Showing 1 - 10 of 23
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.
Here's to all the useful ghosts of our history
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/08/2025
» Ghosts are useful because they remind us of the unresolved, the unsettled, the unfinished -- in life, love, politics, or history. The film of the moment hitches onto that idea and takes it far, as far as the Cannes Film Festival, and now it has been picked as Thailand's representative for the Oscars.
Macondo encountered
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/12/2024
» Ideally, good books should be left alone, even if they sit enshrined in a cobweb after a thousand years of solitude. In the reality of today's content industrial complex, that is unacceptable. Every good book can be and must be adapted. To watch is to live, to binge is to breathe. Literature is not a paradigm of text but fodder for algorithm. So here it is, with an air of inevitability, the much-touted, long-awaited, rigidly respectful and adequately decent Netflix series One Hundred Years Of Solitude -- the first eight parts, with the remaining eight coming next year.
The magic of Méliès
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/11/2024
» Among the many museums in Paris, the Musée Méliès may slip through visitors' attention. That should not be the case.
Andalusian dreams
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/02/2024
» Two Middle Eastern tourists looked excited as they held up a phone to an exquisitely carved arabesque in Nasrid Palace at the Alhambra. No, they're not taking photos. They're comparing the Arabic text on their screen with the 8th century stone calligraphy. I hear them mumble in Arabic -- here's the translation:
The next step in evolution
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/05/2022
» The maestro is teasing us, with his favourite instrument: the scalpel. Mechanical, electrified scalpels that split open the flesh -- often, the belly -- like a bulging purse being unzipped. This time, what comes out of the belly is a menagerie of grotesque organs -- organs with neither names nor functions, grown inside the body primed for involuntary evolution.
Of Naga and political dissidents
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2021
» The Naga is real but the murder is not. Or is it vice versa? What history chooses to remember and relegate to oblivion, what it enshrines as story and what it buries as hearsay, is how the narrative of a nation is forged in a mould of clay or a furnace of fire. Or in this particular case, in disembowelled bodies stuffed with concrete blocks. The murder is real but the Naga is not. This sounds more like it.
Climbing the one-inch barrier
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/02/2020
» Hollywood gasped with embarrassment and sudden realisation when Bong Joon-ho, the director of Parasite, said in his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes: "Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to many more amazing films."
We need less 'content' and more journalism
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/01/2020
» Content, as media gurus keep preaching, is king. But such PowerPoint pep talk is shallow: "Content" -- an increasingly bastardised term that has come to signify TV newscasts, podcasts, movies, viral videos, Netflix series, memes, news articles, editorial features, real advertising, covert advertising, tweets and Facebook posts, organic or boosted -- is also an anaesthetic. It dulls the senses and kills meaning, then proceeds to belittle essence, promote shallowness and eventually undermine the practice of journalism.
Through the prism of history
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/10/2019
» The book's title is printed on its spine: Prism Of Photography: Dispersion Of Knowledge And Memories Of The 6 October Massacre. Thereafter, from the first page on, we have only photographs with no captions.