Showing 1 - 10 of 11
Love, beauty, violence
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/05/2024
» Last year, the world embraced Barbie and Poor Things, two outstanding films that tapped into the state of female consciousness in the 21st century. At the 77th Cannes Film Festival, which ends tomorrow, women-driven stories of all stripes are pushed further up (or down) the emotional spectrum. A noticeable number of titles premiering at the influential festival feature female protagonists in varying states of joy and distress -- and to varying results. Powerful acting by female talent also injects life and spirit into those stories, hailing from all corners of the Earth.
Staying afloat on a sea of despair
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/12/2019
» Chakra (Sarm Heng) is a Cambodian peasant boy who wants to escape a rural existence that offers him no future. "How's Thailand?" he asks a friend who returns from working at a construction site in Bangkok. "If you work hard, there's no problem," his friend assures him. Through trafficking agents, Chakra is smuggled across the border, but instead of being sent to a factory or a construction site, the boy is thrown onto a fishing trawler and forced to work without pay in conditions resembling a floating prison.
Truth and lies
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/05/2018
» By some description, this is one of the most political editions of Cannes Film Festival in recent memory, both on screen and off. After three days, the brouhaha over #MeToo (the festival has a dedicated hotline for sexual harassment report, which begs the question: why here and now?), the comment by Jury President Cate Blanchett on the small percentage of female filmmakers in the programme, and the fact that two of the directors whose films are in the competition are under house arrest in their respective countries (Iran and Russia) -- all of this cast a mixed shadow over the 71st edition of the world's largest film festival that still boasts influence and glamour while struggling to maintain its relevance.
Pray against intolerance in the far South
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/02/2017
» Being a teenager is hard. Being a teenager in the deep South is harder. Being an LGBT teenager is also hard. And being an LGBT teenager in the deep South is even harder, sometimes the hardest.
Art, revenge, despair
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/11/2016
» Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals opens with a montage of naked, fat-rippling, extremely obese women, their bodies wrapped in the American flag as they dance to the beat. We then cut to the opening of an art exhibition featuring those naked women on platforms, curled up as live installation pieces, or as morbid glitz, an excess of grotesquerie amid the well-dressed LA crowd.
Monking around on the big screen
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/04/2016
» Men in saffron robes are a force to be reckoned with; in life, in headline news, and in Thai cinema. At a time when monks scuffle with monks, and sometimes with the authorities, a new Thai film about a funny monk is raking it in at the cinemas.
Lots to love about The Hateful Eight
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/01/2016
» In the stewpot of Quentin Tarantino's tough-to-chew ingredients: graphic violence, racial animosity (if not racist hyperbole), linguistic provocation (counting the "n" word has become a sort of a game), indulgence in profanity and political incorrectness of all stripe, then in The Hateful Eight, the nearly three-hour-long film is largely set in just one room. Heads smashed, women bashed, scrotum busted, black-man-white-man paranoia in full display -- the director's well-oiled strategy is to couch his exploitation exercise in cynical black comedy and gabby digressions -- those delicious, funny, grandiloquent lectures on history and justice that he lately seems to favour.
The Darkest Hours
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/08/2015
» A psychosexual Thai gay film is a rare treat -- actually it's almost unprecedented. Anucha Boonyawatana's Onthakarn (The Blue Hour) arrives at SF cinemas this week with a strong tail wind after its premiere in Berlin in February. Nightmarish, oblique and deliberately disjointed, the film is in part ambient horror and in part a brooding drama about family violence centred around a gay teenager. We savour its chilly mood, its haunting wasteland of disaffected youth, though we sometimes wince at the stilted dialogue. What we see is also a confident switch between what's real and what's not, which is to say The Blue Hour is not something for the impatient and the literal-minded.
Cannes, mon amour
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» Love and other nightmares filled the first half of the 65th Cannes Film Festival. There's post-Revolution love from Egypt, and the love that finds its final destiny, as love should, in death. There are the usual sidekicks of love, such as loneliness and the desire to be recognised, in the heart and in the flesh, in one's own territory and in others. It's both helpful and futile to try to find a common theme in the competition titles at the most frenzied and influential movie festival on Earth, but please allow me to indulge in the activity as a cure to the unusually wet weather that has rendered the mood rather gloomy in this war zone of film criticism.
Brawn, bosom and blood
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/03/2014
» In the absence of Gerard Butler, we thankfully have Eva Green. Hissing rather than acting, uncoiling like a Persian rattlesnake, she is a bitch-babe naval commander lusting for blood and revenge. Her costume is that of a warrior as clothed (or imagined) by John Galliano, a fetishised wardrobe of buxom leather, metal spines and cultish accessories. It’s chic brutality. And with those burning coals in her eyes she stares down the muscled generals on her own side and the topless Greeks, greasy torsos and all, on the other. More than any other character in 300: Rise Of An Empire, her Artemisia knows this film is just one notch above camp and one below a high-budget death metal music video. Green’s vampish theatricality is the best part of this narcissistic, violent almost-cartoon.