Showing 121 - 130 of 130
The Sound of Silence
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/06/2012
» Prince Gautama silently weeps, and the violin sighs. Gently, like a tiptoeing deer, the koto's murmuring melody comes in beneath the rhythmic carpet of the tabla drums.
Temple fair in the clouds
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2012
» Prayers in Paragon Hall. New iPad apps on meditation centres. A haunted house in which earthly desires stalk you like inexorable ghosts. A "dharma boy band" of singers interpreting their tunes through the spiritual looking glass. Then monks as film programmers picking movies that discuss virtues and vices in diverse voices. In short, Buddhism in a new setting: Buddhism in a mall.
Funeral pyres lit in our dark night of shame
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/05/2012
» Light the funeral pyres. Two, not just one. Throw in the conflagration the corpse not of man but of the basic right citizens in any sane society should be able to exercise: the right to speak, and the right to watch film.
Unfairly ripp'd, 'Shakespeare' must pass
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/04/2012
» Four centuries after his death, Shakespeare's child suffers a miscarriage, aborted into a limbo by the Thai censors. Unless the appeal goes through at the National Film Board, you will be deprived of a chance to watch what has already become the most scorching movie of the year, Ing Kanjanavanit and Manit Sriwanichpoom's Shakespeare Tong Tai, or Shakespeare Must Die, an adaptation of Macbeth, charged with black humour, scheming harridans, buxom Lady M in blood-red dresses, and a political parable that peaks with a simulation of the infamous chair episode of Oct 6, 1976.
That sinking feeling
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/04/2012
» Has Titanic changed in the past 15 years? Watching Jack and Rose caught in their aquatic amour once again, now in the remastered 3D version released to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the ship's doomed voyage, is as much to examine the patina and wrinkle worn by the film as to re-evaluate our feeling towards, or against, this biggest pop-phenomenon of the 1990s. Fans will weep, again, either at the sight of the brash, unblemished, pre-jowl Leonardo DiCaprio, so pubescent he could pass as Kate Winslet's son, or at the eventual separation of the iceberg-crossed lovers.
Censors ban 'Shakespeare' film
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2012
» A new Thai film based on a famous William Shakespeare play has been banned by censors on the grounds that its content may cause disunity among the people.
Cambodian classics re-emerge
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/03/2012
» The Khmer Rouge, headlong and senseless, arrived in Phnom Penh and spoiled the party. During the so-called Golden Age of Cambodian cinema, from the 1960s to the early '70s, almost 400 films were released in the country. A number of them travelled across the border and were screened in Thai cinemas, some gaining the status of popular entertainment, and at least one, featuring a chattering snake and his love affair with a beautiful woman, becoming a classic remembered today by Thais as a lost, distant dream.
The gaul of it
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/02/2012
» Come Monday morning, the winter rite of the Oscars will be executed in all its blazing, self-congratulatory aura, and after three hours of pompous live broadcast and in-jokes we'll return to our graves happily thinking about other fine movies the world has to offer. In the global peddling of moving images, we're forced to be fixated with Tinseltown's annual polling, an extensive survey of American taste and preferences, in which 6,000 people cast their precious votes to determine the worldwide conversation about the value of good movies.
Feminine perspectives
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/02/2012
» In her smoky evocation of lost love, vintage romance and bewitching cello music, Madonna, at the helm of W.E., channelled Wong Kar-wai of the early millennium, doing that visual serenade of beautiful, distressing women who're in the mood for love. Wong sculpted melancholia out of gorgeous haze; Madonna's swirl of luxury and grainy jump-cuts merely drift, and then land somewhat in emptiness. Re-telling the story of "the greatest romance of the century" _ the one between Prince Edward and Wallis Simpson _ the Material Girl also gives us a story of a wife who's in the desperate mood for pregnancy. So much so that the effort crosses over from beautiful and tender to obsessive and self-sabotaging.
Rock-Solid Hollywood star
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/01/2012
» Last year in the hyperkinetic film Fast Five, Dwayne Johnson growled and grumbled playing the role of a federal agent chasing a pack of auto-bandits in Rio de Janeiro. Johnson, also known as The Rock, is a prime cut of beef that glitters in the Brazilian sun; yet the man holds his character with gravity, zipping through the breakneck action with all scowl and no smile.