Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, this is kind of one of our more light-hearted videos I decided to make on this channel here recently. Has any film out there ever really gotten Thailand "right"? This was something I was talking about with an old friend of mine the other day and we were kind of discussing has any film ever really captured the essence of Thailand in a really authentic just "wow, yeah that is what it was like to live in Thailand in that time, or at that point”. I have yet to see, I am happy to stand corrected in the comments if somebody points out a film that I have forgotten or not thought of, please feel free to tell me but yeah we were talking okay Hangover 2. Well yeah there was some moments, I find Hangover 2 interesting because Hangover 2 was filmed toward the beginning of when I first got here to Thailand. There are a lot of landmarks and things that I see in it now that "oh yeah, that got torn down" or "that changed into a different place", "oh yeah I forgot about that". From that standpoint," it makes me a little bit nostalgic but long story short, no, it is very much not an accurate representation of Thailand at all, Bangkok or anywhere else. It also got the geography of Thailand way off for a bunch of different reasons. Okay, leaving that aside so Hangover 2 not great, probably not really quite on par. Then you get into like "Bangkok Dangerous" which came out some years ago with Nicolas Cage. Again kind of as a travel log I thought it was kind of a cool movie. Again it just didn't really quite, quite sum it up. It really didn't quite capture the essence. You get into a film like the Beach. Again I thought the Beach was just not quite the Thailand that I found it to be. It just doesn't quite hit things on the mark. Meanwhile you have got a movie like "Brokedown Palace" which elements of that film, especially as it pertains to certain, I want to be clear, certain aspects of the Thai legal system, not everything; I may do a video specifically on Brokedown Palace one of these days because there are there certain things about it that are somewhat very insightful, certain things about it are completely off. But yeah long story short is again it just didn't fully capture the essence of Thailand especially from a Western perspective. That might be the difficulty there is I am coming at this more from a Western perspective and how Western culture interacts with Thailand and maybe it is not possible to ever fully capture that on film.

Long story short is I don't think it has been done yet. Hopefully one of these days some talented filmmaker will come along and actually manage to capture that very unique relationship, that very unique interaction between Thailand and really the rest, you can say the West, but maybe even just more generally the rest of the World.