Showing 1 - 8 of 8
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!
It's alive!
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/12/2021
» Doomsayers will have to hold out a little longer. Cinema -- as in people sitting in the dark taking in a communal experience of audiovisual sensations -- is still breathing, moving, enlightening.
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.
Knives are out in death penalty row
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/06/2018
» To execute or not to execute, the question weighed on Thai society in the past week with the force of righteous anger. It is a tough question, one that lays bare the complex intersection of morality, law, religion, belief, value, and even the position of the country on the spectrum along which the international norm is moving.
'Pre-truth' far scarier than 'post-truth'
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/11/2016
» 'Post-truth" -- that's Oxford Dictionaries' word of 2016. Trump-inspired and aided by Facebook algorithms, it clicks. What happens isn't as important as what you think happens, and if you think something is true, then what is true is simply what you think. But truth be told, post-truth still suggests an involvement of truth, how truth is there and yet is blithely bypassed by emotion and prejudice, and thus there's a more dangerous term that fits better in some places: "pre-truth".
Ditch this witch
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/09/2016
» What an unnecessary movie. Seventeen years after The Blair Witch Project stormed Sundance and gave birth to the found-footage horror sub-genre -- in which we watch grainy video purportedly filmed by victims of horrifying phenomena -- this reboot comes late at the tail-end of our visual epoch flooded by smartphone clips, with handheld amateur images so abundant in our stream of perception that we no longer see the novelty or excitement in shaky pictures that supposedly contain gruesome scandals. It's awful, but aren't we seeing that almost every day online or in the news?
Braving the mainstream
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/09/2015
» What's so romantic about a public hospital examination room? "It's a small, closed space. The two people in there can't escape each other," says filmmaker Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit.
In search of the next hit
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/06/2015
» A string of box-office failures, an absence of hits, an onslaught of Hollywood blockbusters, an economic slump, the vacillating, unpredictable taste of audiences — all of this has plunged the Thai film industry into a gloom in the first half of 2015. Home-grown cinema can barely compete with the American juggernauts, but the past six months have been particularly wounding. Usually, Thai films take around 25% of the ticket sales, with Hollywood gobbling up the rest (the total box office value was around 4.5 billion in last year). This year, so far, local movies took a paltry 10%, according to industry analysts.