Showing 1 - 10 of 24
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.
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:
Changing the narrative
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/09/2022
» A man returns home from work in Malaysia after Covid-19 struck, then gets lost in a bureaucratic labyrinth trying to get government handouts. Another woman finds a job at a factory, but the rules require her to compromise her faith. In Yala, a skater boy sets out in search of a friendly park where he can enjoy his ride. A hijab-wearing K-pop fanatic is getting married to a man who has just converted to Islam. And in a Pattani family, a young man watches his mother being possessed by a spirit, possibly a black-magic attack from his business rival.
In Cannes, it's cinema as usual
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/05/2022
» After the cancellation in 2020 and a bump to the month of July in 2021 -- with smaller attendance as international travel was still interrupted -- the Cannes Film Festival returns to its usual mid-May slot, keyed up and fully prepped to show the world that it's cinema, and the cinema business, as usual.
The way I see it...
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/03/2022
» Ahead of the Academy Awards on Monday, our film critic shares his thoughts on the big runners.
Return to paradise
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/01/2022
» At Maya Bay, hawk-eyed park officials patrol the sandy stretch, whistles at the ready. It was a gorgeous morning last Thursday, just days after the fabled beach on Phi Phi Leh Island had reopened after three years of closure, and the 300 or so holidaymakers, masked or otherwise, were ambling or striking catwalk poses on the pillow-soft sand, awestruck by the emerald splendour around them.
It's alive!
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/12/2021
» Doomsayers will have to hold out a little longer. Cinema -- as in people sitting in the dark taking in a communal experience of audiovisual sensations -- is still breathing, moving, enlightening.
Apichatpong's memory of the world
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/06/2021
» It begins with a bang. Maybe the Big Bang, a culmination of cosmic murmur and subterranean hum that explodes like a burst of revelation, a sonic release of the weight of all human pain. In Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new film Memoria, a woman wakes up one morning in Bogota jolted by a mysterious sound -- a metallic, visceral, bottom-of-the-well bang. The woman, orchid farm owner Jessica (played by Tilda Swinton), wanders the Colombian capital in a daze, haunted by the unshakable aural echo, then leaves the city and heads to the mountains, where the phantom of the bang shadows her.
In School Town King, the kids are not all right
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/01/2021
» There's a sense of immediacy in School Town King, a Thai documentary about two teenage rappers from the Klong Toey slums. On the surface, this is an advocacy film, one that patiently follows the two underprivileged ghetto boys with an unorthodox dream and their misadventures in Thai schools. But what makes School Town King feel urgent is its exposé of structural narrow-mindedness and the ideological straightjacket that leaves no room for kids who do not fit the mould. The conservative school policy, the film suggests in its visual clues and off-the-cuff asides is a chronic condition that has worsened by the arrogantly old-school regime of past years. In the year of Bad Students and Free Youth upheaval, School Town King is a deafening confirmation that the kids are not all right -- and it's surprising only for ignorant adults why they no longer want to put up with it.
The true nature of the beast?
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/11/2020
» 'Happy families are all alike," said Tolstoy, "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."