To me, this movie is perfection.

the audience applauded

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

This movie is so amateurish and melodramatic by our standards. It is also ends up being very boring. I watched it out of curiosity and the one Thai actor is quite hot looking other than it is a waste 2 hours.Sometimes really bad movies can be funny...this one might work that way if you were stoned but otherwise forget it.This thing was geared towards gay audiences....they flushed out the handsomest young Thai actors gave them a macho gangster flair for sexiness but good grief!....it is so silly maudlin and drags.Also after all the effort to put gays in macho non stereotyped roles why have one of the lovers shot in the end. What a depressing deflation... I wish they would put gay people in normal roles where they just happen to be gay. A gay James Bond with upbeat endings instead of the mother hanging herself etc...This script may conform to some sort of Thai typical gangster plot? Also the excessive melodrama maudlin sentimentality may sell there. Did any of you notice how terrible the acting is....one of the gangsters tries to do a facial tick but it is so obviously forced..The cinematography is to show that Thailand (Bangkok) has arrived at the dystopia future big city life. I have been to Bangkok several times it does not resemble this movie...except maybe the grid locked traffic and a constant 99 degree and 100% humidity weather.DO NOT RECOMMEND

Reading the back of the DVD cover, I was thinking - hmmm OK this sounds alright. So borrowed it from the library and while I did find it moving, the film's main problem is that the love story is developed way too fast to make it feel genuine and pretty much forces you to sob (even though it does work sometimes) rather than making you build up the emotional tension gradually.I was expecting a romance, action/thriller sort of movie and you mainly get a romance drama which is fine with me with a gangster sort of plot thrown in to heighten the tension. There is a little bit of exploration on living with HIV in the film from some of the characters, however a lot of the character development is pretty minimal and the beginning of the romance between the two male leads didn't make me fully believe that they fell in love so quickly with no real sort of lead up to it and the ending scene, though I found moving, made it more melodramatic which seemed to overflow like turning on a tap at full blast rather than letting it flow at a normal pace.The acting is pretty decent with the two leads - I thought that love song they used in the film could have been left out as it sort of felt out of place - it would probably fit a really soppy love story. Even though I did feel tears coming up near the end, a lot was sort of unexplained and the director obviously wanted this to be a story that would make you cry - but just don't force it too much.

After my first viewing of 'Bangkok Love Story', I was so disappointed by the melodramatic overload at the end of the film, that my first reaction was to write a very hateful comment about it, and I even wanted to smash my DVD against the wall, literally! However, something prevented me from doing so, and I think I figured out what it is. I was actually extremely moved by the story, and I think that I somehow just couldn't stomach its sad outcome, but after re-thinking about it, I finally realized that what I loved in it actually exceeded by far all the rest. Apart from the beautiful cinematography and the first rate acting, that the other reviewers here have already examined, I think that it is above all the authenticity of the love between the two characters and its unquestionable nature that I found absolutely beautifully rendered. This is a love story between two handsome and masculine men from a completely different social background,who, by a series of very unusual circumstances, succumb to a mutual passion, even if the time and place for this passion are inappropriate. What I loved in the director's approach is that, contrarily to a typical Western approach, like for instance in 'Brokeback Mountain', where the characters are devastated by the realization of the fact that they love a person of the same sex,and struggle with a typically Western guilt, an approach that I find nauseating,at NO MOMENT in 'Bangkok Love Story' do the characters waste time by asking themselves the question 'Am I gay?' or try to deny their feelings. What makes this love story tragic is above all their FATE, which is above all determined by the circumstances of their first meeting,and this fate is also determined to a certain extent by their social background. The tragedy here comes from DESTINY, and NOT from the sexuality of the characters, If 'Bangkok Love Story' had been a straight love story it would also had made perfect sense.(I do not want to spoil this review, but those who have seen the film can easily figure it out by examining the plot, nothing would have been out of place if the story had involved a man and a woman). Another reviewer talked about, I think, something like 'clan-destined' lovers, and I think, he's actually got the point and the heart of the story very well. So I finally decided to forgive the over-melodramatic turn the director gave to the story, and to focus on the beauty that lies within instead, and my rating of the film jumped from an initial 1 to a final 10. But, after all, isn't love a feeling of extreme subjectivity?

The movie posters, showing the two handsome actors, and some of the other reviews led me to want to watch this film, but I was very disappointed by it.I should preface my comments by remarking that I have never visited Thailand, and also that I was relying on English subtitles that had been written by someone who clearly had an imperfect command of the English language--and so it's conceivable to me that were I able to understand the ORIGINAL dialogue, perhaps my impression of the film would be a little better.However, one with cultivated WESTERN tastes, will, I think, find, as I did, that this movie is all very forced sentimentality with little to redeem it in the way of mood, atmosphere or other beauties. I once heard sentimentality defined as "unearned emotion," and I think that sums up perfectly what I find wrong with the film.I thought that the initial plot had been set up for me a little too swiftly, that all the characters were in their particular situations with insufficient development--"this one is a killer, that one is a crook, this one is sick and dying," etc. Contrast this, for example, with Brokeback Mountain, a film with a similar theme of the deep love that develops between two young men, and how carefully we are led to begin knowing and caring for what brought these two youths together.From this rather simplistic, almost juvenile, beginning, the story seems to start loading thick sentimentality on with a trowel, and the piles of it begin to get overwhelming, until, as we near the 3/4 mark, I found myself looking at my watch and calculating how much more of this silliness I must endure--by that time I had given up on the film taking a turn for the better. I rarely find myself laughing with scorn at a story, and I always do my best to let a storyteller tell me his tale in his own way, but in THIS film, each new element introduced to wrestle pity from me just made me react by rolling my eyes and saying, "oh, THAT too, eh?" Perhaps this sort of heavy-handed sentiment is more appealing to the Thai audience for which the film was made, and maybe what strikes me as "unearned emotion" fills a Thai viewer with LEGITIMATE emotion, but I think you'll find the film as disappointing as I did. In fact, by the end of it, I was feeling a mild distaste for nearly every character and the film's ultimately sordid story.=================================Another reviewer asked about the title. In Thai, the title is: "PHUEAN--ku rak mueng wa!" which, in gruff, familiar, male language, means "BUDDY: I love you, man!" roughly. The first word, PHUEAN, is the word you see on the title, that looks a bit like a mirror image of "J" followed by "WOu."