Showing 1 - 10 of 19
The afterlife of Mitr Chaibancha
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/10/2023
» In an abrupt moment of life's brutal script, Mitr Chaibancha fell to his death from a helicopter ladder on Oct 8, 1970. He was filming Insee Thong (Golden Eagle), playing an anti-communist masked hero, when he slipped from the rung and plunged to the ground in Pattaya. That same evening, his body was transported to Wat Kae Nang Loeng. Thousands of people, unable to believe that Thailand's most famous actor was really, tragically dead, amassed impromptu at the temple and demanded that his corpse be raised from the coffin and shown to the public.
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.
Life, love, liberation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/09/2017
» In the sole Thai film showing at Toronto International Film Festival this week, a soap opera star stuck in a loveless marriage tangles with an eccentric hitman and a powerful cult. Samui Song is the latest feature film by Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, who's fashioned a crime thriller that also plays as a critique of many things: patriarchal oppression, faux-Buddhism, public healthcare and the act of cinema-making itself.
EU film fest brings many shades of modern Europe
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/05/2017
» The stories of Europe are told in the 13 films at the European Union Film Festival 2017, which begins tonight at SF CentralWorld.
Scenes from a marriage
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/01/2016
» Memories are ghosts, and so, the marital drama 45 Years is in a way a ghost story. The film begins with Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling, rightly nominated for an Oscar) walking her Alsatian back home in the idyllic outskirts of an English town. The mailman has just dropped a letter at her house and when Kate is back inside, she finds her husband of 45 years, Geoff (Tom Courtenay), reading it. That's when the ghost is awoken: the letter from the Swiss authorities informs Geoff that the body of his ex-girlfriend, killed in a fatal climbing accident 50 years ago, has been found in a melted glacier.
The (sur)real world
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/03/2015
» Chulayarnnon Siriphol can't keep his jokes to himself. He has the boyish — some might say nerdy — looks of a milk-fed goody two-shoes mama's boy, but in his films, the 29-year-old often thrives on pranks, satire, mischief and a brand of droll, childlike humour that cuts through the slough of hypocrisy.
Cannes Day 8: Killing me softly
Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» Brad Pitt is here. He plays Jackie Cogan, the typically violent and fashionably cheeky hitman in "Killing Them Softly". The film is so stylised that you thought the director, Andrew Dominik, was actually trying to impress Jean-Paul Gaultier, who sits on Cannes' jury this year. Each murder, by Cogan mostly, is designed to its nano-second detail, with every shard of bullet-shattered glass visible in its fatal, mid-air flight. Amidst the killings and score-settling, Barack Obama, on TV, campaigns for new America and the soundbites constantly tell us how badly the economy is doing. "Killing Them Softly" is a film that's so conscious about its cleverness that it seems less clever eventually, and one of the clever messages it constantly reminds us is summed up in Cogan's last sentence: "America is not a country, it's a business." I wonder if Quentin Tarantino could've made it more subtle, and more comical.
Be afraid, but not very afraid
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/10/2014
» Bring me the heads of horror filmmakers, for this Halloween Thai cinemas are auspiciously crawling with ghosts. Two new Thai films — one passably creepy, the other disappointing — are in theatres to supply a spook fix during this demon-infested weekend; there are rotten-faced zombies and posthumous vengeance, and hysterical possession and haunted infrastructure (hospital, house, factory, bathroom, you name it). Lately, Thai horror movies aren't getting high readings on the scare-o-meter, and yet in the land of a million spirit houses, ghosts still reign as a sound business venture and cinematic catalyst. Of the two new films, the more thought-out and carefully-scripted is The Eyes Diary, directed by Chookiat Sakveerakul. By his standard — Chookiat made the grisly 13 Beloved and teen romance The Love Of Siam — the new film is a minor exercise. The Eyes Diary sets out to probe a litany of themes — guilt, love, sacrifice, fatal obsession — but as one of Thailand's most reliable scriptwriters, I only wish Chookiat would've twisted them harder and darker.
Thawan Duchanee: Losing a legend
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/09/2014
» National Artist Thawan Duchanee passed away yesterday, but his work and most important philosophy and contribution to popular Thai thought and art will live on
A hard drug for the eyes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/08/2014
» This is a tar pit. This is the eternal midnight, the thrash metal nocturne. This is some of the most striking black-and-white imagery, half-baroque, half-graffiti, dripping and saturated with lush shadows. This is also empty. The hollowness of it all is a badge of pride for the filmmakers. With Sin City: A Dame to Kill For — like the first Sin City in 2005 — you can't take your eyes off the hyper-stylised fetishism on-screen (or at least off Eva Green's strategically obscured body parts), but you'll find it difficult to remember anything afterwards. This is instant gratification, a hard drug for the eyes.