Chocolate

I'd had Chocolate in my Netflix Instant Queue for a good long while, collecting dust.  Well, virtual dust, anyway; that's like real dust, only with less dead skin and insect poop, and probably more memes.  I like the occasional martial arts movie and this was directed by Prachya Pinkaew, who has handled the two best Tony Jaa movies, but I was just never in the mood for what appeared to be a kung-fu chick flick.  And then I read this article from Cracked.com.  While I have loved Ricky-Oh: The Story of Ricki and The Crippled Masters for years, I had no idea that Chocolate was such a conceptual gold mine!  I mean, really --- mental retardation as a martial art skill?  What's not to love?  I mean, aside from a fundamental (and probably intentional) misunderstanding about mental handicaps and their repercussions.

Chocolate is, as the title implies, the story of a sweet piece that gives people pleasure when they pop it in their mouth.

On an unrelated note, image searches for this film rank this picture pretty highly

Actually, Chocolate is the story of Zen (JeeJa Yanin), who is not to be confused with an Intergalactic Ninja who starred in his own NES/GBA game and comic book.  Zen is the result of a star-crossed romance worthy of Shakespeare (or the corresponding Thai knock-off).  When her mother, a Thai gang enforcer/gangster moll named Zin (Ammara Siripong), fell in love with Masashi (Hiroshi Abe), a Japanese Yakuza boss, she knew that their romance couldn't last.

Much like the allure of her huge gang tattoo

Zin's criminal boss, Number 8 (Pongpat Wachirabunjong), is incredibly jealous and very territorial.  While I'm not 100% sure that Zin was his girlfriend, Number 8 makes it clear that he will not stand for their love.  To give them an idea of how crazy he is, Number 8 shoots his own toe off his foot; I guess the idea was something along the lines of "If I am willing to this to myself, imagine the toes I will shoot off you!"  After breaking up with Masashi, Zin quits her gangster ways and devotes herself to raising her Thai-Japanese love child, Zen.  The girl turns out to be rather "special," though.  I would say that Zen's behavior puts her on the autism spectrum, but that's selling this plot short; Zen exhibits a variety of mental illness symptoms, until they become a hindrance to an action scene, at which point they are generally ignored.  So, yes, I am aware that autism is different than mental disability/retardation/illness, but nobody told the writers of this movie.  Zen grows up, gains a best friend/creepy kid that is always hanging around her, named Mang Moom...

"Would it be less creepy if I told you I was manipulating her?"

...and the audience sees what makes Zen so special.  Thanks to Zen's mental disability, she can learn anything, as long as she's seen it done before.  Riding a bike?  Easy.  Kung-fu practice?  Done.  Tony Jaa and Bruce Lee moves?  Hmm...I wonder if that talent will come into play here?  That might not make an ounce of sense in the real world, but apparently this movie takes place in a universe where autism gives you high-end martial arts abilities.  Anyways, Zin is sick.  It's probably cancer, and she doesn't have the money to pay for treatment.  Mang Moom finds an old memo book of Zin's, which shows a list of people who owe her money.  Of course, Moom knows that no tough gangster-type person is going to willingly hand money off to a pudgy kid that really ought to be in school.  That's why he brings along Zen.  It's kind of like bringing a knife to a gun fight, but if you replaced "knife" with "handicapped girl" and "gun fight" with "any fight, whatsoever."  Oddly enough, it worked.

She brought a kick to the face to a jumping contest

Zen was able to kick some ass and take home money for her mom.  Meanwhile, Number 8 and Masashi both noticed Zen's success, and each takes steps to finish her quest, one way or the other.

In my mind, any discussion of the acting and direction of Chocolate is missing the point.  This is a movie about a mentally handicapped girl who --- as a direct result of being mentally handicapped --- became a master of the martial arts.  It's essentially Rookie of the Year, only with "baseball" and "arm injury" being replaced by "kung fu" and "developmental disability."  Let me put it another way: are you the sort of person who can laugh at The Crippled Masters?  Or perhaps your favorite episode of South Park is the "Cripple Fight" episode?

Cripple Fight
Get More: SOUTH
PARKmore...

If that's the case, then you will definitely enjoy Chocolate.  In fact, you should rent it the next time you need to make a Schlitz run.  If, on the other hand, you think laughing at autism will give you a "Go Directly to Hell" card, then you might not want to take a pass.

