Showing 1 - 7 of 7
Paradise lost
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2025
» In Grand Tour, Miguel Gomes' beguiling travelogue set in 1917, a British diplomat in Burma journeys across Southeast Asia, hopping from country to country, to avoid an encounter with his fiancée. Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) is a colonial officer who, struck by an inexplicable premonition or a case of cold feet, decides to flee Mandalay just before his sweetheart Molly (Crista Alfaiate) is due to arrive. He boards a ship to Singapore, then a train to Bangkok -- it derails on the way, but still makes it -- and onwards to Saigon, Manila, Osaka and Chongqing. Molly, pursuing him, would repeat a more or less similar route.
Return to paradise
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/01/2022
» At Maya Bay, hawk-eyed park officials patrol the sandy stretch, whistles at the ready. It was a gorgeous morning last Thursday, just days after the fabled beach on Phi Phi Leh Island had reopened after three years of closure, and the 300 or so holidaymakers, masked or otherwise, were ambling or striking catwalk poses on the pillow-soft sand, awestruck by the emerald splendour around them.
Dissecting a nation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/06/2017
» Pasuk Phongpaichit's and Chris Baker's house is a verdant abode at the end of a maze in an Ekamai sub-soi. The garden at the back has tall trees and a small, tea-coloured pond. The whole area used to be a swamp, said Baker. The couple, both highly respected scholars in Thai studies, have been living there since 1987, or in their lexicon, "just before the boom" -- the high-flying economic expansion whose seismic shifts forever transformed Thailand in the early 1990s. Had they wanted to purchase the plot slightly later than they actually did -- after the boom had set in -- they wouldn't have been able to. "We came just before the high-rises."
Into the strange forest
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/09/2016
» The dirt road is dry and red, scorched by the Isan sun. The headmaster is wary, sardonic, and enervated by the heat. The students, or at least some of them, are bored and ironic ("What do you want to be when you grow up?" a teacher asks. "A bank robber," he deadpans.) Next to this poor state school is a forest, sun-dappled, mysterious and probably haunted. Girls are warned not to go in there because they may never come back out.
The space in the ocean
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/01/2015
» In the new Thai film Tee Wang Rawang Mahasamut (The Isthmus), a Thai girl develops a strange malady after her maid from Myanmar died. She begins to speak Burmese, despite having no knowledge of the language before. And thus begins the metaphysical blurring of mental and geographical boundaries, as the girl and her mother take a road trip to Ranong, the coastal border town populated by migrant labourers from Myanmar.
Isan asserts its presence
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/06/2014
» The cinemas in the Northeast didn’t expect a phenomenon last weekend, but they certainly got one. The sensation came not from the behemoth King Naresuan 5, nor the Tom Cruise-starring alien romp Edge Of Tomorrow, but from the low-budget, unmarketed, Northeast-set and northeastern-speaking movie Poo Bao Tai Ban: E-San Indy.
Give it up for the ghost
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/04/2013
» The lovelorn banshee has finally vanquished the antediluvian queen, with a little help from inflation. Though the number isn't official (it never is), it's safe to announce that Pee Mak Phra Khanong has become the highest-grossing movie ever released in Thailand, dethroning the once-invincible historical epic Suriyothai.