Last Stand at Lang Mei

I endured this on a chartered bus trip from Bangkok to Surat Thani, in south Thailand. Southeast Asian tour buses catering to the backpacker crowd always play bad videos at deafening volume, and it seems some Thai tour operator thought this was what we would like--or maybe someone was trying to be funny. On this particular bus the air conditioner had broken down, so we also were hot, and cramped. So maybe it was just the circumstances that ruined the film for me, but I recall only bad acting and an incoherent plot, which had something to do with an American being held captive, and then somebody blew something up, and then a lot of things got blown up. I was stuck in my uncomfortable seat long enough that I began to identify with the captive, however, and in my misery I examined one actor very closely until it dawned on me--that's Steve Kanaly! Steve Kanaly is best known as Ray Ewing on Dallas, and he also bears an uncanny resemblance to my dad. Unfortunately this would have been lost on most of the others, as few of them were American and fewer still knew my dad. So I kept my thoughts to myself. Then we stopped at a little roadside restaurant and had beer and green curry, and I tried to forget.