Cashier du Cinema

女人化活 - the woman and man change their life
用腦用貝 - using their minds and using their money
上作上乎 - Work is important, personal space is important
飮的字影 - Asian printed matter is presented in a refreshing way
假兵人凌他 - The fakey abusive army guy is a movie villain;
書人好; - The book guy is good;
亞飛飛机飛謎. - The issue of flying to Asia is presented as a mystery.

Netflix' Last Life in the Universe is pretty good. The story is as follows:

There is a Japanese man working at the Japanese Cultural Center in a beach city in Thailand. There is a Thai woman who loses here sister in a car accident that peripherally involves the man. The Japanese man is so incredibly fastidious about his books, his huge apartment has so many 1000s of books; yet he does not evince a "librarian" look; he is not a male version of the librarian from Seinfeld, the episode with the Dragnet guy working in "returns". This guy is very bored at his job, but isn't bored with the job. Go figure.

The incredibly fastidious Japanese guy runs into trouble of his own when some people he knows have a lethal fight in his apartment. He looks slightly moopy at first when he goes over to visit the woman who is mourning at her beach house, and he doesn't mind in the least that he seems moopy - a character strength.

This movie is very good when it comes to communicating the slack Asian corporate attitude in its slackness; compare to an American movie like Diner or a TV show like Cheers, which are very pro-corporate in an American way. A little marijuana, her ease with popularity, her normal attitudes towards jerks she knows (which jerks give us to realize what a great guy the librarian is), and her solid commitment to being a productive member of society all contribute to understanding the life behind the Asian corporate logo; for his part, the guy knows he is the most literate person that could be, and is very serious about the history of literacy in this world, it seems to me. They commune in reading, at any rate.

The Thai woman and the Japanese guy spend a lot of time with each other. His fault is that he is a little shy, her fault is that she has to watch it when she is mildly impolite in a cross cultural context. This character basis is used in the movie; she is learning Japanese and he has no problem w/living in Thailand; he prefers it to Japan.

Anyway, she is moving to Osaka to work at a restaurant and it is unclear at the end of the movie whether or not he is going to fly north to live with her for a time; he has a big problem back at his apartment in Thailand anyway.

The woman's beach house is shown as a pretty good place to be; its pleasing nature antithetically offsets the plot element of leaving Thailand.

6ixtynin9 is another movie by the same director, also on Netflix and also set in Thailand. 69 is a murder mystery that doesn't end too badly.