Being a film buff in Thailand can be frustating. But I found a street vendor in Silom neighborhood of Bangkok selling bootlegged avande garde and art films for 100 baht, that's about 3 dollars US.
We get maybe 15% of world film here in Thailand, art value, great screenplay has nothing to do with the films served up on Thai Cinemas. It is a matter of luck to see the great ones, and sometimes you can find them bootleged even if they don't make it to the Cinema.
Thai film is another story, very loud, like soap opera, with lots of flash, migraine headache stuff.
Living in a Thailand, a western film wasteland, you have to lower your film viewing standards. So in a downtown a Bangkok mall I reluctantly chose a film to watch, just to waste a couple of hours, called "Love in the Time of Cholera". I expected very little from a film with 'Love" in the title, but the idea of linking "Love with Cholera" was intriguing.
I did see the name Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I had heard of him, he won The Nobel Prize for Literature, but how do you take someone seriously that writes in Spanish? And the Nobel must have given Gabriel the prize because it was the year of Latin affirmative action, or because Spanish writers were hip that year.
English is of course the language of great literature, and maybe you could throw in a German for a the prize, a Gunter Grass or the like.
But great literature coming from a person who writes in Spanish, that's a second or third world language.
I entered the theater and after standing in respect for the King of Thailand, and the Thai National Anthem (written by the King who is a Jazz lover). I settled into my seat expecting hot Love and Cholera in the jungle.
What unfolded on screen was one of the most amazing, human, insightful , deep, wise, soulful, fun, magical screen plays and films I have ever seen.
I immediately went out and bought every book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez I could find in Bangkok, and am of the opinion that if I wrote for another 2000 years or wrote forever, I would never be able to write like this giant. He is better than Hemingway, Faulkner, comparable to Mark Twain and Tolstoy, but much more fun than Tolstoy. Reading his work leaves me feeling like a mosquito looking at a a literary elephant, awe struck, wondering how he got so big)?
Someday I am going to dig my way out of the hole I am in here in Thailand, and move to South America. I will fuck dark women with huge asses, great titas, long curly black hair and bushes to die for. Sit in in outdoor cafes day and night, read books by Latin authors , eat Coca leaves and drink coffee while savoring Bosa Nova riffs. This is my dream! I think I have one left in me maybe, if Thailand and the world doesn't kill me first.