Showing 1 - 6 of 6
Two grainy fists for resurrection
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/10/2018
» Shot mostly in Thai prison, with a fair number of ex-cons as extras, A Prayer Before Dawn dives headfirst into the unfiltered squalor of prison life -- not the sociological or political dimension of state incarceration, but the physical, uncooked-meat kind of life in jail, particularly the Thai jail.
Sometimes transcendental, always relevant
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/05/2018
» The American films were on short supply this year at Cannes -- which in turn deprived the assembly line of red carpet material -- but nobody seemed to mind that except, well, some American media and fashion bloggers. That superfluous caveat aside, the recently wrapped 71st Cannes Film Festival was nearly unanimously praised as one of the best editions in recent memory, with a string of good, sometimes very good, titles playing night after night -- and even the bad films weren't so offensively bad, as was often the case. In the midst of soul-searching following the question of relevance (the world wants Avengers), the rise of streaming (the world watches films on phones), the decline of arthouse popularity, Cannes insists on the sacredness of cinema, on the future of the art, and this year it paid off solidly.
The Genius of Thai cinema
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/10/2017
» A high-school thriller shows films from the Kingdom can be a hit on the world stage
On the road, with the elephant
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/06/2017
» Like all roads, this one promises redemption. Like most journeys, the destination is often where one starts off. Pop Aye, a road movie about a man and his elephant on a long trip to the Northeast, is a story of middle-class disillusionment (that's what the middle-class exists for) and the siren call of the rural -- the ambiguous call ringing in the ear of those who feel betrayed by the city.
Girls just wanna have fun
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/01/2016
» Two transhookers are not looking for love and warmth on Christmas Eve around the crummy blocks of Los Angeles. In Sean Baker's hilarious, rambunctious and surprisingly sweet a-crappy-day-in-the-life-of-African-American-streetwalkers, they are looking for horny customers, and for their slick pimp and his new lover (who's "a fish", derogatory slang for real women). It's also a surprise that Tangerine, a guerilla-style indie film shot entirely on iPhones, has made its way to Thai cinemas (only at SF), and those keen to sample an unusual flavour of high-spirited wacky comedy with its heart in the right place, this is the one to go for this weekend.
Striking with a pose
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/08/2013
» How frustrating it is to get stuck in the middle _ limbo _ somewhere between the past that hasn't been forgotten and the future that hasn't yet arrived. How sad to think we're adults when we're just children who dream of advancement, of reason, of democracy, of being something else we're probably not ready to be (though we're trying hard to be), something we struggle to grasp the basics of, like a runner with one shoe, or a dancer clumsily scrambling to get into her first pose. What's worse, we realise, is that as we're fighting to move forward, deep-seated fears, doubts and mental weaknesses hold us back and convince us that our will alone, or our human power and ability alone, is never enough and we're condemned to forever rely on something invisible, something divine, something supernatural, something we're not sure we believe in yet have no choice but to keep believing.