Showing 31 - 40 of 46
Rain bursting to let all hell break loose
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/06/2015
» Like hell, Bangkok is low-lying, hot like fire and prone to floods. It houses desperate souls punished by heat and rain, sometimes, miraculously, on the same day. It’s also extremely vulnerable to water falling from the sky, as evident again on Monday when the city was cursed by the crashing midnight downpour, transforming roads into lakes, gutters into geysers, and commuters into sinners looking for salvation. What have we done to deserve this? Everything.
Our ‘saviours’ say shut up, put up, pay up
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2015
» Death and taxes are the only two sure things in life, so the joke goes. I had a nice time at the tax office last week, three days before the deadline. It wasn’t a “fun time”, which is impossible, but nice enough in my dealings with a courteous tax lady who performed her arithmetic gifts with a pencil and calculator, smiling and helpful in her office full of paper and weary-looking taxpayers — some of them street vendors and odd-jobbers, I gathered. There’s something Kafka-esque about a visit to the Revenue Office: The mild dread (of what?), the anxious wait and, above all, the wild guess about the bureaucratic labyrinth that delivers our payment into the invisible state coffers.
Going mad in March, with fear of tragedy
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/03/2015
» The March heat is driving people crazy. Each week, news headlines just get weirder, as if we were madmen who subscribe to the newsletter of our madhouse. Don’t tell me you never experience that moment when a headline is so absurd, so improbable that you believe − I mean, really believe for many seconds or minutes — that you’re reading one of those satirical publications or websites that peddles mockery and exaggeration. Only it’s not. It’s real. And if madness is defined by the inability to distinguish between what’s real and what’s fantastical, we’re all going down that path, led by the smiling Pied Piper in uniform.
Autocratic filmmaking is our forte
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/12/2014
» In the week Sony censored itself and shelved the Christmas Day release of The Interview, a comedy about the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, I'm reminded of this slim book on my desk which I sometimes flip to random pages. One has this: "In the capitalist system of filmmaking the director is called 'director' but, in fact, the right of supervision and control over film production is entirely in the hands of the tycoons of the filmmaking industry who have the money, whereas the directors are nothing but their agents."
Force-fed film belongs deep in dark vaults
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/12/2014
» Strange things have happened at the cinemas. First, Hitler showed up in a Thai short film sponsored by the government (meaning by taxpayers), the radioactive gatecrasher into a party of virtuous citizens. Second, another Thai film featuring, among other things, a joke about the anal cleft — it's funny as long as it's not your anal cleft — is raking in a huge amount of money at the multiplexes, likely surpassing the 100-million-baht mark as you're reading this, which is after just four days of release. Cinema enlightens, even in the dark forest of swastikas and bodily bergschrunds.
South doesn't need any more gun-slingers
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/11/2014
» When you have cowboys and gun-slingers running the circus, it's likely to be all bang-bang. An eye for an eye, a rifle for a rifle, a kill for a kill, and as the Apache warriors storm the citadels of the new frontiers, the sheriffs are prodded to become trigger-happy.
A passport to happiness is all you need
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/07/2014
» Like a sinner praying for salvation, I pray that the Ministry of Education will launch the "good deeds passports" project before the next full moon. Kids, parents and disciplinarians are dying to wave it around like a diploma of sanity, or an amulet against ghosts and anarchism. The Education Ministry is so educated that it has tapped into the zeitgeist: moral bookkeeping, and control of the happiness barometer (check out the military carnival at Sanam Luang), will guarantee the bright future of democratic Thailand.
Footie ecstasy prescription won't last long
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/06/2014
» Tell me, what’s happiness? Football, of course. Not playing it, not qualifying for it, but consuming it. Precisely, happiness is watching the 64 matches of the highest-level football played in the far-flung Amazonian longitudes, the broadcast signals being sucked live from space to the tubes of 65 million Thais at the expense of — a bargain, I believe — 427 million baht paid for by tax money from the public purse straight to a private firm. They should make it a policy to distribute ecstasy pills to accompany our late-night viewing, just to be certain maximum happiness is achieved, sustained and thanked for.
Flag turns the national into factional
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/02/2014
» Red, white and blue. The tricolour Thai national flag has never been this omnipresent.
Paranoia, politics mute Thai cinema
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/07/2013
» When there is not a ghost film making headlines by raking in a whopping billion baht at the box-office, movie news in this country is often about censorship, which stalks certain filmmakers like a serial killer. This week we have two such news items, both under-reported, and both concerning the larger issue of media freedom. Let's take a look.