Showing 1 - 8 of 8
Follow the yellow brick road
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/06/2019
» There is a newly-invented subgenre of the rock biopic: the queer, British, 1970s-set rock biopic, preferably with family trauma and cruel (or at least unsympathetic) parents. First was Bohemian Rhapsody, the shoddy Freddie Mercury flick, whose status as an Oscar-nominated title still befuddles. Now comes Rocketman, in which Taron Egerton preens and struts in Elton John's greatest hits of wardrobe flamboyance, even at his AA session.
All eyes on Asia
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/10/2018
» Asia's premier cine-event took off last night. The 23rd Busan International Film Festival once again draws all attention to the South Korean port city as it hosts the annual showcase of films, especially Asian films. One part to promote the South Korean film industry -- a formidable machine of creativity and commerce -- and one part to reign as a centre of filmmaking activity in this part of the world, Busan has gone through some bumps, political and managerial, but remains steadfast in being in the biggest in Asia.
Three stories from Asia
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/10/2016
» An illegal Filipino migrant in Hokkaido, a Japanese grandfather in Penang, a UN official reflecting on the romantic past in Phnom Penh. The three short films in the omnibus Asian Three-Fold Mirror: Reflections narrate the criss-crossing of destiny between Asian people -- or particularly in this case between Japanese and Southeast Asians. The Reflections project has been commissioned by the Japan Foundation and Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) as a means to show the mutual relationships, present or forgotten, among the Asian countries.
A part of Myanmar's tapestry
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/06/2016
» Even with the civilian government, the military is still untouchable in Myanmar -- at least in the movies. Last week state censorship banned the film Twilight Over Burma: My Life As A Shan Princess, an Austrian production about the real-life Austrian woman who met a Shan prince in the US, married him and moved to Burma before the 1962 military coup d'etat that brought everything down. The film, which was shot largely in Thailand and starring mostly German and Thai actors, was supposed to open the Human Rights Film Festival in Yangon last Tuesday.
Lots to love about The Hateful Eight
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/01/2016
» In the stewpot of Quentin Tarantino's tough-to-chew ingredients: graphic violence, racial animosity (if not racist hyperbole), linguistic provocation (counting the "n" word has become a sort of a game), indulgence in profanity and political incorrectness of all stripe, then in The Hateful Eight, the nearly three-hour-long film is largely set in just one room. Heads smashed, women bashed, scrotum busted, black-man-white-man paranoia in full display -- the director's well-oiled strategy is to couch his exploitation exercise in cynical black comedy and gabby digressions -- those delicious, funny, grandiloquent lectures on history and justice that he lately seems to favour.
Romanticising the insurgency
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/07/2015
» Rarely do we see a Thai film set in the Deep South and rarely do we see a film with so many people saying "assalamu alaikum" to each other. So now that we have one in the cinema, it turns out to be such a piece of romantic fluff that it hardly does justice to the complicated reality of the region and its people. What should we expect when Latitude Tee Hok (Latitude No.6) has been financed by the military — the Internal Security Operations Command, to be precise — and produced by UCI Media, an affiliation of a company that sells communication equipment to the army?
Revenge or reconciliation?
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/04/2014
» The wounds of war fester with time. Eric Lomax was serving in the British army in Singapore during World War II when the Japanese invaded and captured him. Along with other Allied soldiers, he was sent by train to the POW camp in Kanchanaburi, where he endured the ordeal of forced labour in the construction of the Death Railway, that memorial of death and barbarism whose name still rings with a funereal aura today.
Closely observed study In Contrasts
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/09/2012
» In the ever-stormy sea of independent film-making, every ingenue goes through the same cycle of dreaming, hoping, fund-hunting. If the dream and the hope can be kept alive, they finish the film and then starting hoping all over again _ this time for the chance to get it released.