ong bak: the thai warrior – 4 stars

movies have been good to me this week. after the animation show, only a couple days later i planned on getting a bunch of the guys together and going to check out this excellent kung-fu movie, which i’d been looking forward to ever since i saw the crazy cool trailer a couple months ago. it was going to be a glorious night of extreme maleness: in-n-out burger, ass-kicking, and ideally with a beer-drinking wrap-up.

well, more than half of the normal crew was busy ‘working’, or going to ‘parties’ or ‘birthdays’ or ‘washing their panties’ or something, so it ended up just being me and my buddy ted, but you know what, the fact that an objective party may have perceived it as a man-date couldn’t stop us. we went. the fact that some weird loser with a headband and goatee thought that in-n-out burger was an american idol audition, singing some R&B hits, possibly of his own creation, couldn’t stop us. we chowed those burgers. and it was worth it, because when that movie started and that skinny asian dude began beating all manner of hell out of everyone that came near him, both of us joined the rest of the crowd in cheering loudly and enjoying every unbelievable minute. i mean kill bill, house of flying daggers, that stuff is amazing. but that stuff is also imagination. here, we’re talking about someone with a jaw-dropping physical talent that the camera can only hope to capture in a way that does it justice. so if you don’t live in LA or NY and can’t get to one of the whopping two places in town showing this, do yourself a favor and write down the name, and wait for netflix to save the day. sure, the plot is kinda silly and there isn’t a lot of ‘acting’, so much as blows to the head. but since when does that really matter to the real beef-eating action fan?

as a matter of fact, i was so satisfied by the high-flying beatdowns that when ted and i went to a bar afterward, we didn’t even worry about being surrounded by tall douchebags hitting on girls in tanktops. we sat at the bar, drank our scotch, ignored two girls that were standing right next to us for about 10 minutes, and talked about kung fu and money. sometimes you have to forget about distractions and focus on the priorities, you know?