You Don’t Mess With The Zohan 1/2
Written by Writer on Friday, October 3rd, 2008
You Don’t Mess With The Zohan 1/2
KONG RITHDEE
Starring Adam Sandler, Emmanuelle Chriqui, John Turturro. Directed by Denis Dugan.
This obscene, tasteless, infantile and hilarious movie will make you laugh and cringe in equal measures. Adam Sandler plays Zohan, an Israeli counter-terrorist agent who gets tired of the Israeli-Palestinian strife and smuggles himself to New York to pursue his dream of becoming a hair stylist. He settles in a rinky-dink salon run by a Palestinian beauty (Chriqui), and quickly rises to become its star stylist due to his dirty pleasure-giving techniques administered on a clientele of old ladies. Zohan is all about Sandler’s protruding crotch, his sex acts with senior citizens, his penchant to make salon liquid look like semen, and his belief that humour _ vulgar, adolescent humour _ can blur the line between transgression and redemption, between ethnic mockery and ethnic unity. Amid all this is the allegory (I think) about the possible reconciliation between Israelis and Arabs, and about the vice of Western meddlers.
Starring Hideaki Ito,Yusuke Iseya, Masanobu Ando. Directed by Takashi Miike. In English with Thai subtitles. At Lido and Paragon.
Takashi Miike’s hybrid of cinematic phyla results in a mad hotpot that’s not entirely sizzling. In this fiery furnace, Miike throws in ingredients from Spaghetti Western, Yojimbo, cowboy ethos, samurai sagas, Japanese anime, Tarantino’s violence, plus his own crackpot humour and a fair dose of bad English. A lone gunslinger arrives at a remote outpost where two clans _ the red Heike and white Genji _ are brawling their way to the legendary buried gold. The Eastwood-esque gunman is trapped in the crossfire, fools the town’s sheriff, beds a sexy widow, then turns against both gangs to save an orphaned boy in a final showdown that involves swords, pistols, dynamite, and Rambo-style machine guns. Miike is a film-maker that draws his energy from chaos, but it feels like one long bad joke here. The thing is, he borrows so many cinematic influences, then twists and mocks them without at least showing some respect to them. This is not subversive; it’s just cluttered and foolish.
Bangkok Dangerous 1/2
Starring Nicolas Cage, Shahkrit Yamnarm, Panwad Hemanee, Charlie Yeung. Directed by Oxide and Danny Pang.
Nic Cage should consider Bangkok dangerous, chiefly to his reputation as a quality actor. So the American hitman arrives here to zap his four last targets, and while taking time off from preparing JFK-style assassinations, he sightsees the floating market, visits temples, prays to a Buddha, feeds the elephants, takes the BTS, bonds with a local boy (Shahkrit Yamnarm) and falls for a deaf pharmacist who’s also a traditional Thai dancer (played by Hong Kong star Charlie Yeung). Plus there are scenes with Thai boxing matches, Coyote lasses in bikinis, and a sad-faced garland girl _ all symbolic of crazy, corrupt, decadent, whatever Bangkok. Remade from their own 1999 Thai film, the Pang brothers somehow manage to make a pure lemon.
In Bruges
Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Clemence Poesy. Directed by Martin McDonagh. Only at Lido.
This debut work from playwright Martin McDonagh is a dark comedy that derives its flair from the sharp, gabby dialogue and the perfomances of the three leads, especially Colin Farrell. Ray and Ken (Farrell and Gleeson) are two professional hitmen sent by their boss (Fiennes) to Bruges, a picturesque Belgian city swarmed with happy tourists, to hide out after a murder gone wrong. Ray is a hothead Irish lad who’d rather be anywhere else but in Bruges (”only retards are impressed by the old buildings here”), and it’s slowly revealed that he’s a tragi-comic soul haunted by a terrible crime he has committed. This town of Medieval beauty becomes Ray’s Purgatory, and one night on a walk he hooks up with a pretty cocaine dealer and grows obsessed with a racist dwarf who’s arrived to shoot a children’s film. There’s a sense of genuine misery and lost hope beneath the movie’s jeering humour, and then Ralph Fiennes shows up and shatters everything into pieces.
Email kongr@bangkokpost.co.th
