A DIRTY GAME: Chuvit Kamolvisit, former owner of a string of massage parlours takes pictures with his supporters during an election campaign for his Rak Thailand Party in Bangkok.
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CORRECTS SPELL OF FORMER OWNER’S NAME TO CHUVIT – In this June 21, 2011 photo, Chuvit Kamolvisit, former owner of a string of massage parlors takes pictures with his supporters during an election campaign for his Rak Thailand Party in Bangkok, Thailand. As the super-pimp who once ran Thailand’s biggest brothel empire and then exposed the police kickbacks he had to pay for it to flourish, Chuvit feels uniquely qualified to lead the country’s fight against corruption. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)
And in his quest to win a parliament seat in elections Sunday, the 49-year-old one-time massage parlor king is betting a public tired of divisive, hypocritical leaders will agree.
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BANGKOK — As the super-pimp who once ran Thailand’s biggest brothel empire and then exposed the police kickbacks he had to pay for it to flourish, Chuvit Kamolvisit feels uniquely qualified to lead the country’s fight against corruption.
And in his quest to win a parliament seat in elections Sunday, the 49-year-old one-time massage parlor king is betting a public tired of divisive, hypocritical leaders will agree.
BANGKOK (AP) — As the super-pimp who once ran Thailand’s biggest brothel empire and then exposed the police kickbacks he had to pay for it to flourish, Chuvit Kamolvisit feels uniquely qualified to lead the country’s fight against corruption.
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After returning home, he made a fortune during a late 1980s real estate boom. When a client took him to an upscale massage parlor, he had an epiphany. “I said ‘Oh wow, it’s good!’ It’s like a Hugh Hefner: You know, surrounded by the beautiful girls, making money.”
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He sold his slice of the sex business years ago, and says he’s done with it for good. But when people ask about his former life, “I say yes … I should go back to the massage parlors,” he sighed. “Because that was better — cleaner than politics.”
… Politics is like diapers. It’s better to change it often”. This is the slogan scrawled across one of the election placards depicting grim-faced Chuwit Kamolwisit, ex-massage parlour tycoon, holding a rather disgruntled looking girl in his arms. Another placard shows him holding his bull terrier, a champion of loyalty. Chuwit’s pranks and ‘in your face’ publicity seem to be working as he appeals to many voters who are fed up with the main two rivals, prime minister Abhisit’s Democrat Party and Yingluck Shinawatra’s Peua Thai Party. Chuwit’s placards are strategically placed around the city for maximum impact.
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Around the city many placards have been vandalised, mainly those showing the prime minister. The four photos of placards with Abhisit’s head carved out were taken near Phra Khanong on June 5th, as was the final photo of Chuwit at the wheel of his car driving the country ahead. All the other photos were taken on June 20th. Bangkok, Thailand, 20/06/2011
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None of the bad guys are Thais. That includes the flaccid and forgettable Mr. Big played by Paul Giamatti. The monks don’t look Thai either; with their burgundy robes and prayer beads, they seemed more Tibetan. Even the insect that makes a cameo in the Bangkok hotel room looked to me like a Madagascan hissing cockroach and not the local variety. The owner of the film’s only brothel is also a foreigner, as are its customers, which lets Thailand off the hook for its most notorious industry.
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Alan, the round, scruffy idiot savant (or maybe just idiot) of The Hangover Part II, utters that deadpan-strange aphorism while a monkey indeed gnaws on what looks like a monk’s, er, weenis through his clothes on a Bangkok bus. When asked about his new movie in an L.A. hotel room, Zach Galifianakis, the actor who plays Alan, is similarly round, scruffy, and prone to deadpan one-liners or—more often—dead silence.
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Its sequel drops Alan, Phil, and Stu in Bangkok, Thailand, for further substance-swallowing trouble, morning-after madness, freaky strip clubs, and freakier Russians. The overgrown child with a few screws loose—who wakens in a deeply sleazy motel room with the others, but without his hair—is likely to blame.
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And why not? In Bangkok, the bearded, shaven-headed Alan resembles a prison-camp escapee—one wearing a girlish straw hat and a T-shirt adorned with a Labrador doggy photo. He says wildly inappropriate things at wildly inappropriate moments. He is a bad-people magnet. But in this film we first meet the self …
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This is one of those movies. It features many, many bad words and makes light of many, many bad things: drug overdoses, unprotected sex with prostitutes, severed fingers, monkeys smoking cigarettes. And yet this dark and seedy follow-up to 2009s blockbuster comedy has quite a retro message suggesting that civilized men carry inside them a monster, a demon within, that requires constant taming. Why, no less a theologian than Johnny Cash pleads on the soundtrack: God help the beast in me.
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It happened again, confesses Phil in the brief flash-forward that opens the movie. And yet, despite all the similarities, despite the same madcap plotting and hysterically unhinged comic filth, The Hangover Part II veers into much darker territory. Bangkok, for one thing, out-depraves Vegas by a long shot; gone is the safe, prefabricated sheen of Sin City, replaced by sweat and smog that hides the missing Teddy. Bangkok has him now, mutters a cagey tattoo artist played by filmmaker Nick Cassavetes.
When crafting a follow-up to the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time, it’s understandable that one might be reticent to mess with a winning formula. But director Todd Phillips and writers Craig Mazin and Scot Armstrong seem to have confused revisiting with recycling: The Hangover Part II so closely mirrors its blockbuster predecessor in every vital aspect that it can scarcely claim the right to call itself a sequel. The only significant new wrinkle introduced in Part II is its setting: Bangkok, Thailand, a location that at least theoretically augurs well for a second helping of inspired lunacy. The story structure of the first film has been copied wholesale, a game of Mad Libs played with its script. The action is again set around a bachelor party, this time in honor of buttoned-down dentist Stu (Ed Helms). Again the boys (Stu, Bradley Cooper’s boorish frat boy, Phil, and Zach Galifianakis’ moronic man-child, Alan) awaken the next day in a hideously debauched hotel room, with little memory o …
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