Showing 1 - 7 of 7
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 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.
Corona and the death of cinema (again)
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/03/2020
» "Cinema is an invention without a future," said Louis Lumiere who, along with his brother Auguste, invented the Cinematographe in 1895. From its birth, cinema was convinced of its own death. From the very beginning, cinema predicted its own eventual demise. And that was before the two world wars, the advent of home video, laser disc, DVDs, Blu-rays, terrorism, mass shootings, Netflix, and now the coronavirus, the latest scourge that has sealed shut cinema houses around the world.
Chaiyaphum owed more than lost data
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/08/2018
» In the age of video clips, one video clip is absent. At a time when we're inundated by cat clips, dog clips, accident clips, slap clips, brawl clips, grope clips, chase clips, murder clips -- when we even have clips recorded from the depths of a dark cave where light hardly reaches -- it's amazing that one crucial clip, shot in broad daylight, is missing, lost or made to be lost forever, along with transparency and maybe justice.
Wild Boars may well need saving again
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/07/2018
» I thought we could let it rest, but apparently the post-rescue drama of the 13 cave survivors is here to stay. On Wednesday, the 13 Wild Boars members were put on stage in a live broadcast, a 6pm state-run slot usually reserved for military propaganda.
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.
Image is everything
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/05/2018
» Cinema, Jean-Luc Godard said via FaceTime, is X+3 = 1. The X, of course, is -2.