Cry for me, Tiger

I didn't know anything about Tears of the Black Tiger (or, Fah Talai Jone) when Irwin bought the ticketsfor the screening at Film Forum. And anyway, no review or preview could have aptly prepared me for this techni-color "pad thai Western." After witnesing all the cheesy cinematic techniques (in the suspension prior to a shoot-out, the gunslinger in the foreground is dollied across, creating the illusion of a pan against a painted sunset; or the hyper-violent shot of a slo-mo bullet shattering the villain's mouthful of teeth before splashing his brains out upon the vivid green grass) executed with such unabashed conviction, I was shocked to later learn that the film had been made in 2001 (not the 60's or 70's?!). I found the film remarkably without camp or irony for a contemporary film... or maybe the irony was so thick I didn't realize I was swimming it in. It did not compare to Sholay, the 4-hour epic grandmother of all Bollywood movies (a former police commissioner whose family is murdered and arms chopped off by a local bandit hires two petty thieves and rollicking buddies to save his town), but still, today I found myself thinking about the sequence in which two cowboy-bandits swear their loyalty to each other by:
a.) pouring some clear liquid presumably alcoholic into two glasses;
b.) slicing their wrists open and pouring their blood into the aforementioned glasses;
c.) chugging the concotion, then twirling around each other in a joyous dance, all in front of a grand statue of a Buddha.
Sabai-dee, dudes.