Showing 1 - 10 of 10
In the dark places
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/11/2018
» It rains incessantly in Zhang Yimou's Shadow, a monochromatic palace-intrigue-and-martial-arts high rhapsody set in a perpetual monsoon. Everything is grey, brown, black and white, a solemn palette befitting a solemn story interspersed with a blur of sword-fighting where warriors wield blades and umbrellas as if they were painting calligraphy.
See Snow White in all its big screen grandeur
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/04/2018
» Can you name the seven dwarfs, as in Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs?
Much more than just animation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/02/2017
» One of the year's best animated movies didn't come from Pixar and Disney. It's this little-heralded film from Michael Dudok de Wit, a Dutchman picked by Studio Ghibli to helm its first international co-production. La Tortue Rouge (The Red Turtle), which doesn't have that many screenings left now (why?), is a calm, quietly touching beauty, a fable about man, nature, family, the environment -- I don't know, life itself. It has no dialogue, just the sounds of wind and waves, the storm and the sea. It's not going to win the Oscar, for which it has been nominated, but not winning an Oscar is probably an even higher honour a good film can hope for.
In Your Name, a conspiracy of the stars
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/11/2016
» A millennial comet is hurtling past Earth and two Japanese teenagers wake up one morning with their bodies switched, living each other's life and dreaming each other's dream. Mitsuha in a small rural town becomes Taki, and Taki in Tokyo becomes Mitsuha. Then time bends, souls migrate, the sky bursts, and the painful transience of love pushes and pulls the two high-schoolers in a conspiracy of stars (and quantum physics, maybe).
Projecting a cinematic institution
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2016
» Ideally, a documentary film about the last stand-alone cinema in Bangkok should be shown on the big screen of that cinema. But while that hasn't happened, The Scala, a one hour film by Aditya Assarat about Scala Theatre, will be showing on True Thai Film channel on True Visions on Friday at 9pm.
7 car stud
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/04/2015
» With Furious 7, the superhero season has begun — and these guys (and girls) are so poised in their invincibility that they don't even bother to put on spandex costumes.
Snowden under siege
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/03/2015
» The Oscar-winning Citizenfour has opened in Bangkok. An opportune cinema experience here in our land of 99.9% democracy where the contentious Cyber Security Bills are being revised, the so-called Edward Snowden documentary seethes with unsettling power. Its civic outrage is strong, but the cool-headed storytelling gives it gravity. The immediacy of the issue at its heart is also the debate of the early 21st century. And if the film lets us know from the start that it's taking the side of the whistle-blower, all the better.
A post-love story
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/02/2014
» Spike Jonze's feature-film career concerns pretty much about burrowing in, and messing up, his characters' heads. The human hard-drive the cerebrum is where all the secrets in the world, which is actually the secrets about ourselves, are stored: Being John Malkovich (1999) is a literal response to that perennial itch about being someone else; Adaptation (2002) brilliantly simulates the way a writer agonises over his thought process; Where The Wild Things Are (2009) takes place inside a boy's head. All of these films have a giddy, nebulous, childish quality, and they throw surreally hard questions at us with straight-faced frivolity.
Small-screen superstars
Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/01/2014
» Travelling projectionists once crisscrossed Thailand with their canvas screens and suitcases stocked with film rolls.
Jobs for the fanboys
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2013
» The opening scene of Jobs, the feeble biopic of the iconic Apple founder, is the one that keeps recurring throughout the film, with varying degrees of hagiographical worship, which is never less than lofty.