Showing 1 - 10 of 22
The world is on fire, but we still have the Oscars
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/03/2026
» Tight races in several categories as two outstanding American films, Sinners and One Battle After Another, vie for glory with other international titles.
Cinema of resistance wins at Cannes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/05/2025
» In a year full of richly textured stories about female trauma and painful personal growth, the Cannes jury, led by Juliette Binoche, took the noble route and gave the Palme d'Or to the most political film in the 22-title competition.
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 vagabond returns
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/01/2023
» A film once overlooked and misunderstood may have found its moment many years later, the work's peculiar vibrations finally detected and at last appreciated.
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.
Once upon a time on the French Riviera
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/05/2019
» The spectacle ahead will -- hopefully (cinema sages are an optimistic bunch) -- be spectacular. The 72nd Cannes Film Festival opens tonight and there are all manner of curiosities to look forward to: an army of hipster zombies; Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate; Korean parasites; a Maradona doc; an Elton John biopic; Islamic extremism in Belgium; British miserabilism (Brexit and other demons); and, of course, Elle Fanning on the red carpet for 11 days straight, performing jury duty at the world's most reported, most hyped and most influential film festival.
Fierce and pitiful
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/03/2019
» Krasue is a Thai ghost beside whom vampires -- and other blood-lusting Western monsters -- pale in comparison. Basically a detached head of a woman floating around in the dark, lit up by a phosphorescent glow from her still-beating heart, and with her bloody entrails dangling below the head like an infested creeper, krasue feeds on, naturally, filth, blood, corpses and carcasses. Sometimes it's compared, for the sake of convenience, with Gothic-era will-o'-the-wisp or jack-o'-lantern. But seriously, please, that is a gross under-characterisation that discounts the supreme grotesqueness of krasue, born by the pulpy fantasy of our equatorial folklorists.
Life lessons
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/03/2019
» Fate clicks its fingers and an already poignant piece in Navin Rawanchaikul's "Revisited Departed" becomes the exhibition's most moving. It's a photograph of the artist as he guides his ageing father's fragile hand around a metre stick -- an indispensable tool of trade for any fabric-wallah -- fronted by a group of clay moulds sculpted from the imprints of his father's hand.
Relive those Summer Nights at the Scala
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/08/2018
» John Travolta's ducktail hairdo set the craze and burned the path for cool delinquency, everywhere including Thailand. Grease celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and this Sunday the film will return to the big screen at Scala. The crowd is unlikely to be young, but the spirit, the nostalgia and the scream (hopefully) will set the house alight.
A not-so-mundane history
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/06/2018
» A lampshade, elegant and shiny, bears a distinct image of the Siamese constitution over the map of Thailand. A nielloware cigarette box, in solemn brass and black, also features an engraving of the constitution -- the emblematic figure of a folded scripture on a tray. Next to it are matchbox labels, pins, a glass bottle, a bowl, a water jar, an ashtray, a vinyl record. All of them carry the symbolism of the seismic transformation that took place 86 years ago.