Showing 1 - 8 of 8
Living in Thailand's age of impunity
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/01/2026
» There's no place like Thailand. Joyscrolling TikTok and Reels reveals dozens of clips made by international visitors lamenting having to leave our lovely country and return to dreary Europe or joyless America. "Nobody talks about how hard it is to go from this" -- insert a cut of a wonderful beach in Krabi -- "to this"--cut to a drab, damp suburban street somewhere in the West. Add a crying-face emoji. "I want to move here!" the traveller announces. True, everybody loves Thailand.
The Silent Film Festival keeps echoing
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/09/2024
» A rocket-bullet plunging into the Moon’s eye, its mouth pursed halfway between a sneer and a smile. You’ve seen it before, but it’s time to witness one of cinema’s most recognisable images from Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902) in its colour glory at the 8th Silent Film Festival in Thailand, the annual banquet of early cinema hosted by the Thai Film Archive.
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.
Follow the yellow brick road
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/06/2019
» There is a newly-invented subgenre of the rock biopic: the queer, British, 1970s-set rock biopic, preferably with family trauma and cruel (or at least unsympathetic) parents. First was Bohemian Rhapsody, the shoddy Freddie Mercury flick, whose status as an Oscar-nominated title still befuddles. Now comes Rocketman, in which Taron Egerton preens and struts in Elton John's greatest hits of wardrobe flamboyance, even at his AA session.
Some Southeast Asian picks from the Busan International Film Festival
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/10/2018
» How do Aceh and Japan, two places that seem unrelated, separated by a vast distance of land and sea, connect on the personal and historical level?
Relive those Summer Nights at the Scala
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/08/2018
» John Travolta's ducktail hairdo set the craze and burned the path for cool delinquency, everywhere including Thailand. Grease celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and this Sunday the film will return to the big screen at Scala. The crowd is unlikely to be young, but the spirit, the nostalgia and the scream (hopefully) will set the house alight.
Sometimes transcendental, always relevant
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/05/2018
» The American films were on short supply this year at Cannes -- which in turn deprived the assembly line of red carpet material -- but nobody seemed to mind that except, well, some American media and fashion bloggers. That superfluous caveat aside, the recently wrapped 71st Cannes Film Festival was nearly unanimously praised as one of the best editions in recent memory, with a string of good, sometimes very good, titles playing night after night -- and even the bad films weren't so offensively bad, as was often the case. In the midst of soul-searching following the question of relevance (the world wants Avengers), the rise of streaming (the world watches films on phones), the decline of arthouse popularity, Cannes insists on the sacredness of cinema, on the future of the art, and this year it paid off solidly.
Keeping classic films alive
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/04/2018
» The colours in the Thai spy movie Operation Revenge remain as vibrant as when the film first came out 51 years ago. Likewise, the struggle for independence in the Indonesian film Barbed Wired Fence remains intact, as vivid and strong as the image of the college boys projected on the screen when it came out in 1982. These films were on the verge of disintegration when they were revived to their former glory, ready to return to where they belong.