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Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/07/2020
» Evil is not banal in Ju-on: Origins, a particularly grisly six-part Netflix series. The J-horror wave that broke at the turn of the millennium may no longer be in vogue, but this supposed origin story of the 2001 Ju-On: The Grudge is probably even more extreme in its depiction of ghostly malice and vengeance. It's scarier too -- if you have a stomach for murder, disembowelment, matricide and self-combustibility -- because here the origin of violence is mostly domestic: the violence committed by father against mother, mother against daughter, husband against wife, friend against friend. It's a series (or you could see it as a three-hour film) about monsters that shows us that monstrosity really is born and raised first and foremost by humans.
Highbrow picks from Netflix
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/05/2020
» Cannes Film Festival, the annual jamboree of world cinema usually taking place in May, has been postponed until further notice. In its absence, we delve into the Netflix menu and find four films that made their debut at Cannes over the past decades and made a noise in their own way.
Fierce and pitiful
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/03/2019
» Krasue is a Thai ghost beside whom vampires -- and other blood-lusting Western monsters -- pale in comparison. Basically a detached head of a woman floating around in the dark, lit up by a phosphorescent glow from her still-beating heart, and with her bloody entrails dangling below the head like an infested creeper, krasue feeds on, naturally, filth, blood, corpses and carcasses. Sometimes it's compared, for the sake of convenience, with Gothic-era will-o'-the-wisp or jack-o'-lantern. But seriously, please, that is a gross under-characterisation that discounts the supreme grotesqueness of krasue, born by the pulpy fantasy of our equatorial folklorists.
La La Land, Moonlight directors invoke 2016
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2018
» Two years ago it was Damien Chazelle's La La Land vs Barry Jenkins' Moonlight at the Oscars. This year, the race between the same two directors seems to be shaping up again. This week at Toronto International Film Festival, Chazelle returns with his "Moon movie" First Man, and Jenkins with his adaptation of James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk. The award season -- for those who still care -- is gearing up full steam now.
Off to a quiet start
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/01/2016
» For its first two days, the 68th Cannes Film Festival hasn't managed to turn up the real heat. The world's most famous tapis rouge — or red carpet — of the Grande Theatre Lumiere might be set ablaze by the stars of the furiously hellish Mad Max: Fury Road, showing Out of Competition, but talking points early in this cine-circus include Catherine Deneuve's caricature on the cover of Charlie Hebdo and Salma Hayek gnawing at a sea dragon's heart cooked by a virgin. Otherwise, café punditry keeps up the Cannes tradition of guessing the Palme d'Or winner without anyone having seen all the contestants. Elsewhere on the Boulevard de la Croisette, things remained pretty underwhelming.
The reel deal
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/10/2012
» From the first Indian movie to Satyajit Ray and a recent corporate thriller, the many faces of Indian cinema are to be splashed on Bangkok screens _ with Thai subtitles and free of charge.
The Sound of Silence
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/06/2012
» Prince Gautama silently weeps, and the violin sighs. Gently, like a tiptoeing deer, the koto's murmuring melody comes in beneath the rhythmic carpet of the tabla drums.
Temple fair in the clouds
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2012
» Prayers in Paragon Hall. New iPad apps on meditation centres. A haunted house in which earthly desires stalk you like inexorable ghosts. A "dharma boy band" of singers interpreting their tunes through the spiritual looking glass. Then monks as film programmers picking movies that discuss virtues and vices in diverse voices. In short, Buddhism in a new setting: Buddhism in a mall.