Showing 1 - 7 of 7
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.
Coldplay across the universe
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/02/2024
» The latest Coldplay concert in Bangkok was a feat of photogenic spectacles designed to bedazzle, complete with light-blinking wristbands, sci-fi-warped animation on spherical screens, balloons in the shape of planets and exploding fireworks above the roof of Rajamangala National Stadium ("The football field not often used to play football on," as a Thai national squad member noted.)
Into the devil's lair
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/11/2021
» Like a session of cinematic séance, Rang Zong (The Medium) channels a cemetery-sized roll call of classic horror elements. The film, recently picked as Thailand's representative for the Oscar's International Feature, is proudly possessed by the ghosts of The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, the Paranormal Activity franchise, and Ari Aster's Midsommar, but with Southeast Asia's earthy voodooism, plus a serving of Korean-style blood-and-viscera gore as well as an icing of zombie scare-aesthetics. It's a full-course buffet of fright tricks, complete with an apocalyptic, 30-minute-long exorcism orgy that leaves no spell unuttered and no human unpossessed. All of this is couched in a faux-documentary setup, with handheld shots, grainy CCTV footage and characters speaking directly to the camera.
The old skeleton in the closet
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/04/2019
» Motherly ghosts are Southeast Asia's fiercest creatures, as they cling to their memories with a vengeance. In Marn-Da (The Only Mom), a Myanmar-Thai haunted-house horror, a motherless child wanders her old colonial house -- she was already dead, sure -- looking for love and hugs. When a new family moves in, the girl-ghost finds the perfect mother she never had and the old skeleton in the closet comes tumbling out.
Scala shows a true horror classic
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/10/2018
» The mother (or daughter?) of all antichrist misdemeanours returns. On Oct 31 -- Halloween night -- The Exorcist will soil the Scala with its ineffaceable green puke, God-denouncing expletives and Satanic rebellion led by Linda Blair, strapped to her bed and yet still cussing, hurting, levitating.
All in the family
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/06/2018
» You know you're walking into a horror movie, but the brilliance of Ari Aster's Hereditary is the way it deftly hides its cards and stacks up mystery upon mystery, secret upon secret, madness upon madness, until everything unravels in demonic hellfire. The film ticks all the familiar elements of a ghost story -- a dead grandma, a spooky house, a grave robbery, a candlelit seance where spirits are summoned, a sleepwalker roaming the dim corridor, an occult sign written on the wall, a couple of headless corpses, etc -- but Hereditary rises above the genre formula with its coolly composed formalism, its deliberate pacing, and its sly psychological manipulation that almost convinces us at certain points that this is more of a domestic drama than a horror movie.
A comedy likely to end only in horror
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/02/2018
» The junta can read the stars and history and they must know this isn't going to end well. As frustration grows, as protests form, as their support ebbs even their idol Gen Prem Tinsulanonda flat-out said so they amp up censorship and tighten the squeeze, not with gusto but with desperation. With Deputy Prime Minister Gen Prawit Wongsuwon looking increasingly like a plump Chinese deity on the verge of losing his worshippers, the regime reacts with force, gagging tactics and plain old bullying.