Interview with David Pasquesi, Improviser, Actor, Comedian, Meat Man

Odds are, you've seen David Pasquesi or heard his voice, though you may not realize it. Of the seventeen movies he's appeared in, six were directed by fellow Second City alums, including three by fellow Chicagoan Harold Ramis. He played Stew the Meat Man in the television show and movie Strangers with Candy, and Jeff Garlin's best friend in Garlin's recent I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With. With T.J. Jagodowski, he does an improv show called "TJ and Dave" at the ImprovOlympic, a venue co-founded by his teacher Del Close, one of the creators of modern long-form improv. (Among iO's many alums is Ali Davis and the Upright Citizens Brigade.) In addition, he works as a stage actor in Chicago, and he is one of the more prolific commercial and voiceover voices on television.

I consider myself an improviser, but do not mind when people call me a comedian or actor. I guess I like anything when it goes well. When people laugh, I like it. In regards to performing comedy versus more serious plays, I think there is comedy in all of it. When I am pretending that I am an actor... to me, that's funny.

I am a Chicago-area native. When I am not in Chicago I can't seem to get past the notion that there is a better place to live and it is Chicago. I have been tempted to live elsewhere, but then I look at my situation objectively and realize there is no better place for me to become a better improviser than here in Chicago.

However, the comedy scene in Chicago has changed quite a bit since I first got started. Back then, there was one stand-up club, Zanies, and the more alternative Chicago Comedy Showcase. Then the stand-up boom of the late 80's came, and there were at least a dozen stand-up clubs. Now there is only Zanies again.

I started in comedy back in... let's see... it was around 1981. My brother was in Law School and he went to an improv class. I had never been on stage but I tagged along. I was at once enamored with it and started to study about it. I lucked out to have a great teacher for my first class, a Second City alumna, Judy Morgan. Improvisation seemed to fit the ideas and hopes I had about the way things should be.

I decided to try to do this and nothing else around 1984. I had graduated college and was working in an office. One day I just quit, lived on a friend's floor and started doing stand-up and taking classes with Del Close. The only reason I wound up at Del's class is that I benefited from some advice given to my friend, Joel Murray, from one of his brothers. I admired Del for his intelligence, dedication to improvisation and well-masked generosity... very well-masked.

Comedic improvisation was not considered a good career move. There was one place that would pay you to do it, The Second City. So the people that were involved were people who were interested in improvisation as an end in itself. I think that is different now. I think there are more people who see it as a stepping-stone to a more commercial end. I'm not saying it is wrong or right, just that it is different. It used to be a stepping-stone to absolutely nothing else.

I suppose my dream is to do things I find rewarding and challenging with people I respect and enjoy. As an improviser, I currently love to do the show with TJ and am tickled that we perform regularly in New York in a 'legit' theater and are reviewed as theater and not as comedy or improv, but actual theater. I think that is a step forward for improvisation and I am honored to be a part of it.

As for people I admire... Harold Ramis is wonderful. I think he is a great example of someone who is extremely intelligent, talent, funny, generous and kind. He is a great director, performer, writer and filmmaker. Not bad, if you ask me.

Have the parts I have played in movies affected my career? ... gosh, now that you ask, I notice that I am not a big-shot movie star, so... not that much I guess. Sometimes people say something on the street. It doesn't happen often, so I still get a big kick out of it.

Favorites are tough to pick, but I'll try. Honestly, I truly enjoy doing the things I choose to do, so if I am working, I enjoy it. But that's not what you asked. As a comedian, I loved working at Second City. I had Del as my director and got to work with a great cast which included Joel Murray, who had been my roommate in college. As a stage actor, the best thing I got to do was to play Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross at the Steppenwolf. The cast, director, play, production, all of it was a blast. Other than that, the things I find most satisfying are the things I've done that I was in way over my head. Making a feature with Mitch Rouse, writing and making a TV pilot with Tracy Letts, improvising a TV show with Rouse, Jay Leggett, Michael Coleman and others from Second City and ImprovOlympic. It is a great thing to goof around with your friends doing things that make one another crack up.

The things that were unsatisfying were the things that didn't last long.

