Showing 1 - 10 of 22
Poor Barbie... Oppenheimer's the bomb
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/03/2024
» The annual guessing game to read the minds of inscrutable Oscars voters is here.
Piyabutr plays House role by the book
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/09/2019
» How thick does a book need to be to stop a bullet? Perhaps, I imagine, Piyabutr Saengkanokkul is asking himself that same question.
Dream, murder and reality
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/05/2018
» The 11-day Cannes Film Festival will close tomorrow, and as the race for the Palme d'Or is the most breathtaking in years, we look at some of the highlights of the second week of the world's largest movie festival
Time is not on our side
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/01/2018
» This is a note on an important Thai film that is unlikely to be shown in Thailand. Such is the fate of home-grown cinema in a time of disease, the time of a black hole.
Human traffic
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/11/2017
» Edmund Yeo started writing the film Aqerat before the word "Rohingya" would make world news headlines -- entirely for a distressing reason. Now the Malaysian film, which had its premiere in the main competition of the 30th Tokyo International Film Festival this week, has proved prescient as over 500,000 of Myanmar's Rohingya minority have fled violence for Bangladesh in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in years.
A trip to Diamond Island
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/04/2017
» It's a story of Cambodia but also of Southeast Asia: the new rich built on the back of rural labour, young men who leave their homes in the countryside to carry bricks and build real-estate edifices in the capital. The promise of the future is built on the uncertainty of the present.
Ground reality
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/09/2016
» In The Road To Mandalay, young Myanmar migrants hide in the cargo of a truck trundling past the borders into Thailand. In Bangkok, they look for jobs with the dream that every Myanmar worker dreams: to save money and return home, or better, to go somewhere else where life is kinder. They both find work in a textile factory in the outskirts, the female weaving yarns and the male lifting machines. To them, Thailand is a land of hope, though they'll soon find out, like many Myanmar workers do, that it's also a limbo, a perpetual transit, a non-place where hope can be dashed in seconds and desire can turn into tragedy.
Desolation row
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/08/2016
» Ripping through lonesome plains and highway desolation, two Texan brothers set out to rob banks that, technically, have been robbing their family for years. Tanner and Toby (Ben Foster and Chris Pine) are siblings at different ends of the spectrum: the first a wild coyote, a jittery flask of criminal energy; the second a melancholic fox, handsome, sad and serious.
IS a threat even if they aren't here
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/07/2016
» Ramadan has ended, and what a bloodied Ramadan it was as the godless terror of the so-called Islamic State (IS) -- though I prefer Daesh -- spilled innocent blood and soiled the spirit of the holy month.
Of military, monks and an unholy mess
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/02/2016
» It was a match made in heaven, if heaven had a wrestling match. A few hundred monks from the Sangha Buddhist Alliance faced off with 150 soldiers on Monday at Phutthamonthon park, saffron vs green, tonsured vs crew-cut, as a mini brawl broke out between the two sides over the contested supreme patriarch nomination. Choice photos show a monk head-lock a soldier, jujitsu-style, while soldiers were blocking the angry brethren from entering the park. It was an unholy mess. I thought we were watching news from Myanmar, only that Myanmar seems peaceful these days.