Showing 1 - 10 of 14
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 politics of taste in our election season
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/12/2025
» Hell is other people's tastes. Hell is when we passionately hate what people unconditionally love. Hell is when we can't fathom how anyone on the face of the earth can like someone or something we find revolting -- a food, a film, a style, an opening ceremony, a politician, a president.
Paradise lost
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2025
» In Grand Tour, Miguel Gomes' beguiling travelogue set in 1917, a British diplomat in Burma journeys across Southeast Asia, hopping from country to country, to avoid an encounter with his fiancée. Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) is a colonial officer who, struck by an inexplicable premonition or a case of cold feet, decides to flee Mandalay just before his sweetheart Molly (Crista Alfaiate) is due to arrive. He boards a ship to Singapore, then a train to Bangkok -- it derails on the way, but still makes it -- and onwards to Saigon, Manila, Osaka and Chongqing. Molly, pursuing him, would repeat a more or less similar route.
Poor Barbie... Oppenheimer's the bomb
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/03/2024
» The annual guessing game to read the minds of inscrutable Oscars voters is here.
Marina's soul searching in Bangkok
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/10/2023
» Like Dante guided by Virgil, Marina Abramovic drifts through the purgatory that is Bangkok chaperoned by the little monkey prince. After praying at shrines and temples of assorted spiritual inclinations, she is taken to the Monkey King (Pichet Klunchun), whose rhymed, melodic prophecy finally guides Abramovic to the prayer hall of Wat Pho where her salvation awaits clad in a saffron robe.
Rebel without a cause
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/05/2021
» She came, she provoked, she burned, she left pools of blood and bits of brain on the school yard while laughing her pretty head off all the way to purgatory. She's Nanno, the demon child with Lolita's freckles and the Joker's face-splitting grin. She's the headline girl from the hit Thai series Girl From Nowhere which, since the May 7 release of its Season 2 on Netflix, has made it to the top-10 chart in many Asian countries and summited the algorithm in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. In China, the series' hashtag was for a time trending on Weibo (Nanno's Thai school uniform also inspires Chinese cosplayers).
A sick man, on a tour of hospital hell
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/05/2021
» The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu came out in 2005 and cemented the cinematic potency of the Romanian New Wave and their brand of droll, deadpan and relentlessly realistic movies about life in the ex-socialist state. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2005 and now, 16 years later, The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu is buried deep in the algorithm of Netflix. But it's there if you look, and I'm bringing it up today because its story of public healthcare apocalypse and accumulated absurdities experienced by a patient trying to find a hospital bed seems more timely, more wickedly serendipitous, than ever.
Piyabutr plays House role by the book
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/09/2019
» How thick does a book need to be to stop a bullet? Perhaps, I imagine, Piyabutr Saengkanokkul is asking himself that same question.
Psycho-killers, interviewed
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/08/2019
» The series didn't drop with as much ballyhoo as most Netflix new releases; instead it creepy-crawled into the algorithm of fans with chilly stealth last Friday. Mindhunter Season 2, created by Joe Penhall with several episodes directed by David Fincher, is a cerebral remedy to Netflix's glut of story-driven series and formulaic cliffhangers. Mindhunter takes almost a geeky pride in its dialogue-heavy exploration of the most vicious minds in the anthology of American true crime, the procession of ultra-violent serial murderers, pathological rapists and sadistic torturers, and in the way it isn't fixated on solving any particular cases (as is expected from a detective show) but taking time to study the methodological eccentricity of each crime and the increasingly dark obsession of the detectives, sucked ever more inextricably into the transgressive vortex.
Dream, murder and reality
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/05/2018
» The 11-day Cannes Film Festival will close tomorrow, and as the race for the Palme d'Or is the most breathtaking in years, we look at some of the highlights of the second week of the world's largest movie festival