I honestly enjoy all of it for different reasons. Just by the nature of improvisation, one is constantly surprised.

This was originally published on Huffington Post, and has been back-dated.

Spielberg's the Biggest Director in Hollywood -- So Why's He Cashing In On Indiana Jones Again?

Alexander the Great. Julius Caesar. Genghis Khan. Steven Spielberg. In an era where conquest is achieved not though territorial annexation but through cultural ubiquity, Spielberg is king. And now his most famous creation is back, looking out from billboards, signs and posters, sporting a case of 27 year-old three-day shadow: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Clearly, the S in Dreamworks SKG is not a man who needs to look far for a dollar or who has wanted for success in recent years. So why, at this point in his career, would he bring back Indiana Jones - and the aging, long-in-the-tooth Harrison Ford - rather than letting well enough alone?

In recent years, we've seen an increasing number of latter-day sequels to revive aging franchises: Terminator 3, Rocky Balboa, Rambo, in which pre-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone showed off impressive musculatures underneath sagging, leathery skin. So what are Spielberg and Ford doing in their company? Though he's famous for Indy, for all the mass entertainments Spielberg has made, he's only made one sequel that wasn't in the Indiana Jones series, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, one of his worst movies.

Then again, like his friend George Lucas, Spielberg took his inspiration from the cheesy movie serials of the 1930's, filling the screen with good guys, bad guys, and the supernatural - you could argue that much of Spielberg's career has followed the pattern of the serials he grew up loving. And that includes bringing back the old heroes for yet another episode.

His movies' black-and-white simplicity has made Spielberg the most famous and successful moviemaker of his era. Lauded for his unerring crowd-pleasing eye, for making glossy mass entertainments with high budgets, big explosions, and huge box office returns, he's equally criticized for his movies' relative lack of intellectual curiosity, moral ambiguity, or formal complexity. His movies are often told through the eyes of children, and those children are often put in harm's way, which is a good way to create an empathetic connection, but also a good way to manipulate an emotional reflex. However, his technique is so masterful that it's hard to fault him until you get out of the theater.

His devotion has always been to the indelible image, the sort of five-minute snapshot that people say was worth the price of admission. And he's created a tremendous number, movies that can be rewatched ad infinitum and that will be be fun forever: Jurassic Park, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, War of the Worlds, Duel, Jaws, Saving Private Ryan, E.T., Catch Me If You Can, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Spielberg's movies reveal a man of personal themes, or obsessions: dinosaurs, aliens, futuristic sci-fi, World War II, children's stories, creepy crawlies, and Warner Brothers animation (like Animaniacs, which he produced). And, though it once would have been unthinkable in Hollywood, the Holocaust.

When Hollywood was founded, its Jewish power brokers were famously so self-conscious about their shared ethnicity that they tacitly agreed to mute Jewish themes in their films. Times changed, and Schindler's List has a lot to do with the change. However, that and the terrific Munich are Spielberg's only two overtly Jewish movies, however. Although he battles Nazis, Indiana Jones is a decidedly non-Jewish hero, even if his famous fedora wouldn't look out of place in Crown Heights. The movie is more in line with the Old Testament fire and brimstone of Cecil B. DeMille than with Jewish tradition, and that holds true for most of Spielberg's movies. But unlike those of his predecessors, the lack of overt ethnicity in his movies seems to come less from personal embarrassment and more from a desire to tell universal stories.

And those stories seem to resemble one another -- substitute a shark for a dinosaur, or a dinosaur for a Nazi, and a lot of the filmmaking technique in each of his best movies looks pretty similar. His love of animation isn't hard to understand, since so many of his movies involve both special effects and nonhuman villains, from his debut Duel through Jaws, Jurassic Park, and War of the Worlds. He is the preeminent FX director of his day, and the new Indiana Jones movie will undoubtedly feature effects more eye-popping than any the '80s sequels could muster. Thankfully, it's set in 1957, so there will be no attempt to digitally mask Harrison Ford's natural aging process, twenty-seven years after the release of Raiders.

