ONG-BAK concludes BAMcinématek series honoring the last ten years of Magnolia Pictures
ONG-BAK: THE THAI WARRIOR (Prachya Pinkaew, 2003)
BAMcinématek
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Wednesday, August 31, 4:30 & 9:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.ongbakmovie.com
When this film first came out, there was a huge push under way to make Tony Jaa the next martial arts action hero, following in the footsteps of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li. It’s going to take a much better vehicle than this silly, repetitive, unimaginative film for the Thai warrior to make a name for himself. Jaa stars as Ting, a young country villager who has learned the contemplative ways of Muay Thai from his master, Pra Cru (Woranard Tantipidok), a Buddhist who once killed a man during a rope fight. When bad boy Don (Wannakit Siriput) steals the head of Ong Bak, the town’s deity, Ting heads to the big city of Bangkok to get it back, hoping he won’t have to use his massive physical skills. There the quiet fish out of water meets George (Thai comic Petchthai Wongkamlao), a former villager who has changed his name and hangs out with minor-league gangsters and gamblers in his quest to make lots of dough. In order for Ting to get close to those who have Ong Bak, George brings him to a fight-club-like dungeon where Ting must either battle ridiculously overwrought cartoon-like characters or return to his village with just his tail between his legs. Ong-Bak has a good heart and means well, which makes it more difficult to point out how intrinsically inane it is, amateurish, barely at the level of the worst of Jackie Chan, sort of a Karate Kid 7 meets Gymkata 3 by way of Don “the Dragon” Wilson’s Bloodfist XII. There was a lot of hoopla back in 2003 surrounding Jaa because all of his stunts in the film are genuine — there are no wires, CG special effects, or trick camera angles. While that does make for some fun individual scenes, it does not hold up in a lame story that lasts a very long hundred minutes. Director Prachya Pinkaew did a lot better with his 2008 martial arts movie, Chocolate, starring the awesome Yanin “Jeeja” Vismistananda. Ong-Bak is screening August 31 at 4:30 & 9:30 at BAM, concluding the “10 Years of Magnolia Pictures” series, which also included Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson, Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us, James Gray’s Two Lovers, and other cool flicks from the great indie house.
Craig Zobel’s debut feature film is a smart, subtle comedy set in the somewhat shadier corners of the music industry. Desperately in need of money and jobs, soft-spoken Martin (Pat Healy) and rambunctious Clarence (Kene Holliday) become traveling salesmen for GWS, a small music company that auditions wannabes, then asks them to pay (up front) upwards of thirty percent of the costs of producing their own CD. As Martin and Clarence get better and better at their sales pitch, they become more and more suspicious of the whole endeavor as they are ordered by company founder Layton (Robert Longstreet) and his right-hand man, Shank (John Baker), to sign up the hopefuls regardless of their talent level. Using the Maysles brothers’ outstanding documentary Salesman (1969) as a point of departure, Zobel adds the public’s seemingly insatiable demand for reality-show stardom — all of the musical performers in the film believed they were auditioning to make records, not appearing in a fiction film, resulting in a series of wonderful unscripted scenes. (The filmmakers revealed their true intentions at the end of each audition.) Healy (Undertow) and Holliday (who starred in such TV shows as Matlock and Carter Country and is now an evangelical minister) make a great team, both in good times and bad, as they each attempt to better their life — much the way the wannabe musicians try to as well. Great World of Sound is a terrific sleeper of a film that was a festival hit all over the world. It is screening August 31 at 6:50 at BAM as the last film in the “10 Years of Magnolia Pictures” series and will be followed by a Q&A with Zobel. 
Winner of the 1972 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is a sharp, cynical skewering of the European power structure, taking on the high-falutin’ hypocrisy of the government, the military, religion, and, primarily, the wealthy class in hysterical vignettes that center around a group of rich friends trying to sit down and enjoy a meal. But every time they get close, they are ultimately thwarted by miscommunication, a corpse, army maneuvers, terrorists, and, perhaps most bizarrely, fake stage chicken. Buñuel regular Fernando Rey is a hoot as Rafael Acosta, the cocaine-dealing ambassador of Miranda who doesn’t take insults well. Stéphane Audran and Jean-Pierre Cassel play the Sénéchals, a lustful couple desperate to finish a romantic rendezvous even as their guests wait, Julien Bertheau is the local bishop who moonlights as a gardener, Claude Piéplu is an erudite colonel not afraid to share his opinion at a haughty cocktail party, and Maria Gabriella Maione is a sexy stranger who might or might not be a revolutionary after Acosta. Meanwhile, Acosta doesn’t mind making a play for Simone Thévenot (Delphine Seyrig) right under her husband’s (Paul Frankeur) nose. And Ines (Milena Vukotic), one of the Sénéchals’ maids, watches it all with a wonderfully subtle disdain. As if the first half of the film were not surreal enough, the second half includes a series of riotous dream sequences involving ghostly apparitions and a bit of the old ultra-violence, either outwardly related by characters or as cinematic surprises dished out by the masterful Buñuel.
Akira Kurosawa’s thrilling police procedural, Stray Dog, is one of the all-time-great film noirs. When newbie detective Murakami (Toshirō Mifune) gets his Colt lifted on a bus, he thinks he will be fired if he does not get it back. But as he searches for it, he discovers that it is being used in a series of robberies and murders that he feels responsible for. Teamed with seasoned veteran Sato (Takashi Shimura), Murakami risks his career — and his life — as he tries desperately to track down his gun before it is used again. Kurosawa makes audiences sweat as postwar Japan is in the midst of a heat wave, with Murakami, Sato, prostitute Harumi Namiki (Keiko Awaji), and others constantly mopping their brows, dripping wet. Inspired by the novels of Georges Simenon, Stray Dog is a dark, intense drama shot in creepy black and white by Asakazu Nakai and featuring a jazzy soundtrack by Fumio Hayasaka that unfortunately grows melodramatic in a few key moments — and oh, if only that final scene had been left on the cutting-room floor. Stray Dog will be screening on August 27 at Symphony Space as part of the “Kurosawa” series, consisting of special presentations of the master’s films shown on the big screen in HD for the first time ever; the series concludes August 28 with Rashomon.
