Showing 1 - 5 of 5
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.
Of zombies and fairy tales
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/05/2022
» The opening films across the three programmes at the 75th Cannes Film Festival speak of disparate destinies of contemporary cinema, from the poetic to the political and the pointless. Let's start with the latter.
To dump or not to dump
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/12/2019
» The title of a new Thai film is a bilingual wordplay: How To Ting is literally translated as "how to dump". That, I think, is sharper than its tired official English title, Happy Old Year. To dump or not to dump -- things and people, mementos and memories -- that is the question. In the film, a young designer who's dressed like a Muji model, and who has just returned from studying in the minimalist-paradise Sweden, plans to dump all useless objects from her maximalist Bangkok house, where she lives with her mother and brother, and to turn it into an all-white, supremely sparse and unapologetically decluttered interior nirvana -- a home office lifted straight from a Scandinavian style book.
A one-man 'loveable rogues' gallery
B Magazine, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/05/2018
» Sunny Suwanmethanont raises his thick eyebrows and chuckles. He forks a piece of mango into his mouth while he considers something -- an existential query of sorts.
The many faces of France
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/01/2018
» At the simplest level Agnes Varda's and JR's Visages Villages is a documentary film about photography and art-making. Going slightly deeper, as the title suggests, it's a film about faces and places, about people and their villages -- rural communities, farmland, factories and towns in the unglamorous corners of France. And yet at its most moving, most humanist moments, this film by an 89-year-old filmmaker and a 33-year-old street artist is about the heartbreaking ephemerality of art, about mortality, memory and the transient nature of everything, above all of life itself.