Showing 1-10 of 39 results
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Thai-helmed 'Memoria' a Cannes star
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/06/2021
» A Thai-directed film starring Tilda Swinton has been selected for the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival 2021, the first time in 11 years that a Thai filmmaker will be featured in the top tier of the prestigious festival.
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Corona and the death of cinema (again)
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/03/2020
» "Cinema is an invention without a future," said Louis Lumiere who, along with his brother Auguste, invented the Cinematographe in 1895. From its birth, cinema was convinced of its own death. From the very beginning, cinema predicted its own eventual demise. And that was before the two world wars, the advent of home video, laser disc, DVDs, Blu-rays, terrorism, mass shootings, Netflix, and now the coronavirus, the latest scourge that has sealed shut cinema houses around the world.
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Religious fervour serves no god well
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/04/2018
» Aformer rock musician has embraced the role of online preacher and denounced, above other things, rock music. In fact, he objects to most kinds of music, deeming it against Islam. Weerachon "Toh" Sattaying, once the high-pitched frontman of the band Silly Fools (love the name), has over the past six years quit his former lifestyle and became a born-again Muslim. Bearded, skull-capped, fiery-eyed and charismatic, Weerachon runs a dry-aged beef business and hosts an online religious programme that has cultivated quite a following.
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A baroque nightmare, upgraded
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/11/2018
» The original 1977 Suspiria was a trashy bloodbath, an Italian giallo at its most lurid and disturbing -- a lair of maggots, murderers and witches. The remake, in cinemas this week, is high-trash Euro art house, more bourgeois and hipsterish -- a baroque nightmare whose danse macabre has been upgraded to fit the faces and forms of Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton. The new film has been directed by Italian Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, A Bigger Splash, I Am Love) and shot by Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, whose 35mm work here is one of the film's high points.
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A hint of political maturation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/09/2018
» The Bangkok Art and Culture Centre has been put under bureaucratic pressure, its budget cut and its relations with Bangkok Metropolitan Authority strained. One way to support this hub of contemporary art in downtown Bangkok is simple: visit the place, admire the art and the events, and show that the city needs a modern, open-minded art and culture venue unshackled by the old guard.
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House RCA retrospective honours Japanese Palme d'Or winner
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/07/2018
» Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters will open in Thailand on Aug 2, two months after the film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival. Among modern Japanese filmmakers, Kore-eda has amassed the strongest following in Thailand, largely due to the fortunate fact that most of his films -- not all, mind you -- have opened commercially here since 2004. To pave the mood for Shoplifters, a gem of a family drama that finally brought the 56-year-old director one of the highest honours in international cinema, the Thai distribution Mongkol Major brings back seven films by the master in a Kore-eda Retrospective programme at House RCA, starting today.
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Last light at Lido
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/05/2018
» The Lido Theatre opened on June 27, 1968, a 1,000-seat movie palace in the fast-modernising neighbourhood of Pathumwan. The first title on the marquee was Guns For San Sebastian, a cowboy film starring Anthony Quinn.
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Dissecting a nation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/06/2017
» Pasuk Phongpaichit's and Chris Baker's house is a verdant abode at the end of a maze in an Ekamai sub-soi. The garden at the back has tall trees and a small, tea-coloured pond. The whole area used to be a swamp, said Baker. The couple, both highly respected scholars in Thai studies, have been living there since 1987, or in their lexicon, "just before the boom" -- the high-flying economic expansion whose seismic shifts forever transformed Thailand in the early 1990s. Had they wanted to purchase the plot slightly later than they actually did -- after the boom had set in -- they wouldn't have been able to. "We came just before the high-rises."
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The late, late show
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/06/2016
» Normally prime time for television is 8-11pm or thereabouts, the period when the family gathers to watch news and series while having dinner. So it will come as a surprise to many that for Muslim audiences during this month of Ramadan, prime time for television is closer to a graveyard shift -- 3-4.30am, deep in the night while most people are asleep -- as families wake up for the pre-dawn meal before a full day of fasting.
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At Cannes, humour makes a surprise visit
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/02/2017
» Humour is hardly ever associated with Cannes competition films -- to win the Palme d'Or, for example, it's assumed a film should possess art house gravitas, serious humanity, or weighty, topical, discourse-stimulating subject matter (last year's winner, Dheepan, is about immigrants in Paris, and before that, the three-hour-long Turkish drama Winter Sleep).
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