We can only hope a similar good sense will inform the rest of the movie. And if there's a single moment to match Elliot's bicycle silhouetted against the moon, or the Nazis' faces melting off when the Ark is opened, or Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler seeing the dinosaurs for the first time, or the beach landing on D-Day, it will have all been worthwhile.

This originally appeared on Huffington Post, and has been back-dated.

Harold & Kumar 2: Best War on Terror Movie Ever (Though That's Not Saying Much)

George W. Bush: You guys are awesome.
Harold & Kumar: No, you're awesome!
George W. Bush: No, you guys are awesome!
--dialogue from the movie

What is courage? Courage is making a movie called Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay in which George W. Bush is a sympathetic character, especially considering that most of the audience would probably disagree apoplectically with the sentiment. However, that's about as far as it goes, politically; it's about the Global War on Terror to the same degree as Hot Shots! is about the first Iraq war. And, because it's a funny stoner comedy that's the sequel to a popular movie, it's also likely to be the most successful War on Terror movie ever made.

That's not saying much, of course: there has been a glut of movies about Iraq, both fictional and documentary, and nearly all of them have failed both critically and commercially. With the minor exception of Syriana, virtually every movie about the War on Terror, the war in Iraq, or our post-9/11 society has bombed at the box office: Redacted, Rendition, Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Grace is Gone, Stop-Loss, The Road to Guantanamo, The Great New Wonderful, Reign Over Me, and even the mindless action flick The Kingdom.

But Escape from Guantanamo isn't really a War on Terror movie, per se, so much as it's a continuation of the first movie's dopily sincere message about how we incorrectly judge people based on their outer appearance. Especially Neil Patrick Harris.

In fact, the title notwithstanding, it's one of the most remarkably faithful sequels you'll ever see, in tone, setup, and execution. In other words, if you liked the first movie, you'll like the second. If you didn't, you won't. Escape from Guantanamo begins about an hour chronologically after the last movie ended, and, after a quick encarceration in Gitmo and a quick breakout, our heroes spend the rest of the movie on the lam (chased by insane G-man Rob Corddry, channeling his inner Jon Voight), finding themselves in brief sketchlike comedic situations. This time, the ultimate destination is Texas, where Kumar's ex is marrying a buddy of Harold's who works for the Department of Homeland Security, who has the power and connections to clear their name.

In the meantime, they do a lot of drugs, see a lot of nudity, run from a lot of scary people, and learn over and over not to judge a book by its cover. It's lucky the two stars are so well-cast, because the movie really rests entirely on their charisma. (Well, that, and the knowledge that a good number of audiencemembers are going to come to the theater bombed out of their mind.) The jokes aren't really political, the situations aren't really satirical, and the social commentary isn't really sophisticated. But it has a happy ending, the guys get the girls, our democracy is preserved, and Neil Patrick Harris fans get all the NPH they could ask for, including a Starship Troopers appreciation that I applauded.

On the other hand, it's not a movie that takes a lot of risks, blazes a lot of new ground, or totally lives up to the promise of its title -- there's a lot of Harold and Kumar, but only about a minute and a half of Guantanamo. Like Albert Brooks's Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, it's funny on its own terms, but it fails to take advantage of the chance to comment meaningfully on the great cultural issue of our time. Every little bit helps, and it's far better that the movie be funny but politically demure than unfunny and politically strident. Still, it feels a bit like a missed opportunity.

The movie's directed by the guys who wrote the last one, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg. Visually, they do a fine job by keeping the camera on Cho and Penn, though some of the episodes could perhaps be spiced up to interrupt the predictable rhythm of the two of them traveling and bickering and then periodically running into a comedic setpiece. The soundtrack is quite good, and very well-suited to the mood. The house was full on opening night, and the entire theater was laughing, which was both a good sign and a big help -- if at all possible, stoner comedies should be watched with other people.

Other than Neil Patrick Harris and a brief scene with Ed Helms, there are no other celebrity cameos, which is actually a good thing, as celebrity cameos are a frequent pitfall of lazy comedy sequels from Wayne's World to Austin Powers. This movie comes by its laughs slightly more honestly. Hopefully they'll be able to stick to their principles by the time the inevitable Harold & Kumar 3 comes around.

