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  • LIFE

    Harry shows Bangkok some Styles

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/03/2023

    » The accessory du jour was the fluffy pink boa. The colour scheme was hot pink -- pink pants, pink boots, pink cowboy hats, pink eyeshadow, pink hijabs. Or if not pink, then anything in the tooth-aching shades of the rainbow. It was a lively, joyous sight on Saturday night, a show of hot-hue aesthetics in a defiant contrast to the brutalist concrete skeleton of Rajamangala Stadium. How I wish concrete-mad Bangkok could look like this every day!

  • LIFE

    Handicapping the Oscars

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/04/2021

    » Nomadland for Best Picture

  • LIFE

    Corona and the death of cinema (again)

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/03/2020

    » "Cinema is an invention without a future," said Louis Lumiere who, along with his brother Auguste, invented the Cinematographe in 1895. From its birth, cinema was convinced of its own death. From the very beginning, cinema predicted its own eventual demise. And that was before the two world wars, the advent of home video, laser disc, DVDs, Blu-rays, terrorism, mass shootings, Netflix, and now the coronavirus, the latest scourge that has sealed shut cinema houses around the world.

  • LIFE

    Bismillah, Freddie will not let us go

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/11/2018

    » Freddie Mercury, played with an earnest commitment bordering on fetishism by Rami Malek in the biographical film Bohemian Rhapsody, is a rock star the likes of which we hadn't seen before the 1970s and haven't since: An Asian frontman of a British rock outfit, a four-octave opera lover who sang in leotards and thongs, a proud organiser of orgiastic jamborees, and a gay man who endeared himself to the hard-rock audience that, in all likelihood in those pre-diversity days, either failed to realise that their mustachioed rock-god was out-and-out queer or suppressed their suspicion so completely that they didn't feel any cognitive dissonance in their devotion to Queen. Even the name Freddie gave the band laid it all bare.

  • LIFE

    Sometimes transcendental, always relevant

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/05/2018

    » The American films were on short supply this year at Cannes -- which in turn deprived the assembly line of red carpet material -- but nobody seemed to mind that except, well, some American media and fashion bloggers. That superfluous caveat aside, the recently wrapped 71st Cannes Film Festival was nearly unanimously praised as one of the best editions in recent memory, with a string of good, sometimes very good, titles playing night after night -- and even the bad films weren't so offensively bad, as was often the case. In the midst of soul-searching following the question of relevance (the world wants Avengers), the rise of streaming (the world watches films on phones), the decline of arthouse popularity, Cannes insists on the sacredness of cinema, on the future of the art, and this year it paid off solidly.

  • LIFE

    Image is everything

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/05/2018

    » Cinema, Jean-Luc Godard said via FaceTime, is X+3 = 1. The X, of course, is -2.

  • LIFE

    Strange brew

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/03/2018

    » He went down to the crossroads, fell down on his knees, asked the Lord for mercy -- and somehow got it. In this biopic documentary, Eric Clapton -- his place in the pantheon of guitar god-dom guaranteed -- is a tragic genius denounced by his own mother and nurturing a desperate crush on his best friend's wife, which kept his guitar wailing and weeping. Here's a 60s-70s blues-rock maverick who sold his soul to heroin, cocaine, cognac, whatever, and when he emerged from the pit and things began to feel wonderful tonight, he lost his son in a terrible, terrible accident. That a new documentary about his life to date is allowed to end happily is proof that rock'n'roll (and life itself) can cheat the claws of fate and go on for longer than 12 bars.

  • LIFE

    'Be yourself'

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/11/2017

    » Shawn Mendes came away from the MTV Europe Music Awards (EMA) on Sunday with the top honour of Best Artist. The 18-year-old former YouTube star has come a long way from his early internet stardom, with his 2015 album Handwritten debuting at No.1 on Billboard's Top 200 Album chart -- and 2.3 billion streams worldwide. Mendes' 2016 album Illuminate again debuted at No.1 on the Billboard chart and went on to garner much popular and critical acclaim.

  • LIFE

    Windows on the world

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/09/2017

    » As Hussain Currimbhoy sees it, this is a golden age for documentary filmmaking, a time when the criss-crossing narratives of the world tangle with audiences' growing suspicion over traditional media. The emergence of streaming services has also revolutionised distribution philosophy and connected doc-makers with audiences in ways unseen before, especially with audiences who once had little interest in documentary titles.

  • LIFE

    The outspoken monk

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/05/2017

    » At the start The Venerable W., we see the firebrand Myanmar monk Ashin Wirathu speaking to the camera, calmly and casually. He talks about the African catfish, a creature that "grows fast, breeds a lot and is violent". The punchline is not totally unpredictable: "Muslims are like that."

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