When my older daughter was little she would watch the same movie every day, often twice in the same evening, and I'd watch it with her. The first was Annie. I think I saw Annie with her about 60 times. Then she switched to Grease, My Fair Lady, and The Breakfast Club. I saw them all with her, pretty much every evening after work.

I've had a few movies that I watched over and over without her. One was Men In Black. I think I watched it a dozen times. I always rooted for the bug to defeat Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, but unfortunately he never did. Will Smith's record is 12-0 so far, but I can always hope for an upset.

I also watched The Fifth Element a dozen times. I always like Bruce Willis movies without fail, but in The Fifth Element, screw Bruce Willis. It's Leeloo, that Russian girl with the red hair, that I watch.

I have a new favorite movie now. It's a foreign film with subtitles, from Thailand. It's called Last Life In The Universe. I've written about it before. So far I saw it three times in two weeks. Maybe I'm done, maybe not.

It has humor that is sometimes dark, sometimes silly, or maybe it is always both. One running gag is the frequent suicide attempts of the star, Kenji. The movie opens with him fantasizing about hanging himself and actually setting up a noose in his apartment. He's interrupted when his brother shows up at the door, and the brother just refers to Kenji as his crazy brother, and sees the noose, and it's clearly not the first time he's seen his crazy brother toying with suicide, so he just goofs on it.

One time, Kenji lays down in bed, puts a pillow over his face, and tries to smother himself. That is the stupidest suicide attempt I ever saw. Then there's the time that pretty Noi throws him out of her apartment, then wants him back because he did all her dishes for her. She goes outside, there's a goat or something in the road, she nudges it with her foot and asks it where the Japanese boy is, then she walks over to her car and sees him lying patiently directly in front of the front wheels, waiting for her to drive over him. He looks pretty silly down there.

Speaking of silly, the winning moment of the movie is when the three yakuza assassins bust into Kenji's apartment to kill him. He's on the toilet bowl at the time, and they don't know he's there. Kenji is a neat freak (remember doing the girl's dishes for her), so he is compelled to flush the bowl when he's done. He knows it will attract the killers, but what can he do, it's messy in that bowl. So he flushes the bowl. The killers look at each other, then all head for the bathroom. They see that the bathroom window is smashed, and Kenji is nowhere to be seen. One of the killers points his gun inside the toilet bowl and says FREEZE. That is one of the silliest moments I've ever seen on film.

There are a lot of websites on the internet that try to explain the plot of Last Life in the Universe. After seeing it three times, I think I have the answers they are looking for.

Is Kenji a yakuza gangster himself? He is so bookish and nerdy, such an obsessive cleaner, so fussy, how could he be a gangster? The answer is yes, Kenji is a yakuza gangster himself, an experienced killer, as tough as anyone else in the movie.

Why doesn't he ever make a romantic move towards Noi or any of the other girls in the movie? Because he is a homosexual, that's why. None of the internet sites understood that. Kenji is gay. When his fellow yakuza teases him about it, he just stays quiet, and when Noi asks him about it, he doesn't answer her either. There's even a little scene on a bus where some guy touches Kenji in a way that suggests homosexuality, his hands all over Kenji, and even though Kenji doesn't respond to the guy sexually, he doesn't pull away from the touch.

Why does the yakuza send three killers to kill him? I don't know. It is obviously related to why Kenji is in Thailand, not still in Osaka where he came from. Maybe it is related to why Kenji always toys with suicide. Maybe Kenji decided to quit the yakuza, and fled Japan knowing that nobody is allowed to quit. That's my best guess, simply because he quit them. Another possibility is that they may know or suspect that Kenji killed the assassin they had sent to kill Kenji's brother. But I lean towards the first explanation. They don't necessarily know that Kenji killed the other assassin. When they come from Japan to Thailand, they're not coming to investigate what happened to their assassin. They are coming specifically to kill Kenji. But it might be that. Maybe they lost contact with their other assassin and realized Kenji killed him.

Kenji is a reluctant hero. He is living with Noi (no sex, remember he's gay), and Noi's ex boyfriend is furious. The boyfriend, Jon, is a real piece of garbage. He seduced Noi's little sister, so he has had both sisters, despite the fact that Noi was his girlfriend. We see him with a different girl, grabbing her by the hair, stuffing a cigarette into her mouth, taking it back out, and shoving her head down as he orders her to blow him some more, then he smacks her in the head and says "watch your teeth".

Jon turns into a stalker, because Noi tells him off when he calls. Jon won't just let her go. He shows up at the house and punches and kicks Noi. Kenji is in the other room. Jon takes off his belt and starts whipping Noi on the floor. Kenji strolls in, grabs the whip hand, and punches Jon in the face. See, Kenji is a yakuza. Jon leaves, a coward at heart, threatening Kenji as he leaves. Jon ends up getting killed by the yakuza assassins just because he was in Kenji's apartment when they arrived.

One odd thing about this movie is the way the director substitutes Noi's little sister Nid for her. Nid is dead. She was killed in a car crash early in the movie. But in some later scenes with Noi, if you look closely you see it is Nid, not Noi. The director of the movie sometimes switches actresses on you. There's even one scene where Noi lays on a couch with Kenji, and then all you can see of Noi is her legs, and they are all bruised and bloody - because they are Nid's legs and she was run over by a car.

Noi has a beautiful face, kind of on the thin side. Nid has a fuller face and is even prettier than Noi. When you first see Noi and her face is fuller and prettier you just think what the hell?

Nid dresses in a Catholic school outfit. She dresses like an eighth grader. The thing is, she and her sister are both prostitutes.

There are some very touching moments. Noi is looking at a photo of herself and her baby sister when they were little. Later, when Noi leaves her Thailand apartment to head for Osaka, as the car drives off, the camera focuses on a potted plant by the apartment, and we hear Noi say "goodbye .... Nid". The ending of the movie is controversial, with many explanations given. I think I've got it figured out now.

Kenji is in a prison. He is in handcuffs. He's apparently waiting to be interrogated. He lights a cigarette. The first time we see him there, we see him from behind, and a huge yakuza tattoo is revealed for the first time, covering his back. Either he was arrested on suspicion of killing one or more of the three dead bodies in his apartment (his dead brother was killed by a yakuza assassin, that assassin was in turn killed by Kenji in self defense, and Jon was killed by the other three yakuza assassins), or he was arrested for being an internationally known yakuza.

Then the scene shifts to Osaka, where we see Noi (or is it sometimes Nid?) wiping off a table in a restaurant, looking so tidy, then going to her apartment. Keep in mind that Noi is the single messiest girl in the world, leaving dishes and crap all over her house and not caring a thing, and that she is a whore, not a waitress, and in fact, when Kenji had asked her what she is going to do in Osaka, her answer was "same thing I do here".

Someone tells Noi that she has a visitor. The camera pans to a few items that are connected to Kenji, so the visitor is obviously Kenji, free from jail and visiting a girl he loves, though he doesn't want sex with her.

Then the camera switches back to Kenji in jail, musing, smoking his cigarette. Show the credits.

The interpretation is that Kenji is daydreaming, in jail, of the way he wants Noi to be. He's not in Osaka, at least not yet, and he is about to go on trial in Thailand. It's all the same to him anyway, since he is plenty tough enough to survive jail, and might like the sex life there, but he does like to daydream, and he does love his adorable slob Noi.