And when it does, my buddies and I will definitely be there to see it.

This originally appeared on Huffington Post, and has been back-dated.

The Forbidden Kingdom: Bad Script, Bad Acting, Bad Score, Otherwise Okay Movie

Studio exec 1: Hey, Jackie Chan and Jet Li have never been in a movie together before.* We should do a movie where they team up.

Studio exec 2: That's brilliant! But the main character should be played by a white kid who can't act.

At least, I'm guessing that's how the greenlighting process for The Forbidden Kingdom must have gone. At the top of the list of missed opportunities in this movie is deciding to have two of the great martial arts movie actors of all time upstaged by a dopey American kid, Michael Angarano. This casting decision is necessitated by a classic save-the-natives plot, as in The Last Samurai, in which an earnest American has to save good Asians from bad Asians. It's offensive on any number of levels, but mostly just patently ridiculous to see a kid who couldn't act his way out of a paper bag try to save Jet Li and Jackie Chan.

Martial arts movies aren't so much a genre as a medium -- in the past few years, we've seen martial arts movie as melodrama (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), biopic (Fearless), costume drama (House of Flying Daggers), and Western (Kill Bill). The Forbidden Kingdom is a kids' movie, basically a cross between The Karate Kid and The Neverending Story, though not quite as good as either one. It's not bad for what it is, but it could have been so much more: a movie with Jet Li and Jackie Chan should be a martial arts Casablanca, and it ends up being closer to Surf Ninjas.

The main character is a kid who loves his chop socky flicks, and the movie's a bit of a mishmash: after a dream sequence, it opens in a Chinese antique store, familiar from movies from Gremlins to Big Trouble in Little China, run by Jackie Chan in old-age makeup. Some time after an early look at the video box for The Bride With the White Hair, we meet one of the movie's main villains, a beautiful witch with white hair she uses as a whip. Jackie Chan's first fight scene is in the drunken boxing style, recalling his famous role in The Legend of Drunken Master. Both Li and Chan play two different characters, Chan as a drunken scholar and as the store owner who sends the boy on his quest, and Li both as a monk and as the mythical hero the boy must save.

There's a lot of plot in the movie, mostly in lengthy narrated exposition scenes -- there's a magical staff which transports the kid from South Boston to medieval China, an army of evil English-speaking immortals who want it back, an immortal emperor who can help the kid get home, a pretty orphan who wants to avenge her parents' death... well, basically, everyone who fights Li and Chan is bad, and everyone who helps them is good.

The boy eventually learns how to fight -- the lack of a great training sequence is another missed opportunity -- and the beautiful orphan has a few moves of her own. Fortunately, their love story is left mostly undeveloped, as their lack of chemistry rivals that of Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman in the Star Wars prequels. And while the orphan and the boy do pitch in on the fight scenes, the camera wisely keeps most of its attention on Li and Chan, the real stars of the show.

The cinematography oscillates from gorgeous to indifferent, as the frequently greenscreened backgrounds occasionally stun and occasionally bore. Cinematographer Peter Pau, who also worked with martial arts choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping on Crouching Tiger, does a good job of capturing the fight scenes, but seems to lose interest on some of the panoramas. Far worse is David Buckley's score, which is sweeping, insistent, and thuddingly mediocre, and really should have been done by a Chinese composer like Tan Dun (who was behind the brilliant scores for Hero and also Crouching Tiger).

The script, by Hidalgo scribe John Fusco, is similarly banal. Chinese folk mythology is a rich tradition to mine, but not when you give the main villain lines like, "Did you think you had a chance? I don't think so," or have the orphan talk about herself in third person for no apparent reason. The script's problems are exacerbated by some uncomfortably stiff line readings by a mostly Chinese cast who first speak Mandarin when we meet them, but then unaccountably switch to flat, accented English.

Those shortcomings aside, however, what's most important is the Jet Li/Jackie Chan fight that has been promised by every movie poster for the past months and fantasized about in every video store for the past 20 years. And their brawl, in a Buddhist temple with stone statues that get smashed in the fracas, is well worth seeing, even if the stars, now 43 and 54, respectively, are no longer in their primes athletically or onscreen. Still, it's eye-popping. Much of it takes place as the two are both holding onto the magical staff, beating each other with their other three limbs as they dance and kick and jump and run.

