Showing 1 - 10 of 232
Asean Film Festival is finally here
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/03/2024
» Despite the odd, unexplained double postponement -- the first when it was moved from early December 2023 to late January 2024, and then from January to March -- the Bangkok Asean Film Festival finally gets under way, from today until Sunday at SF CentralWorld. Despite the adjournment, the line-up looks decent, with the best Southeast Asian titles culled from the past year -- Tiger Stripes, Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell, Abang Adik, Dreaming And Dying, Oasis Of Now, Nowhere Near, Morrison, Thai classics The Adventure Of Sudsakorn and The Adulterer, and a short film competition.
Poor Barbie... Oppenheimer's the bomb
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/03/2024
» The annual guessing game to read the minds of inscrutable Oscars voters is here.
2023 ROUNDUP A vintage year for Thai cinema?
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/12/2023
» There were cheers of jubilation and gasps of disbelief as Thai cinema found itself awash with excitement in 2023. This has been the most successful year for mainstream Thai movies in a decade, a box-office triumph far exceeding all expectations. To many, the 2023 coup de theatre calls for celebration. "We are back!" cried optimistic pundits. But also: "Really? Is it just a one-time cinema party and can we keep the ball rolling?"
Will gentrification respect city's people?
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/06/2023
» We've lived for over a century in the shadow of grandeur: near the Customs House, known to Thais as rongpasi. "We" means my maternal family and the community of Haroon Mosque. Each day before sunrise, the muezzin's sing-song call rings through the neighbourhood, carried on the river wind towards the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the French Embassy and Assumption Cathedral.
10 films to watch out for
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2023
» A fierce hijab girl, a Vietnamese pilgrimage, a Scorsese-DiCaprio team up and a new Cate Blanchett drama, Cannes Film Festival opens today with an eclectic taste of world cinema.
If it was up to me...
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/03/2023
» The Oscars are once again upon us and Life goes out on a limb to pick the peaches.
Pandemonium
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/09/2022
» The first shot of Athena will be discussed in every writing about the film. A bravura choreography of movement that begins with an intimate close-up of a face and ends, after 10 blood-rushing minutes, with an explosion of revolutionary rage -- a la Les Miserables and Do You Hear The People Sing? transported to a predominantly-Muslim Paris suburb -- that opening shot is so hypnotising and immersive in its non-stop kineticism that we're led to forgive that it's also an earnest show-off, a proud enshrinement of style and attitude over everything else. Romain Gavras, a filmmaker known for making music videos for Jay Z and M.I.A, will cement that approach with many similar shots throughout the film -- long, seemingly uninterrupted shots with parkour camerawork full of angry bodies -- more than enough for aspiring filmmakers of the world to slobber over.
Return to paradise
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/01/2022
» At Maya Bay, hawk-eyed park officials patrol the sandy stretch, whistles at the ready. It was a gorgeous morning last Thursday, just days after the fabled beach on Phi Phi Leh Island had reopened after three years of closure, and the 300 or so holidaymakers, masked or otherwise, were ambling or striking catwalk poses on the pillow-soft sand, awestruck by the emerald splendour around them.
Pedro Almodovar celebrates life in all its messy turns
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/11/2021
» Pedro Almodovar's films turn camp into art, or art into camp. Or even better, he isn't bothered all that much whether the candy-coloured hijinks, the sexual anything-goes, the carnal perfidy and maternal heartbreak in his movies are a form of art or a celebration of camp. And we, the audience, shouldn't either. Almodovar, the internationally best-known Spanish filmmaker, thrives on something much simpler, I think. Freedom.
Time is not on anybody's side
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/10/2021
» There's the anatomy -- the bone and the flesh, supple or flaccid. Then there's time, the cruellest judge of all. In Jakrawal Nilthamrong's Anatomy Of Time (the Thai title is simpler, Wela), the first sound we hear is a tick-tock metronome like the soundtrack of the cosmos as we watch an old lady gently tending to her tubed and bedbound husband. Time will be folded back. The old woman will become young and her dying husband will appear as a spirited, dashing military captain fighting communist insurgents for the good of the nation.