Hell is for children...to kick your ass

If you can get beyond the basic idiocy/brilliance of the core concept of Chocolate, though, there are several points of interest.  First and foremost, JeeJa Yanin is pretty damn impressive in the film's action scenes.  The primary fight style is inspired by Muay Thai; if you can imagine a young girl kneeing people in the face, then you've got a decent idea of the action in the movie.  Thanks to Zen's ability to mimic anything she sees, though, there are moments where the fighting style shifts noticeably. 

This scene was obviously inspired by Bruce Lee.  No joke.

That's a pretty cool way to change things up.  It helps that Yanin is also a very small girl, so her acrobatics also added some unusual spice to this genre flick.

The villains are also pretty entertaining.  While I would hesitate to call any acting in the film "good," the bad guys were consistently nonsensical and over the top.  Number 8 was the main baddie, but he wasn't all that weird.  His transvestite second-in-command, though, was hilariously ugly.  I would post a picture of him/her, but doing a Google image search for "chocolate movie transvestite" proved to be rather unpleasant.  My favorite bad guys were the mini-bosses.  The basic setup for any scene has Zen going to a group of meat/fish/pig/box packers and demanding the money owed to her mom, the bad guys laugh and refuse, and Zen kicks all their asses.  One of the guys holding the money flat-out dared Zen to take the money from him; when she beats the shit out of everyone in the warehouse, the same guy whines about her overreacting.  I had to pause the movie there until I was finished laughing.

Another thing Chocolate does well is introducing unintentionally funny conceptual moments.  This doesn't include the core concept of kung-fu-autism, mind you.  Let's take Zen's buddy, Mang Moom, as an example.  I can ignore the logic of treating Zen as a street performer whose talent is to catch what you throw at her.  I can ignore the shock of seeing his character (remember, he's a child) on the receiving end of a gunshot wound.  Both of those are kind of unintentionally funny.  Or terrible.  Whatever.  What was fantastic about his character, though, is when he is offered candy by the evil killer transvestite and is specifically told to give it to Zen --- and he does!  Even better, the candy is poisoned!  There is just so much gold in that simple idea, I just don't know what to do with it all!  First and foremost, giving a fat kid chocolate candy and expecting him not to eat it, especially if nobody else knows about it, is a pretty terrible start to any evil plan.  But what kid takes candy from a stranger...and saves it for someone else?!?  It's not like Zen would have known anything was missing, because she's shown as nearly oblivious to everything.  Also, if you're a creepy killer trannie, you might want to have a middle man offer the kid the candy in the first place; kids are stupid, but even they keep their distance from obviously creepy folk.  Unless, of course, they happen to be named Mang Moom.

Please tell me she's practicing this move for Moom

Prachya Pinkaew did a decent job balancing the action and story in Chocolate.  There are rarely stretches without action of some kind, and I think that is the best way to make a movie like this.  The action choreography was varied and impressive, but it wasn't fantastic.  Beautiful?  Yes.  Worth rewinding immediately after seeing?  Not so much.  The problem isn't with JeeJa Yanin, who looked about as tough as a teenage Asian girl can look.  The scenes were just not gory.  This is a martial arts movie where the main hero fails to kill most of her foes.  They're using all sorts of weapons, but she just beats them down and then makes the rounds to make sure nobody is getting back up.  In theory, there is nothing wrong with that.  In fact, it might have been downright unsettling to see Yanin massacring people on the big screen.  And yet the lack of awesome (or any) finishing moves undermines one of the main pleasures found in martial arts movies.

Don't get me wrong, this can be an entertaining movie, as evidenced by the above clip.  The action is pretty cool and there is the added bonus of another mentally-handicapped-but-violently-blessed character to add another layer to Chocolate's ridiculousness.  It's fun and totally worth watching, but it's not bad-ass and it's not a classic.  Unless, as I've pointed out before, you're going to Hell and you want to laugh on your way down.  As a legit film, Chocolate deserves...

 But if you're in the mood to laugh at a modern martial arts movie that actually has solid action, this deserves a Lefty Gold rating of...

Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior

With the popular rising of MMA fighting in the US, it's not too surprising that we have found an actor that specializes in some of the more exotic MMA styles.  Tony Jaa's breakout role was this, Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (sometimes subtitled "The Muay Thai Warrior"), and it is all about showing off what Tony Jaa can do.

