สนับสนุนโดย สำนักงานศิลปวัฒนธรรมร่วมสมัย กระทรวงวัฒนธรรม Supported by Office of Contemporary Art And Culture ,Ministry Of Culture

˹éÒáá
¢èÒÇ
ÇÔ¨Òóì
ÊÑÁÀÒɳì
º·¤ÇÒÁ¾ÔàÈÉ
ÃÒ§ҹ˹ѧä·Âã¹à·È¡ÒÅ˹ѧµèÒ§æ
ÃÒª×èÍ˹ѧÊ×ÍáÅк·¤ÇÒÁà¡ÕèÂǡѺ˹ѧä·Â
ÃÒª×èÍ ·ÕèÍÂÙè ˹èǧҹ
 
ÃÒª×èÍ˹ѧà¡èÒ
 
 
 
 

   

“Easy Rider: That Sounds Good Goes Places but Reaches Nowhere”

  Sorradithep Supachanya / 25 June 2010
   
 

 

That Sounds Good must have been a fun movie to make—the cast and crew traveled throughout Southeast Asia and China to capture the landscape and the moments that can inspire the world explorers in us. But with a lack of character development and a flawed story that meanders through random stops, this movie is as much fun to watch.

Great road movies are often about the journey to oneself. The protagonists must leave home and travel great distances to learn something about the world, or about themselves. The three leads in That Sounds Good achieve neither. Though they trek through Indochina, fall in love, and fall out of love, in the end they return home not any wiser for their experience. They only get lucky.

The movie begins with a caravan of four-wheelers crossing the Mekhong to embark on their month-long exhibition across Laos, Vietnam, and China. Somchoon (Monthon Jira), a caravan organizer, is joined by two unlikely companions: hard-of-hearing Soontree (Rattanarat Uetaweekul) and blind-as-a-bat Ter (Ramita Mahapruekpong). The girls’ physical limitations lead them to mistake Somchoon’s otherwise harmless words and actions as an expression of his romantic interest in them. What follows is a series of somewhat comically awkward moments that almost ruin the trip and threaten the girls’ friendship.

 

 

Like many of the director Leo Kittikorn’s eccentric heroes (the tango-dancing female mafia gang in Bullet Wives, or the personification of karma in red Nike shoes in Ahimsa), Soontree and Ter are characters that amplify those human flaws that are among the causes of our troubles. In this case, they represent our wishful thinking tendency with which we spin things out of context to serve our narcissistic agenda. Soontree is hard of hearing and Ter cannot see well, yet both convince themselves of Somchoon’s love when it does not exist.

But character development seems to stop there. The girls hold on to their convictions for much of the plot, and then come to their realizations and acceptance far too quickly. Somchoon, a potentially interesting character, looks perplexed most of the time until near the end when he inexplicably becomes a changed man. His coterie of travel companions should have been his mentors; instead, they choose to be passive bystanders.

The plot crawls as the three leads confuse one another with reality versus expectation. The hard-of-hearing girl’s insistence on others repeating their sentences multiple times certainly does not help speeding up the plot. Towards the end, the story suddenly accelerates and arrives at a crowd-pleasing conclusion without paying much attention to the journey. But as the wise words go, “the road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same; yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.”

That Sounds Good could have been many things: a romantic comedy, a road movie, a drama about suffering of unrequited love. Or, all three. Now, that sounds good to me.

   
   

Everything you want to know about Thai film, Thai cinema
edited by Anchalee Chaiworaporn อัญชลี ชัยวรพร   designed by Nat  
COPYRIGHT 2004 http://www.thaicinema.org. All Rights Reserved. contact: ancha999 at gmail.com
By accessing and browsing the Site, you accept, without limitation or qualification, these copyrights.
If you do not agree to these copyrights, please do not use the Site.