Most of the rest of the major action scenes are either fought against scores of attacking enemies, or are simulcast, so that we watch one protagonist locked in battle for a minute or two, and then switch to another, so that we don't miss anything. The pyrotechnics are impressive, though in these scenes a little magic and high-wire flying goes a long way.

Simply seeing Li and Chan onscreen together is a pleasure, the sort of easy happiness that is fully expected but nonetheless rewarding, like watching the coffee shop scene from Heat a 200th time just to see Al Pacino and Robert De Niro enjoying each other's company. The charisma of Jet Li's fist is such that when he's punching someone, it's almost impossible not to be transfixed. But while his fist is agreeably diverting, particularly on the big screen, this is far from his best movie. Feel free to see the movie if you want, but after you leave the theater, be sure to rent Fist of Legend, Once Upon a Time in China, or Fearless. You'll thank me in the morning.

* The reason why Jackie Chan and Jet Li have never been in a movie before? According to Richard Meyers, in his commentary to Once Upon a Time in China, the feud started in a movie called High Risk, in which Jackie Chan was supposed to star with Jet Li, but which ended up featuring Li and an actor named Jacky Cheung essentially parodying Chan. As a result of that movie, Chan never worked with Li, until Forbidden Kingdom. back to top

This originally appeared on Huffington Post, and has been back-dated.

I'm a Diehard Atlanta Braves Fan. Does That Make Me a Jerk?

I was born in Atlanta in late 1983, where, for the past two decades, the local baseball team had been one of the most hopeless in the country. Then a funny thing happened when I was 7: the Braves went from worst to first, narrowly lost one of the most hard-fought World Series of all time, and stayed in first place for the next decade and a half. Thanks to TBS, a cable network that didn't have much programming other than Braves games, Bond marathons, and repeats of Bloodsport and Enter the Dragon, the Braves gathered fans in every corner of the country that didn't already have a team.

Then they stayed atop the NL East for more than a decade, overstayed their welcome, and became known for playoff futility and the Tomahawk Chop, a stupid racist gimmick plagiarized from FSU. Finally, they stopped winning, and I have to learn how to root for a team that isn't the best any more.

I didn't start to love the Braves just because they won, but they started to win right around the time I started to love them. They weren't Hollywood like the Dallas Cowboys, the other America's Team -- Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, and John Smoltz were great competitors and lovely guys, but they weren't supermodels. Instead, they were solid and professional, and a bit intentionally bland. Then came the end of their unprecedented streak of postseason appearances, and their point of national interest ended with it. The Braves went back into the rank and file, kicked to the middle of the pack in SportsCenter highlights, pundit predictions, and feature article puff pieces. I want my team's 15 minutes of fame back. How loudly can I root for the old overdogs to get back on top without sounding like a jerk?

I know there's a line somewhere, because by definition Yankees fans are across it. New York Yankees fans, if they're self-aware -- and may they have all my neuroses and then some -- understand the low sacrifice and low moral stakes involved in rooting for the richest team in the game, for rooting for Ivan Drago to beat Apollo Creed. No one wins a moral victory in high school by blowing out the other team. There's a purity in defeat, just as there's a bullseye attached to every championship ring. For almost 20 years, I loved my team through thick; now that my team's suffering, I finally can prove my loyalty by loving them through thin. But I don't want a moral victory. To hell with close competition and a well-fought match; I want all the other bums in the cellar, and I want my guys to lap the field.

The Boston Red Sox did that last October, and their fans are learning the collateral joys of being insufferable. By spending a few well-placed dollars wisely, the Red Sox recently traded futility for dynasty in a matter of 36 months. Now, replica Cheers bars and college campuses are filled with poser bandwagon fans, outnumbering true bleeders by as many as green-hatted drunks outnumber Irish Catholics on St. Patrick's Day. I admit I envy their success. I hate that they're better and more popular than we are, and I hate that I have no right to complain.