The plot isn't terribly deep.  Ting (Jaa) lives in the backwards boonies of Thailand, in a poor, tiny village.  When the village Buddha statue (called Ong-Bak, for reasons never explained to Westerners) has its head stolen by some outsiders, Ting volunteers to retrieve it.  Ting is has had extensive martial arts training, but he has chosen not to use it for his own gain.  That's right...this is yet another martial arts movie where the resident bad-ass is reluctant to fight (for the first half hour).  Ting heads to the big city to find Ong-Bak's head, but he doesn't know the first thing about city life; he does know who stole the head and he has the address for a former villager, Humlae, that came to the city and never returned home.  Ting finds Humlae, who now goes by the name of George (Petchtai Wongkamlao), has dyed his hair blonde, and is a small-time grifter.  After some gambling hijinks from George, Ting ends up in an underground fight, where he knocks out the current champion with only one hit --- a knee to the face.  This angers a local crime lord, who was betting on the champion.  The rest of the film has Ting being somewhat reluctant to fight until he and George can no longer outrun George's creditors/George's grift victims/the crime lord's thugs.

There's not much plot, but that's okay.  This is a movie clearly centered around the action sequences, and there are a lot of them.  Ting has four or five official boxing matches, and they're all decently cool.  Each opponent, of course, has a unique style of fighting that Ting has to overcome, so nothing gets repetitive.  I was less impressed with the rest of the movie's action.  There was an extended chase sequence that, while impressive, was waaay too long and had no real payoff.  That segued into an auto rickshaw chase, which was the dumbest thing I've seen in a foreign movie in years.  These things top out at around 30mph --- that's not an exciting life-or-death race to watch.  Even with the lame chase scenes, Tony Jaa is very impressive.  There was no wire fighting or special effects used in this movie, so that's really Jaa doing all those things.  Of course, a little bit of special effects wouldn't have hurt; in his fights, the opponents often look like they are waiting to get hit, instead of looking like they are fighting.  The good news is that, if you see something cool in the movie once, you will see it again.  The bad news is that the reason you see it again is because they do a slow-motion replay, not because they packed the movie with action awesomeness.  Here's a taste, but beware that this clip features terrible dubbing (go with the subtitles, trust me) and a little bit of naughty language:

With good (if flawed) action and not much plot, attention naturally turns to the acting and directing.  Tony Jaa isn't much of an actor, but he stayed within the range of his talents here.  What does that mean?  Well, let's just say that looking confused or angry is about as good as I think his acting will get.  Petchtai Wongkamlao, who is apparently a big deal in Thailand, was very annoying as George.  Wongkamlao was there as comic relief, kind of like Rob Schneider in Knock Off, and was every bit as obnoxious as that sounds.  I get it, they needed a normal person to try the same stunts that Jaa was doing and show how insanely difficult they are, but Wongkamlao was hammier than Miss Piggy.  The rest of the actors ranged from annoying (George's grifitng partner) to just odd (the Asian afro ninja), but most fit the movie fine.  Prachya Pinkaew directed the film and clearly knows how to film action scenes.  The movie looks very cheap, though; I don't know if their film stock was inexpensive, or if they used a low-rent digital camera or what, but this looks like a movie that was made for the direct-to-DVD market of the late 90s.  While Pinkaew was able to capture a lot of Jaa looking awesome, the grainy quality of the footage is distracting.  As the director, he could have helped make those action scenes better by having the anonymous thugs do less standing around, waiting to be hit, and more pseudo-fighting.  But he didn't.

For what it is, Ong-Bak is a decent movie.  It knows that you don't care about the plot, so neither does it.  There are a lot of cool moves, and they are played back in slow-motion so you don't have to fuss with your remote.  How convenient.  This is just a B-movie, though.  Jaa is clearly an action star, even in his first role, and that elevates this movie above the rest of the cheaply-made martial arts films coming out of Asia today, and it is beyond refreshing to see a post-Crouching Tiger martial arts movie that is free of wire-fu.  While this isn't a great movie by any means, the quality of Jaa's moves is enough to make it worth viewing.

Hilariously, when this movie was released in Europe, they replaced the original Thai score with some French hip-hop sounds.  This music video is a bonus feature on the DVD, and it is AWESOME.