Showing 1 - 3 of 3
Cinema paradiso
Guru, Pasavat Tanskul, Published on 19/01/2018
» Independent cinemas are few and far between in Thailand. While people are able to enjoy various films in every mall imaginable, those shown in such chains cater to a mass audience. Although we love our big-budget blockbusters with their high-profile movie stars and dazzling special effects, all the while being seated comfortably in a luxurious, state-of-the-art cinema, they eventually become mundane after multiple repeated viewings. Therefore for some of us, we long to watch something different.
On unhappy women and clumsy hitmen
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/01/2018
» Pen-ek Ratanaruang's movies -- eight of them in the past 20 years and the ninth slated for a Feb 1 release -- are often inhabited by unhappy women and clumsy hitmen. Unhappy, yet those women are neither resigned nor passive. Clumsy, yet those hitmen have aspirations, dreams and worries like people in other respectable professions. A genre geek, Pen-ek likes crime thrillers, but one of Thailand's best-known directors is also a diligent investigator of human relationships and man-woman dynamics, their eccentric and mysterious rapport and misunderstandings that determine the course of the world, and of cinema.
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.