I know this is kinda off topic of Graffiti but who cares,
this is the "Channel Zero" Forum right?
If anyone on here is big into Martial Arts and Martial Art Flicks, than be on the look out for Tony Jaa! !
Tony Jaa is Southeast Asia's long-overdue answer to Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan! !
-From the Oct. 25, 2004 issue of TIME Asia Magazine-
Jaa, whose real name is Phanom Yeeram, grew up in Thailand's rural northeast, a region most notable for its poverty and, in the early 1980s, the occasional mortar round fired across the Cambodian border by the Khmer Rouge. "Some days we'd be sitting down to dinner and the mortars would explode in the village, blowing out our windows and doors," Jaa says. He escaped these grim realities by viewing the films of Chan and Lee on outdoor screens at temple fairs. "It was powerful for me to watch," he says. "What they did was so beautiful, so heroic. I wanted to do it, too." Jaa practiced in his father's rice paddy or, when bathing the family's elephants, by somersaulting off their backs into the river. "I practiced," he says, "until I could do the move exactly as I had seen the masters do it."
At 15, Jaa sought out the Thai stunt coordinator and low-budget action director Panna Ritthikrai, who took him on as a protégé. He went to a gymnastics college and soon found work as a stunt man in local and international films, including 1997's Mortal Kombat 2. Then he and Ritthikrai started devising their own stunts inspired by muay boran, a more elegant and traditional form of Thai boxing that resembles kung fu. Jaa traveled the countryside talking to the few remaining old masters of muay boran, rediscovering more than 100 long-abandoned moves. Ritthikrai and Jaa filmed the actor's best stunts and showed them to Bangkok director Prachya Pinkaew. The filmmaker was dazzled but had problems getting backing for a film with Jaa in the lead role. "Thai audiences are not used to seeing people from the northeast in the lead," says Sita Vosbein, managing director of Pinkaew's production house, Baa Ram Ewe. "They think people with dark skin are uneducated and ugly. They are always cast as bad guys." When the film was a hit, Jaa felt accepted at last. "I have never been so proud," he says. "I've been fighting discrimination since I was very young. For people to appreciate the beauty of the ancient art of boxing, instead of focusing on what I look like or where I come from, was what I had always dreamed."
The insane inventiveness of the stunts—done without special effects, wirework or apparent concern for Jaa's life and limb—has turned Tony Jaa's movie: Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior into box-office gold in Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and even France, where the film found a fan and international distributor in action auteur Luc Besson. Besson recut the film and secured a U.S. distribution deal with Magnolia Pictures. Expectations are high that Ong Bak and Jaa will break big in North America when the movie is released in February.
I just peeped his new movie yesterday, and all I have to say is that:
This guy is NO F*cking joke! !
Again the movie is called: Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior
The star is named: Tony Jaa
For all you kung-Fu fans, this movie is not to be Missed!!