Two years without playoff baseball in Atlanta (and TBS's decision to stop showing Braves games) have had the opposite effect -- our fans are so famously fairweather that we rarely sold out playoff games by the end of our run. If you find someone who can name a Brave other than Smoltz, Glavine, or Chipper Jones, odds are they're the genuine article. (It's an even easier guess these days, because fans of the Falcons and Hawks are rarer than a six-leaf clover.)

Sports metaphors are among the most potent images in our culture, used to describe everything from politics to religion to war. Winning a game takes on a much deeper significance when it's clear that everyone from God to the American President is on someone's side, especially if they're rooting against you. When I cheer on the Braves, it means I want them to continue having more than their share of success, and if it means I have to give up the moral high ground, so be it. It's American to want to win, and it's American to bray obnoxiously in celebration. I know there's a line somewhere. I just hope I haven't crossed it yet.

This originally appeared on Huffington Post, and has been back-dated.

Rest in Peace, Charlton Heston

Charlton Heston died tonight at the age of 83. One of the great leading men of Hollywood, a man of limited range but unlimited charisma, whose wealth of memorable screen performances fortunately overwhelmed his increasingly outspoken politics, Heston never quietly enjoyed his fame, but never squandered it.

Charlton Heston's defining performance, at least for members of my generation (whether most of us realize it or not), probably came in Wayne's World 2. He played a bit part, listed in the credits as "Good Actor," brought on in a gimmick to replace a man giving Wayne directions at a gas station whom Wayne complains isn't a good actor. Heston delivers the man's lines again, but does so with such pathos, such richness, that Wayne's mugging and crying in front of the camera almost seems genuine -- and Heston's Golden Hollywood baritone overacting fits the role perfectly.

In that movie, he was an elder statesman gently sending up his own deserved legend, and for a man whose most memorable performances would seem laughably stilted if delivered today, it perfectly fit both the movie and his history. Unsurprisingly, he played virtually the same role, though not for laughs, in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet three years later; also unsurprisingly, having already pulled the trick off once, this time he was much less memorable.

His bit part in Wayne's World 2 may have been the defining role for his latter-day acting career, but, sadly, it wasn't what defined him. That came in Bowling for Columbine, when guerrilla documentarian Michael Moore depicted him, as NRA president, as the personification of much that was wrong with America's gun culture. The movie was released in 2002, the same year that Heston announced he suffered from symptoms of Alzheimer's disease; he stepped down as NRA president the next year. Michael Moore later suffered a backlash from his treatment of the aging Heston (which Moore defended by saying he had tried to "not make Heston look as evil as he actually was"), but it was the apogee of Heston's transformation from great actor into political sideshow.

Heston's closest analog may have been Ronald Reagan, as they were both Hollywood Golden Age actors whose later careers largely transitioned into conservative politics. But while Reagan's presidency was perhaps the final death knell in the career of Ronald Reagan, B-movie star of Bedtime for Bonzo, Heston's latter-day persona could never push away the memory of his greatest work, like Touch of Evil, Ben-Hur, or Planet of the Apes. By the end of his career, when he began to take roles which winked at his status as a living legend, his very presence on the screen unconsciously recalled a half-century in front of the camera.

Whenever I think of Charlton Heston, though, I think of Touch of Evil, where he played a Mexican by putting on a bad mustache, a bad tan, and, in the exact same voice as Judah Ben-Hur, he would deliver lines like, "Susie, one of the longest borders on Earth is right here between your country and mine. Open border. Fourteen hundred miles without a single machine gun in place. I suppose that all sounds very corny to you." Eyebrow raised, lips raised not in smile but in oversincerity, declaiming each line as if it were something between a pun and a psalm, every character he played had the same accent, same chiseled chin, and same wooden expression, which as he aged became ever more dignified. Whatever he lacked in the Method, he made up in animal magnetism: he was handsome and strong, and had a voice the sound of mahogany. Heston wasn't a good actor, but he was a great one.

It speaks well of us as a culture that a man's art should outlive his politics. As Little Steven van Zandt has said, "One must always separate the artist from the art. The art is always better." Charlton Heston was one of our greatest stars, and his best movies will last forever. Rest in peace, Charlton, and don't eat any Soylent Green in Heaven.

