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This time-honored ritual, a sweetly reverential act repeated hundreds of times a day at theaters throughout the kingdom, is part of what makes going to the movies one of Bangkok's great little unsung pleasures -- particularly at the newer cinemas, which offer efficient computerized booking systems (no need to queue up for good seats), up-to-date sound and projection equipment and the singular option of choosing dried squid treats instead of popcorn at the lobby snack bar.

With tickets selling for only about $3 at the city's impressive inventory of modern multiplexes, Bangkok would be a true paradise for cinephiles were it not for an unfortunate dearth of good pictures rolling through all those high-fidelity projectors. At almost any given time, a handful of mediocre Hollywood blockbusters monopolizes the local listings, consistently favoring the kind of shallow comedies and action-packed thrillers that lose nothing in translation. But so appealing are the movie houses themselves, my wife and I routinely scan the new releases for a convincing excuse to spend an evening at the cinema, frequently settling for titles we hope will be at least mildly entertaining if not especially memorable.

It was in this spirit that we attended a screening last March of "The Beach," starring Earth Day 2000 poster boy Leonardo DiCaprio. The film adaptation of Alex Garland's dark novel was just out in Thailand, but reviewers in the States had been badmouthing it for weeks, so we arrived at the theater with decidedly low expectations and were not the least bit disappointed.

Squirming through the ponderous tale of an island Utopia gone seriously awry, I wondered how the Thais in the audience must feel seeing their culture reduced to such incidental, two-dimensional characters: The weird old witch of a chambermaid, the sneering snake blood salesman, the heartless police detective, the sadistic posse of backwoods dope farmers with fingers ever twitching on the triggers of their automatic weapons.

Then it dawned on me that my own culture wasn't faring so well either, represented in the film by an impetuous and self-indulgent American backpacker who goes hog wild in the tropics after running away from home in pursuit of an escapist adolescent fantasy.

Despite director Danny Boyle's best efforts to make us like DiCaprio, the most heroic figure in "The Beach" strangely turns out to be the chief marijuana grower, played with convincing edginess and pragmatism by Abhijati "Meuk" Jusakul. When the final confrontation between farmers and foreigners brings the story to a long overdue climax, Jusakul delivers the film's most gripping moment -- and only example of subtle character development -- as he works out a harsh but eminently sensible resolution to the conflict that doesn't involve blowing the whole lot of pathetic farang kids to kingdom come.

More intriguing than the movie itself is the ongoing debate about the real beach at Maya Bay on the island of Phi Phi Leh, where much of the filming took place. Protesters picketing outside the Bangkok premiere called for a general boycott of "The Beach" on the grounds that location work for the film -- which involved bulldozing sand dunes and planting a temporary grove of coconut palms -- had caused irreparable damage to a sensitive littoral ecosystem within Thailand's Koh Phi Phi Had Nopparat Thara Marine National Park. Twentieth Century Fox, which obtained a permit to use the site, contends that its crew left the beach in better condition than when it arrived, removing the imported palm trees, restoring the dunes and hauling away tons of previously accumulated flotsam and jetsam.

Later the plot thickened when significant sand erosion became apparent at Maya Bay after last year's rainy season. Environmental activists blamed inadequate restoration of the native vegetation that would have stabilized the dunes. Royal Forestry Department officials countered that unusually strong monsoon storms were responsible, insisting that the dunes would re-form naturally over time.

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