Showing 11 - 20 of 31
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.
Charter tune plays like a broken record
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/06/2016
» One song is championed, the other outlawed. One song hides its prejudices in the subconscious, the other clear in its messages. Both songs are about the referendum. That is, in case we still have the referendum, because it's almost safer now to bet on Albania winning Euro 2016 than on our slippery Aug 7 poll taking place.
All aboard for a scary trip down South
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/04/2016
» The news reads: Hard-line critics of the regime will be sent to take intensive "training courses" in the Deep South. The National Council of Peace and (dis)Order (NCPO) has confirmed the courses in the camps, which will be longer and more rigorous than the regular attitude adjustment series.
'Superheroes' fail to rescue democracy
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/03/2016
» We thought it would be Batman v Superman: Yawn of Justice. But it turned out to be a cut-rate spectacle performed on a sidewalk by inept actors. We thought it would be a bout between the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) and the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC), a contest of will and superpower. But then it revealed itself to be a badly scripted soap opera executed by elderly actors who read their lines without a wink.
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.
Our blood runs cold in a burning sun
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/11/2015
» In Truman Capote’s true-crime book, In Cold Blood, a rural town in Kansas was rattled by brutal murders. Four people killed in their own home, late at night, three shot point-blank in the face, the other had his throat slit, then shot in the head. It was a robbery turned massacre. The morning after committing the crime, the book reports, one of the two killers, Dick Hickock, went back to his house and had toast for breakfast with his family, laughing, unperturbed, as if nothing so inhuman had happened just hours before.
Living under a regime of infinite jest
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/08/2015
» Of course it was just a joke, how could it not be?
Learning to love shooting from the hip
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/08/2015
» Maybe some Thais dig PM Prayut Chan-o-cha the same way some Americans dig Donald Trump.
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?
When the O2 is impure, breathe CO2
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/06/2015
» Congratulations. Peace prevails. Silence is golden. Reform is at full throttle. Reconciliation will glue the cracked golden axe into one shiny piece. Politicians can grow mushrooms. Generals can play golf. Elections are overrated. Democracy is a dream. Only the road map is real. Love is in the air. Citizens can stop worrying and learn how to love the bomb. Everything will be all right. Why worry? Why complain? Why think?