Who's in It: Chartchai Ngamsan, Stella Malucchi, Supakorn Kitsuwon, Arawat Ruangvuth, Sombat Metanee
The Basics: Unless you're Thai yourself or really aggressive about finding such things, chances are you haven't seen many Thai westerns from the 1950s. I know I haven't, so I'm kind of at a loss to tell you if this movie is a just an homage, a serious re-creation, a wacky camp-ification or what. But I can tell you it's like playing a really fun, color-saturated guess-the-film-reference video game. If there wasn't a genre of heartbreaky Asian cowboy cartoons before this, there is now.
What's the Deal? Leave it to the Land of Smile to come up with a gay cowboy movie where no one onscreen is homosexual. Kind of the way that Can't Stop the Music was all about how horny the Village People were for Valerie Perrine. In fact, while watching this, my mind wandered for a bit, and I thought about how whoever owns the copyright on the V.P. brand could make serious money if they just created a different version of that group for every country in the world. Anyway, there's the plot (poor outlaw cowboy meets rich girl engaged to cowboy's enemy that she doesn't love — tragedy ensues), and then there's the series of visual cues dancing across the screen — and sometimes those two things are not exactly the same.
The Recipe: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly + The Umbrellas of Cherbourg + All That Heaven Allows + Devo's "Whip It" video + Pierre et Gilles art photography + pencil mustaches + telenovelas = this. Yes, I know that's a lot of stuff. It's a lot of movie.
Who'll Want to See It: Thai audiences who get annoyed that the only Thai movies that make it to English-speaking countries are obscure art films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul; art-house audiences who like to chuckle knowingly at pastiche.
My Only Complaint: I'm a huge fan of violence that's been stylized into outer space and back, the kind where you aren't even thinking about how gross it is anymore because you're laughing or in shock. And there's some of that here. But there could have been more. I'll just content myself with the crazily wonderful scene of men slicing up their forearms and drinking their own blood out of glasses.