Chocolate [Thai]

Chocolate (ช็อคโกแลต), a review, review2 from someone who watched it at the premiere in Bangkok, is a 2008 Thai martial arts movie; it's also the first Thai movie I've ever watched. It stars Nicharee Yanin "Jeeja" Vismistananda, Ammara Siripong, Hiroshi Abe, and Pongpat Wachirabunjong. The synopsis is as follows (taken from here, which also has the movie trailer):

‘Chocolate’ stars newcomer Nicharee “Jeeja” Vismistananda as an autistic girl who learns how to fight both by absorbing her martial arts skills from what she sees on TV and from the Muay thai boxing school next to her home. When she finds a list of debtors in her sick mother’s diary, she decides to go collecting. Her quest leads her to confrontations with criminal gangs and also her father, a member of the Japanese mafia.

First off, I like organised crime organisations - not that I want to join one or anything. I just like watching the interactions, not to mention they usually involve butt-kicking. This movie had that. Another factor that lured me in was I had never watched a Thai movie before. I have a couple of Thai friends and my hair cutter person is ethnic Chinese who was born in Thailand, but I guess I never got around to it. Another interesting thing is that Hiroshi Abe was in it and I wanted to see how his Thai was (never mind the fact that I don't know how it's supposed to be). Ah yes, I'm also really big on medical conditions and the main character is diagnosed with autism. A really big thing that led me to this movie, however, was a friend who was at Hollywood Video and saw the DVD cover of Chocolate and decided we looked alike with his other friend who was with him, then proceeded to send the picture to me with the caption "I didn't know you acted in movies." O_o The cover had those usual quotes from that basically told me it was a martial arts flick and I saw the really strange title: Chocolate. I looked it up online and it got pretty good reviews and so the hunt began.

First off, the "English" subtitles were really bad, even though it was supposedly ripped off a DVD. Thing is, the English was all grammatically wrong and I swear that half the time, instead of English, there would be Mandarin Chinese pinyin. Good thing I know pinyin. After I got over the horrendous subs, it was great. :) The plot's pretty sweet (Possible spoilers: The girl's mom has a relationship with the dad who's a member of the yakuza, then because of her mom's jealous mobster boyfriend, tells the dad to return to Japan. They still exchange letters. The jealous ex tries to get back at her while the mom is diagnosed with cancer so the girl and her adoptive brother goes out to collect money from people who owed a debt to their mom in order to get enough money for treatment. Then there's the showdown "battle" at the end where her dad shows up just in time for and they meet for the first time.) and the fighting that goes on is neat. I mean those noises and the scene at the meat butchery?? ^_^ Either way, I definitely enjoyed this movie. It had action AND a plot. Not to mention the butt-kicker is FEMALE and according to all the butt-kicking I saw, she knows her stuff.

While the captions roll, there are behind the scene clips that show you how the action scenes led to a good amount of injuries all around. They earn my respect and attention. I wonder if it's a common thing for Thai action movies...

This is actually not available streaming online (I know, 'cause I checked and I was THIS CLOSE to buying it online but I ended up not - I hate the shipping and handling) so I ended up downloading the torrent here. I also had a problem with the subs playing until I downloaded VobSub, then it worked perfectly - well, at least there were subs though they could have been better...

Picture taken from here.