Showing 21 - 30 of 31
Hail, Hollywood!
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/03/2016
» Funny but not that funny, smart and striving to be awfully smart, Hail, Caesar! belongs to the middleweight rank of the Coen brothers' catalogue. It's a movie about movie love, and about the woes of making movies, or at least studio movies, the constant pain of working in that carnivorous system in which its members nibble on one another, and in which the faceless bosses are taking the biggest bite. You can tell from the poster that this is a tribute to the old Hollywood of 1950s, but since this is a Coens' movie, it sprawls into satire, slapstick, musical numbers, and religious mockery, with a darker undercurrent of the post-war ideological theatre played out in the Californian backlot.
Will the best films win the Oscars?
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/02/2016
» The Oscar night is also the Oscar-bashing night. It was always the night (or morning, in our time zone) of constant bemoaning and condescension, because the Academy voters, like most voters, always get it wrong, at least to million others around the world who believe, in our collective delirium, that we have a stake in this pageant taking place somewhere in Los Angeles. Things have taken a turn for the worse with the snap judgement made possible by social media; now the outrage and disbelief are so raw since they're aired in real time, on Facebook and Twitter, like I did last year when I was convinced that it was against every law of nature that Birdman, a well-crafted display of pretension and self-obsession, won over the more delicate Boyhood.
Soulful, sorrowful, tragic
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/08/2015
» Amy is a biographical documentary of the singer Amy Winehouse, but it is also a horror film. Watching it is like watching a ghost, a confused, tortured ghost of a woman who has boundless talent in singing and none in living. As we watch Amy Winehouse -- in home video footage, concert recordings, TV interviews, etc -- it hits us that we're watching her being killed slowly at every passing minute; killed by herself, her addiction, and by the cruel ecosystem of the fame industry that feeds first on her gift then more voraciously on her downfall. This is one of the best documentary films this year, and in some parts it's also one of the hardest to watch.
From horror to biopic
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/06/2015
» Youth, sex, death — preferably in that order — the indispensable ingredients of horror movies get a spooky shake-up in David Robert Mitchell's It Follows. Ripe with a psychosexual vibe, this creepy film can be read as a metaphor about the demon of one-night-stands, or the venereal guilt of casual sex. Or you don't have to care much, because as far as a ghost flick goes, this one remixes the old formula with wit, serves up a series of shocks, and manages to give off a stylish, purring chill.
Wrestling the American nightmare
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/01/2015
» Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher is perched between an American nightmare and a family tragedy, which from a vantage angle are probably undistinguishable. It's also a story of a love triangle, an unlikely kind, involving two brothers and another man who asserts himself (most notably his nose) between them. Splashed across the screen before the whole thing starts is the solemn declaration "based on a true story" — an old Hollywood habit of codifying history into truth and fiction into biography — though in this case, it works to add weight and shock to the narrative that follows.
Cannes and misdemeanours
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» At the 66th Cannes film Festival, off-screen drama attempts to steal the limelight from on-screen offerings. Last Friday, the news of a diamond robbery at a hotel room from which a burglar made off with US$1 million (about 30 million baht) worth of Chopard jewellery astonished (and amused) festival-goers; the crime took pace hours after the screening of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, about brazen heists of celebrity homes.
Sensual biopic encapsulates an age
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/11/2014
» Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent is an exquisite opium den, a biography of sensual feelings rather than of fact. Running at 150 minutes, the film is more interested in what Yves Saint Laurent senses, feels, imagines and dreams than the actual reality around him. Usually, a biopic of a personality strives to "humanise" the subject — we're supposed to see him/her at his best and worst, his genius and his foibles. Here, Bonello and his actor, Gaspard Ulliel, have done something more startling: they don't humanise Saint Laurent as much as sensualise him.
A hard drug for the eyes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/08/2014
» This is a tar pit. This is the eternal midnight, the thrash metal nocturne. This is some of the most striking black-and-white imagery, half-baroque, half-graffiti, dripping and saturated with lush shadows. This is also empty. The hollowness of it all is a badge of pride for the filmmakers. With Sin City: A Dame to Kill For — like the first Sin City in 2005 — you can't take your eyes off the hyper-stylised fetishism on-screen (or at least off Eva Green's strategically obscured body parts), but you'll find it difficult to remember anything afterwards. This is instant gratification, a hard drug for the eyes.
The Wolf's spectacular folly
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/01/2014
» Propelled by manic energy, Martin Scorsese's The Wolf Of Wall Street zips through a dollar-fuelled bacchanalia and raunchy pool parties (there are so many pool parties) with train-wrecking velocity. It's as if the filmmakers and their cast are popping speed pills or knocking back a succession of Red Bulls. You watch the film with exhilaration and dread, a dread that the entire narrative accelerating, over the top and almost unstoppable is going to veer over the precipice and crash, leaving Leonardo DiCaprio smiling goofily in the rubble. But it's not; this is tightly controlled filmmaking in the guise of something running amok, and it's actually that sense of dread, risk and danger that fires us up and keeps us on edge. Scorsese is 72 and yet, hats off to him, this film feels like a young man plunging into an all-night orgy while managing to somehow stay sober amidst the threat of overkill.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/03/2013
» Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is a happy whip, drawing as much blood as laughter. It runs on Road Runner humour, fired by cruel comedy, cartoon revenge, cracking you up and making you wince, and that balancing act has always been one of the secrets of Tarantino's brilliance. Still, this is a serious film about history and how cinema appropriates history. In a year that most Oscar-contending titles lay pompous claims to accurate retelling of the past, from Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln, the blissful disregard of "history" somehow makes Django the most truthful film of the lot. Or at least it feels truthful in spirit, leaving the grandstanding of other filmmakers looking spurious, frivolous, or simply wrong.