Showing 1 - 10 of 18
Time for Asean films to shine
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/12/2021
» The pandemic notwithstanding, it has been a stimulating year for Southeast Asian cinema. Reflective, heartfelt and oddball new titles from Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have won major prizes or become critical favourites at international film festivals throughout 2021. Now, many of these films are coming to the big screen in Thailand as the Bangkok Asean Film Festival 2021 (BAFF) is set to open tonight.
On the edge of sanity
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/01/2020
» In Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe is a demented Poseidon, or perhaps a crazed, ocean-battered ex-sailor on the run from a Melville novel. Playing one of the two lighthouse keepers on a wind-whipped rocky islet in the Atlantic, circa 1890s, Dafoe turns up his mad-uncle mode, feral hair, chronic farting and drawling speech, plus a possessive relationship with the lantern -- the source of light atop the lighthouse (he refers to it as a "she").
Quentin's Hollywood, circa 1969
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2019
» Not everything ended in the year 1969. Not every sunshiny starlet died gruesomely in her own Cielo Drive villa at the hands of crazed hippies. And not every potbellied actor, fading cowboy and washed-up stunt double bit the Hollywood dust kicked up by the changing of the guard and the closing of that heady decade. Not, at least, in Quentin Tarantino's affectionate, good-humoured, and surprisingly elegiac film about Hollywood and its oddball residents.
The many interpretations of bliss
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/10/2018
» With the monsoon comes the art. With the wind and bluster come the artists. Here it is, finally, after a year of fanfare and preparation. The first Bangkok Art Biennale 2018 (BAB 2018) will open on Oct 18 and run until next February in a city-wide surfeit of artistic affairs, from exhibitions to talks, workshops to pool parties (which is, of course, art!). The programme will keep Bangkokians and visitors busy for months starting from next week.
Life, love, liberation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/09/2017
» In the sole Thai film showing at Toronto International Film Festival this week, a soap opera star stuck in a loveless marriage tangles with an eccentric hitman and a powerful cult. Samui Song is the latest feature film by Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, who's fashioned a crime thriller that also plays as a critique of many things: patriarchal oppression, faux-Buddhism, public healthcare and the act of cinema-making itself.
Embrace more invasion
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/05/2017
» The original 1979 Alien took leads from body-horror B-flicks and spawned many more -- it was inspired by The Thing (1951) and later influenced the 1982 The Thing in which "the thing", whatever it is, explodes from the chest and back of a hapless victim in a gruesome rupture. Now the Ridley Scott's reboot Alien Covenant revisits those sci-fi grotesquerie while also -- perhaps not necessarily -- philosophising what could have just been exploitation fun. More polished, more ponderous and less dirty, the new Alien movie bursts into life most gaudily when the space-beasts pierce through the flesh of their unsuspecting characters and we half-cringe, in an anticipation for more.
Our best films of the year
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/12/2016
» As usual we have two lists, for titles released in local cinemas and the wider universe of world films shown elsewhere (and hopefully coming to our screens soon).
Foreign film contenders
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/12/2015
» Star Wars is colonising your waking life, so let me warp you to the neighbouring galaxy. The Oscar season is brewing, and one of the categories we're always interested in -- at least because it's the only category that is about the world and not just about Hollywood -- is the foreign language film. This year 81 countries submitted their films to the Academy. The long list will be announced in January, and the five finalists later in the month.
The ballad of a sad man
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/01/2014
» In Inside Llewyn Davis, the ballad of failure proves more tender than the banality of success. His own guitar and somebody else's cat in tow, Llewyn Davis, based on 1960s folk singer Dave Van Ronk and played with hang-dog grumpiness by Oscar Isaac, hops from one stranger's couch to another in New York's pre-Dylan folk scene, looking for a place to sleep and a professional salvation he thinks he deserves (and he deserves it).
Vacant homes and empty heads
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/09/2013
» Meet the Spring-break revellers from hell. Sometimes clad in Pussy Riot-style balaclavas, but most of the time in fluorescent bikinis, Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine) orchestrate the year's most hallucinatory orgy to date, a candy-coloured bacchanalia of robbery, bong parties, contraband firearms, murders and a C-cup binge; all of this lubricated by endlessly flowing booze and a riotous beachside cacophony. Bored kids looking for gratifying oblivion, pushing and pushing and pushing the limit of fun. Spring Breakers is driven by the anxiety of excess, visually and psychologically, showing us how an American-style pursuit of happiness can edge pursuers over the cliff and into the sunshine of hell, where they feel right at home and become even more happy.