Prachya Pinkaew's Thai action flick Chocolate. And you can order it on DVD today, as long as you can play foreign-region DVDs, can understand Thai, and/or don't mind the lack of English-language sub-titles.

I'd rather understand everything that's going on in the movie, but there's been no word on a US distributor and I've grown impatient since first hearing about Chocolate back in February, when it was released in its native Thailand. Even without sub-titles, though, it's easy to follow the narrative.

A gun-toting female debt collector has an affair with a Japanese man, which enrages the gang leader who considers the woman his personal property. She is forced to raise her autistic daughter alone. Her daughter becomes an enfant terrible as far as kick boxing and martial arts are concerned, and soon is demonstrating her uncanny ability to catch flies and whatever is thrown at her -- baseballs, tennis balls, knives -- on the streets of Bangkok.

Mom gets sick, though, and the young girl who loves chocolate discovers Mom's book of old debts and decides to start collecting from a nefarious collection of criminal businessmen. Of course, they don't want to pay, and they all employ dozens of henchmen all too eager to viciously attack a young, pretty teenager, and so our young heroine must fight back the only way she knows how.