This feels more like the post modernist classic that American critics claim Pulp Fiction was. Fah talai jone is a bravura technicolor clash of colors and vibrant energy. Imagine Andy Warhol and Takashi Miike collaborating on making a 1950s popcorn counter postcard come alive and you get some sense of what its all about.The themes and motifs though are very archetypal and familiar. Cowboy and Western motifs abound in what is decidedly an Eastern film, and the plot structure is the stuff of pure romantic formula - a boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl in the end.But its this movie's style that invigorates. Its a romp in the good old fashioned sense, where the frenetic use of color, editing and in your face acting is what makes it so unique.Another example that Thailand punches above its weight.

Parody/homage/ pastiche/(take your pick) film thats a send up of romance movies and Italian westerns. so over the top you'll wonder if there ever was a top, this is one wild ride, even by Thai movie standards.With blood and gore and painted backgrounds mixing with real locations and a very deliberate sense of reality this film is either going to strike you as a master piece or a piece of cow flop. I'm somewhere in the middle-leaning towards the dislike camp. The problem for me its so artificial I that I was watching the wheels and gears whir instead of watching the story unfold. I also am not really in love with the idea that this is almost two hours long. Overwhelmed with the artifice I turned it off a good clip in. The reaction is not really unexpected since I have a real love hate relations hip with the Thai film industry where I find I either lover or hate the films, there is no rhyme or reason other than I dislike most Thai horror films I stumble upon on my own.Is Black Tiger worth seeing (or should that be trying?)? Hell yea. There is nothing like it for shaking the dust from the notion of all movies are the same. There is nothing like this I've ever seen in the west and very few in the east.

Thai filmmakers are making some great inroads, and TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER is a prime example thereof. The storyline, which owes as much to Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns as anything else, is all over the road- intentionally. I couldn't help but laugh out loud at some of the over-the-top shenanigans. All done with a straight face. (And funny in their own special way, too; not as in-your-face as, say, guilty pleasures like TOP SECRET! or REVENGE OF THE NERDS II, but not totally removed, either.) The "old school cinema" look was ideal- and inspired. Something old and something new going on, here. If you're a true lover of cinema, I highly recommend TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER.

Harvey Weinstein famously used to buy up foreign films and then would refuse to distribute them to American theaters, thus reducing competition in the arthouses for the films he actually decided to release. Tears of the Black Tiger was one of those films. Now Magnolia Films got it away from him and has it available. It's a Thai Western, with some of the weirdest and wildest production design to be seen. Unfortunately, it doesn't live up to that amazing trailer that played the art-house circuit back in January. While it certainly is a lot of fun in parts, the pacing is poor and the story gets so bogged down in romantic melodrama that at times it's downright boring. Still, those fun parts make it worth sitting through. When the Sergio Leone-esquire violence begins, it's always entertaining. And it has a couple of the best movie deaths ever.