Showing 1 - 10 of 15
The Year of Great Reckoning
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/12/2020
» For filmgoers, it was a year of mortal dread. The screen went dark, like a coffin nailed shut, and is still like that in many places. Faith in cinema as we've known it was rattled, challenged, and endangered with a Biblical overtone; it's a plague we're dealing with, after all. It was a year unlike any other we had seen before in the 125 years since cinema was invented. And while that sounds dispiriting, 2020 has also been a "Year of Great Reckoning" during which the equilibrium was recalibrated and the idea of moving images continues, as it should, to evolve.
Art as our escape
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/09/2020
» This year's theme is at once hopeful and ironic: "Escape Routes" suggests a flight from our unusual times of pathological disruption and political cataclysm -- here, there and everywhere -- and yet the theme is an acknowledgment of those in-our-face uncertainties from which we struggle to find an exit.
The human condition, from a distance
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/12/2017
» Ai Weiwei's Human Flow is a film that spans the latitudes of a mural painting, vast and long, covering one end of the Earth to the other, many times with a top-down view. This documentary about forcibly displaced people around the world -- from Syria and Iraq, from Eritrea to Mexico -- plays out in the broad scope of Refugee 101, and it works as a (very long) campaign presentation of United Nations High Commission of Human Rights (UNHCR).
A film festival devoted to refugee crises
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/12/2017
» The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) will host the 7th Refugee Film Festival Bangkok 2017, which runs from tomorrow until Dec 10 at Paragon Cineplex. Admission is free, but advanced registration is required at the UNHCR Facebook page.
Oscar contenders from around the world
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/11/2017
» A record 92 films have been submitted to the Oscar Foreign Language Film category. We take a look at some
A beautiful mongrel
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/10/2017
» List the obligatory terms you've seen in all articles about the original Blade Runner -- cyberpunk, dystopian future, neon wasteland, existential noir, cerebral deliberation, gorgeous visuals, brutalist design, Sean Young -- and they're still applicable to the rebooted Blade Runner 2049. You may add a few more: glum, long, Hans Zimmer and Ryan Gosling, wandering the bleak, rain-swept Los Angeles and pondering the deep question: Do androids dream of electric sheep? And also: Do replicants make babies?
Scarlett does non-human, again
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/03/2017
» It's possible that when we all die and are reborn as cyborgs or aliens, we'll look like Scarlett Johansson: white and bewildered, gamine-haired and supremely athletic, fierce on the outside and gentler within. The actor's recent list of post-human roles is impressive. She is an extraterrestrial seducer sucking men's souls in Under The Skin; a human-CPU-God hybrid in Lucy; a cybernetic assassin in Ghost In The Shell, which is our subject today. Mind you, even devoid of her physical self, she still embodies the voice of artificial intelligence, as in Her, in which she purrs her way into the consciousness of that world.
The time for art
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/06/2016
» Sebastian Errazuriz said that as a child he didn't recall any friends saying they wanted to grow up to become a watchmaker.
Sin and the art of redemptive violence
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» Sitting in the courtyard of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke talks about violence _ the violence in his new movie that is riding a wave of critical favour at the world's biggest film festival, and the real violence back in his home country where the unstoppable motor of progress has brought on many changes, good and otherwise.
Thanks Chin, Taweesak for making history
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/10/2013
» In a world of instant video clips and on-demand visual recordings - just draw your smartphones and start shooting, like gun-slingers - it's hard to recall a time when documenting events in moving images was a feat.