by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo
I don't know how I find entertainment. It just seems to fall into my lap.
Take the movie "Ong Bak," a product of Thailand that recently traversed the Pacific to become a legendary flea-market hit.
I have no idea how I came to see this movie, but once I did, I wanted to see every other movie that star Tony Jaa had ever been involved in. Forget Jet Li's disappointing ventures into film, or Jackie Chan and his next Chris Tucker movie. Jaa is the guy to watch.
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"Ong Bak" is a fighting movie like no other. Jaa is a master of the ancient art of Muay Thai, a fighting style famous for using the knees and elbows to take down attackers. What does this translate into? In his first fight of the movie, Jaa sticks up his knee and puts it right through his opponent's throat.
His character is supposed to be conflicted about using his martial arts skills, but this lasts a total of about five seconds. From about the 15th minute of the movie, the fight scenes barely stop. The movie advertises that it uses no strings, no computers, no stunt doubles and no special effects - just actors striking actors in the sternum with their knees, as they did in Shakespeare's time.
This is exactly the way martial arts movies should be made. The plot, though mildly important, is mainly there to set up cool fights. If the plot can't sustain so much fighting, add more fights anyway - it doesn't really matter.
In the case of "Ong Bak," Jaa is forced to travel from his remote village to Bangkok in order to retrieve the head of a sacred Buddha statue. This leads to, among other things, fighting a mob of 30 angry teenagers with knives. Whether or not the scene is absolutely necessary in terms of the story, the director still needed a way to include a shot of Jaa sliding, while doing the splits, under a moving 18-wheeler.
So you're left with a choice - either go watch "The English Patient" and cry into an empty pint of ice cream, or skip the emotional stuff and go straight to what really hurts - which is getting an elbow to the temple.
The movie doesn't stop with breaking bones, though. In a particularly creative scene, Jaa is forced to fight a man whose strategy is to break everything and anything at hand over his opponent's head. As long as you're making a martial arts film, there's no reason to go for subtlety. So the way I see it, a significant portion of a film's greatness has to depend on the total weight of objects destroyed. It's not all about blood loss, after all.
Luckily, producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, in their attempt to have an executive producer's credit in a billion movies by the time they die, chose to pick up Jaa's next movie, "The Protector." The film will be distributed Sept. 8. This film is written and directed by the same man who brought us "Ong Bak," which hopefully means it is just as exciting.
The story this time around is about a man who must go to Australia to retrieve two elephants stolen from the king of Thailand. Sounds fine to me, as long as the elephants are guarded by henchmen - some inexperienced and useless, others big and scary.
In any case, it's sure to be a great movie. Jaa is unlike any fighter you've ever seen. He makes real martial arts movies for true fans of the genre, so hopefully we're just witnessing the beginning of something really big here.