This originally appeared on Huffington Post, and has been back-dated.

Are Muay Thai and Chicken Panang Awesomer Than Kung Fu and Mongolian Beef?

Asian culture has swept across the postwar American landscape like no other, imparting a culinary and pop legacy almost as profound as American culture has on the rest of the world. China was the early winner in cultural supremacy wars, with takeout on every street corner and kung fu in every grindhouse, trickling down to everything from hip-hop records to animated vegetarian screeds. Japan followed suit, and ninjas, anime, and sushi dominated the scene. Now it might be Thailand's time.

If I recall my Carmen Sandiego correctly, Thailand is the one Asian country that has never been conquered by a foreign invader. So it's a crossroads of its own making, influenced but not coerced. And you can see the counterpoints to Chinese cultural touchstones. In video games, Fei Long vs. Sagat. On menus, Mongolian Beef vs. Panang Chicken. In theaters, Jet Li vs. Tony Jaa. In each case, the Thai version is a bit spicier, a bit more exotic, a bit more alluring. And, just possibly, a bit awesomer.

I'm coming close to heresy to my own principles here. I eat from a Chinese buffet near my office once a week like clockwork, and I've idolized Jet Li ever since I saw Lethal Weapon 4. I don't want to believe that familiarity breeds contempt, but I have to consider the possibility that I'm being tantalized away from true love by a lust for the exotic.

Don't get me wrong -- I'd probably eat at that same Chinese buffet once a week for the rest of my life, but they don't have anything as delicious as a Thai curry. I have a signed poster of Tony Jaa in my apartment, and I'm not sure Jet Li has ever made a movie better than Ong-Bak -- frankly, I'm not sure that anyone has ever made a better martial arts movie. With Li claiming his own retirement from serious martial arts films following the superb Fearless, Jaa's the greatest martial arts star in movies today.

Like Street Fighter's Sagat, Tony Jaa practices Thai boxing, or Muay Thai, a whirlwind of lithe gymnastics, incredible acrobatics, and really painful-looking blows inflicted not with punches but with knee-and-elbow moves with names like "the elephant's tusk." Along with his countryman Dan Chupong, whose skill and charisma perhaps put him on the level of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jaa's leading a slow wave of Muay Thai movies to our shores.

Leading the nouvelle Thai vague, of course, was Ong-Bak, the first movie I can remember in my lifetime released in theaters featuring Muay Thai. Following was its unofficial sequel, The Protector, reuniting Ong-Bak's director and star. Then came Dan Chupong, a minor character in Ong-Bak, who starred in Born to Fight and Dynamite Warrior, released under Weinstein Films' direct-to-DVD Asian import label. Of course, now that the DVD floodgates have been opened, there's really no limit to how much will come. (And there's no telling how much wheat will be among the chaff.)

Jaa is a force onscreen, but with a soft voice and strangely delicate face on his wiry, chiseled body, very unlike Jet Li's stoic features or Bruce Lee's ferocious intensity. On film, Thai boxing is more acrobatic and less compact than kung fu, and Jaa makes leaps, mid-air body contortions, that barely seem humanly possible. This led Ong-Bak's makers to run a disclaimer with their ad campaign: "no wires, no stunt doubles, no CGI." (The young Jet Li was so fast with his own moves that he either had to be filmed at high speed and then slowed down so that the moves would be visible, or to slow himself down for the benefit of the camera.) The charisma of Jaa's violence is undeniable, hypnotic, breathtaking.

However, staying in shape takes a toll on the production schedules of a would-be international action star, and Jaa's eight-hour-a-day practice regimen makes it hard to squeeze in much acting. He's only starred in two movies in the past five years, and is working on a third -- by comparison, in the same time, Jet Li has starred in four and completed two or three others. If Jaa wants to claim the mantle he so rightly deserves, he'll need to step up the pace.

There's nothing else standing in the way of his dominance, since he's already conquered the air and the screen... I just hope my favorite Chinese buffet understands.

This originally appeared on Huffington Post, and has been back-dated.