Soi Cowboy

I watched this film in Pattaya, Thailand and disappointed I cannot get it in a zone 0 or 1 format to watch in the USA. The film is so full of everyday Thailand that anyone who has spent time there will understand. Awfully cheap for the dowry to marry, my wife wanted 1 million baht thai currency). The black and white is so Thailand, cheap and gritty. The bad part is that people who have not spent time in Thailand will not understand it. The surprise ending is fantastic. Can't wait until I can buy a copy, will look in Thailand next trip. Well worth the time in the theater although my Thai wife still doesn't understand it and cannot believe the part of the dowry was in the film.

Well done, congratulations!

What is the point with this movie? Just having the end in mind, I really do not get it .What first of all starts off as a simple relationship between a thai lady and a westerner, that drags me along to see if there is something new on this topic, then there is nothing, and yet still ends real bizarre and out of touch with any of that! There is NONE whatsoever connection between the different parts that gives us any direction whats the point .You might as well close your eyes, and start imagining any story you like .The communication between the westerner and the thai is limited to an absolute minimum .It is merely a silent movie .So we do not get any smarter on whats the whole take on this movie .I mean the end that I do not understand how can be anyhow related to any storyline in it, should somehow create the base for whats the whole point of the movie .Since endings are for movies what punchlines are for jokes! The end is so far out ...its a joke ...

Well, first of all this movie does not have a punchline .Second of all its not even a joke ...

This film concerns a Scandinavian gentleman who works in film, perhaps as a sort of financier/director/producer. He lives in Thailand with his Thai girlfriend, and most of the film is an exploration of that relationship. We also see her brother, and a gangster that he works for.

I think there's some films where you really have to provide health warnings. Soi Cowboy, although I absolutely loved it, is a film that few will appreciate, even many film buffs and art-house lovers, simply for reasons of mise-en-scène let alone content (includes full frontal male nudity).

There is, for example, a very long static scene, which consists of an old lady, who is not part of the storyline at all, slowly shuffling down an empty hotel corridor on a Zimmer frame, that makes the arrival of the trailer in Werckmeister Harmonies feel positively explosive by comparison. You have to approach scenes like that with the same amount of contemplation you give a painting, they are that long because it takes that long to absorb what is happening, assuming that you are aware that you have to make that effort. Director Clay put me in mind of that woman's stoicism, her aloneness, her acceptance, and her confusion. This is blue ribband humanism. It is also, without a doubt, springing from extreme virtuosity. If you are not utterly inured to "active watching", you will find yourself taking a beating watching this movie and such scenes.

If you have any sort of intolerance problems regarding obesity, and let's face it, that's the majority of people, you will have a lot of difficulty watching the obese lead, from whom we see full frontal nudity and at one point masturbation (under a bed cover).

The movie somersaults styles, you have really formal, and even abstract, rail-smoothed black and white pans, and then at other times we're static, or the film goes to hand-held and colour. Sometimes the scenes are slow, later quick, it really is a totally acrobatic movie. An analogy that occurs to me is three-day eventing, you have to see the dressage, the cross-country, and then the show jumping. Very different disciplines, just like the three sections of this movie.

Not only is the film profoundly humanistic, but it's also mystical (for example the scene with the butterfly), and at the end, depending on your interpretation, just downright Lynchian. The ending also has a much more down-to-earth interpretation, but I really feel that the duality is important, and that you can get something out of either way of looking at the ending. So my suggestion is to accept the duality. Although the film is humanistic, British viewers (the film is made by a Brit), may well come at it from a prejudicial standpoint, as there is a lot of baggage regarding sex tourism in Thailand in this country.

Another of the laundry list of potential stumbling blocks is that the first forty minutes of the film are so superficially banal that almost everyone would turn off or walk out if they suspected that such a state of affairs were to last until the film's end. You could be mistaken for thinking that this part of the film looks amateurish. That would be because of the lack of lighting used, in favour of a naturalistic look. In fact this section of the film works much better in retrospect, when you have the other elements in mind.

There's a lot of comment on culture clash. At one point Toby buys Koi a gold chain. Koi wants to know how much it costs. In the Western European bourgeois culture of Toby, such a question is an affront; but it isn't coming from Koi. When you live in a culture where there is no safety net, jewellery is a store of liquid value for emergencies, the sentimental value is inseparable from that. Understanding that Thai women value providers a lot more than western women is also quite difficult.

The level of experimentation gives me real hope for cinema. I just can't believe how beautiful the film became after the initial (necessary) ennui. There are scenes where Toby and Koi visit some temple ruins that just staggered me; when the visit is over and the gates are locked, the view floats through the darkened temple park, apropos of nothing, absolutely nothing, there for art's sake alone, storytelling be damned; a moped ride in the countryside reveals an absolute riot of green cascading from right to left across the screen, pure painterly skills being showcased; a simple solitary dinner on a boat captivates, our oddball couple alienated, communicating through a language that is not the first language of either of them, even disliking the food and disputing with the staff. But there's a heartbreaking kernel of affection there.

Wow, this is without a doubt the worst movie I have ever had to suffer through. Not only is the first 80 minutes of it shot in black and white - yeah, black and white! - but there was also very little dialogue in the movie.

This movie was mostly about watching an estranged couple, consisting on an obese white man and a pregnant Thai woman sitting around in a small apartment in Bangkok doing each their own stuff and without talking together. It was like watching something shot out from an actual life experience of a boring couple.

I watched most of the movie on fast forward x32 speed. I kid you not. There was that little happening in 90% of all the scenes throughout the movie. It was all just a lot of prolonged footage of scenes that could have been told better in color and in half the time.

Sure this is a pseudo artsy movie, but come on. Enough is enough. This movie was just too much.

Dealing with issues such as Westerners traveling to Thailand to find love, and the complexity and problems that might follow in the wake given the differences between cultures. But it was done with too much of everything. I am from Denmark myself, and have been married to a Chinese and now with one from the Philippines. So I can relate to aspects of the movie, but I doubt that this movie in any way express life situations for any couple in general. The movie was just downright boring and dragged on in shots that were too long.

The only good thing I found about the movie, well two things given the cheap price for it on Amazon's marketplace, was Danish actor Nicolas Bro was in this movie. Personally I don't count myself a fan of his work, but it was a bold move for him to do this particular movie.

I am sure there is an audience out there for this particular movie and this particular weird genre of movies - especially since it can score a 5.9 score here on IMDb. But, personally, I wasn't in that audience, and I have never been so bored with a movie as I was with this one. This is without a doubt a 1 out of 10 rating from me.