Teringer
An Exercise In Nonsense
Zlatica
One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.
gordonl56
6ixtynin9 - 1999 This one is a bit hard to tag, it is sort of a dark comedy mixed in with plenty of violence and a neo noir feel.A young woman working in a Bangkok bank is laid off. The woman, Lalita Panyopas, is the sole breadwinner for her family who live in a country village. She is at a loss as to what to do next. Thoughts of suicide enter her mind as she ponders her future.She returns to her small apartment to sleep on her problems. Her apartment, number 6, has a loose number that slips down and become a 9 when the door is slammed. This is of course is going to cause Miss Panyopas, a ride into the dark side.The next morning, Panyopas opens the door to take out the trash, she finds a cardboard box sealed with duct tape in front of the door. She picks it up and brings it inside. She grabs a knife and opens the box. Inside, there is $25,000 in cash. What is she to do? Keep it, or turn it into the police.A quick trip to the Police station ends that idea when she sees several people being tossed into the cells. She decides to keep the loot. There is soon a knock on the door. She answers and finds two thuggish looking gentlemen looking for a box that had been left in error. Panyopas says she knows nothing about it. The two smile, then give her a fist to the side of the head.A quick look around the apartment finds the cash. Panyopas is not inclined to giving up the loot. She grabs a flowerpot and brains the one thug. The other goes for her and they struggle on the bed with the thug strangling her. As it so happens, the knife Panyopas had used to open the box is still lying on the bed. She grabs it up and spears the swine with it. Panyopas now has two dead bodies on her hands. What to do? She hides one in a storage trunk and the other in the closet.Now we find out about the cash. It is the rake off from a crooked boxing racket. Every week, the cash is dropped at apartment 9 for the Thai Mafia. The men this week making the drop had mistaken Panyopas' apartment for the drop place.The boss of the boxing racket, Black Phomtong, soon gets a call from the Mafia about the non-delivery of the week's cut. Needless to say Phomtong is at a loss to explain this, so he promises to straighten the matter out. He sends two more thugs to look into the matter. The Mafia likewise sends a man to check up on things.A Policeman who lives in the building happens upon the Mafia type. Guns are pulled and presto change-o, we have two more bodies littering Panyopas' apartment. She goes out and buys several more trunks to stash the bodies in. She decides that she should leave the country sharpish like. She always wanted to visit the UK.She needs a passport and a visa pronto like. She has heard of a place where an under the table passport and papers can be had for a price. It turns out that the establishment is a sideline of the boxing racket outfit. This of course will enter into play later on.Panyopas has the passport in the works, a ticket to London bought. Now all she needs to do is dispose of the stiffs. She enlists the help of her best friend, Tasanawalia Ongartittichai. Panyopas needs to borrow her pickup to move the corpses. She is going to dump them is a black water lake just out of town.While this is going on, the racket boss, Phomtong, has discovered that Panyopas is the one who has his cash. He details one of his henchmen to kill her if she returns to get the passport. He is going to a meeting with the Mafia boss at Panyopas' apartment building.Panyopas and her friend stop to grab the passport. Pal, Ongartittichai, is killed by the man assigned to kill Panyopas. Panyopas, who is by now is becoming used to bloodshed, in turn kills the gunman.Meanwhile, back at the ranch, er, apartment, the racket boss and the Mafia man are having a healthy dispute. Each is blaming the other over the missing cash. Guns are again produced and soon there are 6 more bodies piled up.Panyopas returns home to find the new stiffs. She has had enough. She pulls the cash from the hiding place where it was stashed, and hits the road. She takes the cash and dumps it all in the lake. It has caused her nothing but trouble. Panyopas then drives off to return to her country village. She has had enough of the big city.The misread apartment number bit has been used in several, mostly comedy films before. The story starts with a definite comic feel to it, but grows progressively darker as the film unwinds. The killing of Panyopas' friend, Ongartittichai, was particularly surprising. This is the kind of film one could see the likes of Quentin Tarantino or the Cohen Brothers making.I liked it.
ThurstonHunger
Rented this after definitely enjoying "Final Life in the Universe" also by director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. Please see that one first, if you enjoy it, then perhaps check this one out.This has trace stylish connections to the other, and there is enough cleverness throughout to make this worth watching, however I'm going to have to invoke a new rule that for every dead body a film loses 5 minutes of character depth. Indeed, corpses in films are just roles that the writer/director didn't care enough about to flesh out, and instead just flushed them down.The "comedy" here is meant to mingle in a way that I guess is vaguely connected to Tarantino, like QT there's enough tension and blood that some folks won't be able to see the mirth for the murder. Good dream and imagination sequences, and an excellent soundtrack (not just the songs, but the pure soundtrack as well). It was funny seeing a cassette player, in a critical role, I tried renting a car with one recently so I could play some books on tape. I had about as much luck as any given male character has of surviving in this film.The lead actress, evidently a soap opera star in Thailand, had a beguiling placidity, that really played well as a mouse who roars. The more I think about the film: the masquerading of the "Mafia" man, an excellent use of a mirror in a shot in a cafe, the shot through a keyhole, the symbol of Tum's killer coolness by way of a fly she traps in an ice drink, some of the lines (Jim's request for "just blood, no giblets" and whatever the manicure-to-brain-infection was all about), the more I like this. It's just a genre that I don't normally seek out...sure I'm as desensitized to death as the next guy, but I still am not crazy about seeing it. Nor having to sort of glide past implausibilities...(eg, death by vase to the head??).I think where "Final Life..." (aka "Ruang Rak Noi Nid Mahasan") succeeds better than this, is that the murder that occurs in that remains mysterious and never the focal point. Here the guarded nature of the lead actress, and left without a real confidante, limits any sort of insight into what she's actually going through. But again this is not an actual film, it is more a fantasy, and I prefer mine with little or no blood.Still, head and shoulders above so much other dreck, though I wonder if this is really seen as "Thai" cinema. IMDb shows that Pen-Ek spent some time in the US at Pratt Institute, clearly his years there and as an Art Director for other folks makes his silver screen cuisine more cosmopolitan with Thai seasoning than anything else.I also hate the US title, although it might be a jab at folks looking for another sort of Thai video altogether (something the director pokes at twice during the film). Since I can't quite see to giving this a 9, I guess I'll give it a 6/10PS On no...not a mandatory 'merican remakehttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427994/combined
mya_andaman
I had to watch this film too many times for a film studies course and by the end of the course I was so fed up with it. However, I do think it's a very interesting film...the way the story goes and the way it was made. It definitely is very different from other Thai movies and personally, I think that's why it never made it big in Thailand. I thought the editing was great and the filming technique makes it more realistic and closer to everyday life. Plus the plot surely suited the situations within the country at the time. As for the story I really liked the idea of how everything turned out the total opposite and upside down just cuz of the poorly attached room number "6". I never thought it would be showed in other countries, let alone it gaining foreign fans. I'm glad other people appreciate a small production Thai movie as much as I did.
rnekic
Although not one of the newer films, 69 turned out to be one of my favorites of this year's Cleveland International Film Festival. Funny and clever without veering into being overly wacky. You've seen this kind of set-up before but you've never seen such consequences! This is a top-notch black comedy.Possible spoiler below:
The film is vastly entertaining despite one nagging question that loomed in my head as I watched events unfold: Tum, the next time a million baht shows up on your doorstep - invest in a hammer and a nail! Poor girl, it could have spared you a lot of hassle!
