Watching this film was a strange experience. Though filmed entirely in Thailand with a Thai cast, the story began as one of my favorite young gay novels in the USA. In the original novel the three chracaters were something of American Stereotypes. The closeted nerdly highschool swimmer who wore braces and was crushing big time on the all-American basketball star. The out and proud, queeny best friend who was being raised by a single mom, and the latino basketball star who had a girlfriend but was beginning to have doubts about his sexuality.
The movie follows the book pretty closely but has that unmistakable low-budget cachet of an indie film.
What's strange is the way that the characters translate. The queeny best friend seems almost toned down. But that's more to the number of Asian films with over the top queeny men that I've seen.
I often find myself in the "The book was SO much than the movie" club and am not really surprised to feel that way here as well. I'm often distracted by details included by the author and left off the screen or bits inserted into the film that don't work that cause me to wonder why they were added. That happened in this film as well. For example, the story begins when the straight jock walks into a gay youth meeting only to be surprised that two people that he knows are there. The nerdly high schooler, upon spotting his love interest awkwardly upsets a stack of folding chairs and his attempt at a stealthy entry backfires in a spectaular and quite cinematic way. In this film the meeting is there, the stack of chairs is there, the protagonists are there and yet the joke is omitted. That puzzled me.
This movie is also interesting in that it made me question just how a story is affected by the national culture vs how much a story is affected by translation from print to film.
I think that there were a number of mist-steps of both types here but overall I'd recommend this film to anyone that loved the novel and is curious about the kind of film that it would make.