Showing 61 - 70 of 76
Director manages The Impossible
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/10/2012
» On screen, the monstrous waves roar and strike like liquid thunder. Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, playing a couple with three young sons vacationing in southern Thailand in 2004, watch in horror as the tsunami slams on shore like a titanic fist and sweeps them away in torrential whirlpools, shattering their peace and threatening to change their lives forever.
The Lottery labyrinth
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/10/2012
» For 230 years Thai people have gambled on the lottery _ legit and underground, paper-based and imagination-prone. Along with every discussion of the lottery comes a whole syllabus of tangled subjects: economic value, political manipulation, tax structure, legal philosophy, morality, superstition, national character, the distribution of wealth and luck.
Two religious wrongs
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/09/2012
» It is all the sadder when the cause of a conflict - the embassy-torching, slogan-chanting, convulsive protests, mass rallies and shocking murders - isn't even worth the label of a movie, or an "expression". It's garbage, for a start, in the garb of juvenility. It's hate speech, released to the world in the form of visual claptrap, oblivious of its own imbecility. Innocence of Muslims, or at least the 14-minute trailer of the junk that sparked the overreaction of protesters, is not just an insult to a religion. Worse, it's an insult to cinema. The Lumiere brothers would be turning in their graves.
Globally Thai
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/08/2012
» Because the path of art isn't a straight line, the idea of art history as a linear progression _ from traditional to contemporary, from painting to video, chronologically from the 1950s to the 2010s _ sometimes leaves certain roads untravelled, certain stones unturned, and certain views unexplored.
'Big' South film risks missing the ugly point
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/08/2012
» I gasped, because it was the first time I'd seen an aircraft carrier in a Thai movie. Actually, it was just a trailer, and to stick to the cardinal rule of criticism, we won't judge a book by its cover or a prime minister by her dress. No matter how tempting it is.
Time capsule unlocked
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/07/2012
» Before photographs of people outnumbered the entire population of the world, having one's image captured on film was a privilege, a real cause for pride.
Ladda's gone, but the thought police aren't
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/06/2012
» Amidst the ballyhoo of black-screen TV, broadcast-rights rivalry, football fracas, reconciliation war and constitution horror, we return to visit the most beloved media agency of all: the Cultural Surveillance Office, aka the Rottweiler, the guardian of Thainess, or the Department of Propriety.
Twisted and shout
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2012
» In the late 1990s, Nonzee Nimibutr was one of the key figures who resurrected the moribund Thai cinema by contributing two homegrown hits, 2499 Anthapan Krong Muang (Daeng Bireley and Young Gangsters, 1997) and Nang Nak (1999). He brought Thai movies back in the radar, local and international, through a strict cinematographic discipline, eye-pleasing art direction, and stories based on old lore and legends. His previous film released two years ago, Puen Yai Jom Salad (Queens of Lankasuka), was a pirate-vs-sorcerer epic set in the southern peninsula and featured an impressive scene of an aquatic wizard battling a giant whale while chanting the Buddhist teaching of impermanence _ to us, mostly, and not to the whale.
South may stay the loneliest planet of all
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/05/2012
» It is better late, proverbially speaking, than never. Nine months after she won the election to become prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra last Sunday visited the deep South for the first time since she took office. Surrounding her at a Pattani barracks - for the well-dressed dignitaries wouldn't be so foolhardy as to step out of the fenced quarters - were high-profile ministers and generals. The visit was on April 29, a day after the 8th anniversary of the harrowing siege of the Krue Se mosque, on April 28, 2004, in which soldiers killed 108 people and left dozens more widowed and orphaned in multiple places including Saba Yoi district in Songkhla and Krong Penang district in Pattani. At Krue Se alone, 32 people were killed.
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.