Showing 1 - 10 of 38
Coldplay across the universe
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/02/2024
» The latest Coldplay concert in Bangkok was a feat of photogenic spectacles designed to bedazzle, complete with light-blinking wristbands, sci-fi-warped animation on spherical screens, balloons in the shape of planets and exploding fireworks above the roof of Rajamangala National Stadium ("The football field not often used to play football on," as a Thai national squad member noted.)
The vagabond returns
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/01/2023
» A film once overlooked and misunderstood may have found its moment many years later, the work's peculiar vibrations finally detected and at last appreciated.
When literature becomes light
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/07/2018
» Haruki Murakami's books exert a strange pull that's earned him a devoted following around the world -- and Thailand is no exception. One foot planted in the reality of the modern world, the other trudging through a surreal dreamland as the ground beneath his characters' feet keeps shifting, Murakami entrances and confuses, lulls and hallucinates. His novels and short stories also occupy that exclusive territory in the literary world: he's a best-selling author who's also every bookmaker's favourite to win the Nobel Prize. He's also one of a few post-war Japanese writers whose style and substance transcend cultural and national boundaries.
The passion of Pasolini
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/06/2022
» Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna on March 5, 1922, and died in a violent, mysterious circumstance on the outskirts of Rome in November 1975. This year marks the centenary of the Italian poet's and filmmaker's birth, and this Sunday at 1pm, the Thai Film Archive will screen Pasolini's first film as director, Accattone, a gloriously austere ode to underclass plight. It will be the first time the 1961 film is screened in Thailand.
Of zombies and fairy tales
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/05/2022
» The opening films across the three programmes at the 75th Cannes Film Festival speak of disparate destinies of contemporary cinema, from the poetic to the political and the pointless. Let's start with the latter.
The way I see it...
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/03/2022
» Ahead of the Academy Awards on Monday, our film critic shares his thoughts on the big runners.
Time for Asean films to shine
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/12/2021
» The pandemic notwithstanding, it has been a stimulating year for Southeast Asian cinema. Reflective, heartfelt and oddball new titles from Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have won major prizes or become critical favourites at international film festivals throughout 2021. Now, many of these films are coming to the big screen in Thailand as the Bangkok Asean Film Festival 2021 (BAFF) is set to open tonight.
Apichatpong's memory of the world
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/06/2021
» It begins with a bang. Maybe the Big Bang, a culmination of cosmic murmur and subterranean hum that explodes like a burst of revelation, a sonic release of the weight of all human pain. In Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new film Memoria, a woman wakes up one morning in Bogota jolted by a mysterious sound -- a metallic, visceral, bottom-of-the-well bang. The woman, orchid farm owner Jessica (played by Tilda Swinton), wanders the Colombian capital in a daze, haunted by the unshakable aural echo, then leaves the city and heads to the mountains, where the phantom of the bang shadows her.
Asean on screen
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/09/2020
» Ahead of the BAFF featuring Southeast Asian movies plus Chinese and Japanese titles, Life spoke with two filmmakers about their work
Memories buried in soil
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/07/2019
» Memories and war, illusory borders and invisible scars: These themes are resonant in two documentary films shown late last month at the SAC Film Festival (hosted by the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre). In the Thai documentary Din Rai Dan (Soil Without Land), a Tai Yai man in Shan state talks about his life as a waiter in Bangkok and as a soldier in his ethnic army. In the Vietnamese film The Future Cries Beneath Our Soil, a group of men in a rural village bear the indelible wounds of the Vietnam War, still stinging after 40 years.