Showing 1 - 10 of 10
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.
The skin I live in
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/01/2019
» The body is a temple. But it can also be a torture chamber, from which escape, while possible, is soul-crushing. Lukas Dhont's Girl is an emphatic, moving story about Lara (Victor Polster), a Belgian trans teen at an elite ballet school who's going through male-to-female gender reassignment. That she has to contend with her own hormones and pre-assigned biological specifics, as well as the fact that her chosen career mandates extreme rigour in how the body should bend and behave, Lara's fight is nothing short of heroic. And in that vein, the film is as well.
Film lab open house and fair
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/11/2018
» From tomorrow until Nov 6, the Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab (Seafic) will host an open house at the Goethe-Institut Thailand and Alliance Française Bangkok. Seafic is the pioneering non-profit filmmakers' lab for Southeast Asian directors and producers, and has gained more momentum as a launch pad for new film projects from upcoming directors in the region.
Some Southeast Asian picks from the Busan International Film Festival
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/10/2018
» How do Aceh and Japan, two places that seem unrelated, separated by a vast distance of land and sea, connect on the personal and historical level?
Indonesia's torchbearers
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/11/2016
» A woman who rises above the trauma of polygamy in Sulawesi; a Muslim girl and her transvestite father, who works the street of Jakarta; three sisters in a courtship game; a war veteran confronting the harsh aftermath of newly independent Indonesia. At the Tokyo International Film Festival this year, Indonesia is the focus of the Crosscut Asia section, a programme that telescopes national cinema for social and aesthetic angles.
Romancing Bangkok
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/08/2016
» Paris had Paris Je T'aime, New York had New York I Love You. Now Bangkok has its own film ensemble drawn from different neighbourhoods of the city. Bangkok Stories, a portmanteau of six films telling tales of brief encounters and nebulous romance, will premier tonight at the 20th Short Film and Video Festival at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, before going on to cinema and television release later.
Will the best films win the Oscars?
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/02/2016
» The Oscar night is also the Oscar-bashing night. It was always the night (or morning, in our time zone) of constant bemoaning and condescension, because the Academy voters, like most voters, always get it wrong, at least to million others around the world who believe, in our collective delirium, that we have a stake in this pageant taking place somewhere in Los Angeles. Things have taken a turn for the worse with the snap judgement made possible by social media; now the outrage and disbelief are so raw since they're aired in real time, on Facebook and Twitter, like I did last year when I was convinced that it was against every law of nature that Birdman, a well-crafted display of pretension and self-obsession, won over the more delicate Boyhood.
Girls just wanna have fun
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/01/2016
» Two transhookers are not looking for love and warmth on Christmas Eve around the crummy blocks of Los Angeles. In Sean Baker's hilarious, rambunctious and surprisingly sweet a-crappy-day-in-the-life-of-African-American-streetwalkers, they are looking for horny customers, and for their slick pimp and his new lover (who's "a fish", derogatory slang for real women). It's also a surprise that Tangerine, a guerilla-style indie film shot entirely on iPhones, has made its way to Thai cinemas (only at SF), and those keen to sample an unusual flavour of high-spirited wacky comedy with its heart in the right place, this is the one to go for this weekend.
The Wolf's spectacular folly
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/01/2014
» Propelled by manic energy, Martin Scorsese's The Wolf Of Wall Street zips through a dollar-fuelled bacchanalia and raunchy pool parties (there are so many pool parties) with train-wrecking velocity. It's as if the filmmakers and their cast are popping speed pills or knocking back a succession of Red Bulls. You watch the film with exhilaration and dread, a dread that the entire narrative accelerating, over the top and almost unstoppable is going to veer over the precipice and crash, leaving Leonardo DiCaprio smiling goofily in the rubble. But it's not; this is tightly controlled filmmaking in the guise of something running amok, and it's actually that sense of dread, risk and danger that fires us up and keeps us on edge. Scorsese is 72 and yet, hats off to him, this film feels like a young man plunging into an all-night orgy while managing to somehow stay sober amidst the threat of overkill.
Pride of place
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/10/2012
» Twenty-five Thai films were yesterday listed as National Cinematographic Heritage under a Thai Film Archive project, now in its second year, that seeks to recognise and preserve films of historical and cultural importance. The objective is to raise awareness about the need for conservation of the country's audio-visual treasures in a world increasingly ruled by fleetingness and evanescence.