DATE: 3/25/2008 FIRST VIEWING
WHERE: at home, DVD from Blockbuster.
I had heard about this movie while trolling around reading about Thai/Asian cinema a while back…can’t remember where I first heard of it, but I do know I did read some info on Twitch
I tried to keep as uninformed as possible, and had been awaiting word of a DVD release for quite a while. Imagine my excitement when I saw that Dimension “Extreme” was releasing a region 1 DVD! I got the bug to see this and watched it about as soon as I could.
THE GOOD: premise of the game; lead actor’s performance
THE BAD: slightly disappointing last 15 minutes;
THE WONKY: the meal task…ugh; black humor that pops out occassionally
As a “contestant” in a seemingly harmless reality show…what would you do for money? The movie initially seems like it might be a gimmicky take on reality tv designed to disturb you…and on the surface, I suppose that it is. But, there are a lot of different things going on here, and while maybe all of the pieces don’t completely work, the whole of the movie and the meditations on a person’s motivations under different situations turns out to be pretty effective.
Basically, the protagonist has his quiet life quickly turn terrible, in a way that is completely believable, and relate-able. He doesn’t have a lot of money, and bills are slowly building up, and is only ok at his sales job, and all at once…his life is turned upside down as his job is lost, his car is taken away, he has to pay rent, owes a ton on credit cards, and his mom is asking for money. He quickly goes from being disaffected and apathetic to frantic…suffocating under his dire situation, with no clear way out.
Then his phone rings, and he is asked to play the game with 13 tasks he needs to complete in order to win up to 100 million bhat. The tasks are very simple at first, and you know that they are going to get rotten…you just know it…but what really works here is the fact that the movie focuses somewhat less on the actual tasks as it does on the character’s choices…how he weighs his morals against what is being asked of him. How far is he willing to go, and for how much money?
As Chit moves down the path, he is asked to do things that are degrading, or down right terrible, and in each case he has the choice to not do it…the game would end…he would have the money that he already earned, but couldn’t get any more. So how much money will satisfy him? He eventually gets to a point to where the question is…well, I’ve already done THIS…so it’s not that much worse to do THAT…why not?
The driving force is money (at least in his case)…and we watch as his soul is what is actually in question, what is getting tarnished. You wonder if the game is a sadistic exercise for those watching, or if it is an attempt to crush the soul of a human being.
What becomes interesting is towards the end it is suggested that the game is being played fairly widely. One of the people in charge of it mentions that most people have masks on, and once you remove those…EVERYONE is capable of terrible things…and once pretense is gone…when given the choice…they will choose awful things…what a horrible way to see human nature…but chilling in the truths of that statement. After that, one of the thoughts I had was “were some of the other people on Chit’s journey actually playing games themselves??” It sure seemed like it…which added an extra level of this existential outlook on humanity.
The ending to the game portion was a tad unsatisfying, although seeing that Chit retain some shred of decency was a bit refreshing in the face of everything that had gone on (and was seemingly going to continue). While not really plausible, a lot of the elements here were close enough to truth where you couldn’t quite shake it all off as “just a movie” and I constantly found myself wondering what I would do, and how far I might go…especially if someone knew my buttons, and how to push them.
7 out of 10
Filed under: 2006, March 2008, Rating - 7
