after we saw citizen dog, christine, gene, and i sat around gene’s apartment and squealed all over it in delight while kristen sat there with a polite face on wishing we would go away so she could finish watching aladdin. i said to gene at the time that the last good movie i had seen before citizen dog was about hemophages. this isn’t saying much since the movies i saw in the interim were doogal, she’s the man, and aquamarine.
but citizen dog is an amazing movie that not many people will ever get to see. unless they have the mad ebay skills and really care about ordering dvds from asia. the movie is from a thai director who did one previous work labelled a ‘pad thai western’. citizen dog is about a guy who leaves his country home for the big city of bangkok, the cast of kooky characters he meets there, his various jobs, and the girl he falls in love with.
to give you an idea of the kind of movie this is, the kooky characters he meets include: his reincarnated grandmother as a gecko, a talking teddy bear who smokes like a chimney, an 8 year old girl who thinks she’s thirty and plays shoot-em-up video games all day, a motorcycle-taxi ghost, and a guy whose OCD is to lick everything. the girl he falls in love with is reading a book with a white cover in a language she doesn’t understand and becomes obsessed with collecting plastic bottles to the point where a gigantic plastic mountain grows in her front yard. it is a lovely setting for several touching moments in the film when the hero climbs the gleaming plastic mountain and surveys the whole city.
the official review of this movie on the SF asian american film festival page said it was a cross between amelie and chungking express which i found to be pretty true. one of my favorite parts of the film was the color schemes used to highlight different scenes. it’s apparently called ‘candy-coating’ and is used to make different objects in a scene appear much brighter than they really are. another great thing was the narration which was generally tongue-in-cheek and just hilarious.
i’m planning to exercise my mad ebay skills and get this when it comes out on dvd, so if you ever want to see it you have only to appeal to my generous loaning side.
