Showing 1 - 7 of 7
Christie's looks for more Thai bidders
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/07/2016
» Premier auction house Christie's is celebrating its 250th anniversary this year. In Asia, the company first held an auction in Hong Kong in 1986, clocking in nearly US$2 million. Twelve years later in 1998, Christie's Auction (Thailand) opened its doors at the then-Peninsula Plaza on Ratchadamri Road.
Sandcastles in sky and 'our' Leicester win
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/05/2016
» So unsure of ourselves, we grab a straw and think it is a rope. So unconfident of our place in the world, we find an excuse to vaunt it as national pride. Sandcastles? Maybe, and while everyone enjoys building sandcastles, only children think they're real and want to live out their lives in one.
Nippon through film
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/01/2015
» From the emotional quicksand of Hokkaido men to a display of high school angst and quirks, the Japanese Film Festival 2015 brings the taste of cinematic Japan to town. The 10-day festival begins tonight and continues until Feb 8 at Paragon Cineplex. The selection is rich, and as new Japanese movies have rarely gotten regular releases in Thai cineplex these days, the festival is a mini goldmine for audiences.
Romance among the ruins
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/09/2014
» Love is a crumbling currency in the wistful, strangely affecting Pavang Rak (Concrete Clouds). Set in 1997, during the economic meltdown that burst our bubble and left urban carcases of unfinished skyscrapers, the film remembers the emotional inertia of that year and watches its characters drift like ghosts as they realise that even love — of all the catastrophes — can't give them salvation. There's voluptuous despair. There's a full cabinet of 1990s pop-cultural reminiscence, and there's the filmmaker's awkward strive to reconcile the narrative flow with his experimental impulses — and yet here's a Thai film that's as tender as it is bold. It's also a film about the mood (and not necessarily the actualities) of that fateful, uneasy moment of 17 years ago when the market crashed and our sense of the future dashed.
Wake in fright
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/07/2014
» The parched outback saps all the juice from their hearts. In The Rover, David Michôd’s Aussie western that opens this week, two men traverse a lawless wasteland looking for a stolen car and maybe for the last shreds of empathy. Something bad has happened — to the world and its population. The film blithely leaves out any explanation, but we gather that it was some sort of financial apocalypse that reduces Australia to an expanse of sand-blustering wilderness. The collapse renders the local currency useless (only the US dollar is accepted) and pushes men either towards stupor or barbarism.
Mind trip
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/07/2012
» Eric Packer is a brilliant currency trader, played with scowls and smirks by Robert Pattinson. In David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, adapted from Don DeLillo's novel of the same name, Eric, in pursuit of the plummeting yuan (it's yen in the book) and a haircut, rides across Manhattan in his dazzlingly white stretch limo, long as a coffin, noiseless as the interior of a whale. The world is crumbling around him; the anarchists are parading a huge rat statue around and a Time Square screen summons up Marx. It's a protest against the future, says one character. On TV, the IMF chief is seen being stabbed in the eye by an attacker in North Korea.