"Tears of the Black Tiger" is a very entertaining movie. You don't have to understand the parodies of hyper-romantic Thai movies (which I didn't) or of spaghetti westerns (which I did) to enjoy it. Very simple story that moves very quickly even though it is full of flashbacks and other devices. Scene before the opening credits makes one fear that it will be yet another exercise in self referential postmodern cuteness but it just nods at that and then hurtles onward.

Lots of digitized color--some of the cowboys have ruby red lips throughout and the heroine has a few dresses with colors that don't appear in costume designer's palette--that is very splashy but (somehow) not intrusive. Wonderful cinematography--for example there is a curled lip sneer by one of the bad guys that takes replaying a few times.

A friend of mine picked up the Hong Kong VCD of this about five or six years ago, and we were both blown away by how cool and stylized it was. I don't think either of us had seen a Thai film before, but I realized how high it raised my expectations when I tried out other Thai titles and found an inordinately high number of them to be poorly made crap.

I don't believe the HK company ever did a companion DVD release at the time, and not long after I recall this being one of the titles that the Weinsteins stuck under their big fat arses so that almost no one would be able enjoy it. Have they—or preferably someone else—finally put it out?

Here is a review as well as what is going to happen to the film (picked up by Magnolia Pictures):

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbc ... /703010303

It was the first Thai film I saw, and I still regard it as one of the best (Monrak Transistor probably has the top honour). It is kind of weird that it's finally coming out in the US, after all this time. CITIZEN DOG would probably have been an easier sell (mention AMELIE a lot), followed by TEARS OF THE BLACK TIGER with 'From the director of CITIZEN DOG'...

(Magnolia picked up the rights from Miramax, as I understand it... it's not a TWC release)

The OST is also well worth picking up.