Pad Thai Bride

Here's another review that I didn't write, because I'm not going to bother seeing this movie. The review of Jao Sao Pad Thai (Pad Thai Bride), is from an article by Kong Rithdee in the Bangkok Post, taking the Thai movie industry to task for churning out two stinkers.Here it is:

Two weeks after the euphoric triumph of a Siamese movie at Cannes, a couple of Thai films opened last Friday to testify to the reality of our local cinema. Jao Sao Pad Thai (Pad Thai Bride) and Choo (The Sin) are a duo of uninspired attempts to stage a coup on the audience's gullibility. Out and out commercial flicks, the former uses a series of unbecoming street ads to make sure the people know it is a silly comedy, while the latter opts for a pseudo-arthouse motif, with a swirl of montages and a curious, obviously unauthorised logo of Cannes Film Festival.

They say critics are harsh on "commercial movies". But like I've already said in this space a dozen times, there are good commercial movies and bad commercial movies. Likewise, silly entertainment could either be more entertaining than silly, or vice versa.

Pad Thai, the second work from critic-turned-director Mongkolchai Chaiwisut, suffers greatly from its poor script and the clumsy attempt to coax big jokes out of a preposterous situation; even Thep Po-ngam, the great artist of Thai farce who normally cracks the defence of every high-minded viewer, cannot rescue this collection of scattered, underwhelming gags. Sexy starlet Napakprapa "Mamee" Nakprasit isn't cut out to carry a comedy, and her role as a chef who promises to marry a man who can eat her pad thai consecutively for 100 days is simply infantile.

Mongkolchai's first movie, Girls' Friends, showed that he has a nice touch when the subject is close to his heart. But with Pad Thai, the director mounts a half-baked idea, and the whole thing seems artificial, as if he's not making a movie that he himself wants to see, but that he thinks the audiences want to see. Comedy is what all Thais crave, but with the television swamped with crude, though at times witty, comedy shows, are Thai filmmakers running out of ideas to score a big laugh on the big screen?

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