Showing 1-10 of 62 results
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Hoping it's not 'The End' for iconic cinema
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/03/2012
» It's hard not to peddle nostalgia when it comes to the Lido and Scala. In an age of plastic multiplexes with their garish neon signs and overpriced tickets - plus the dangerously robotic protocols of their pre-programmed staff - the two cinemas in Siam Square are a reminder of a time when movies had not been hijacked by blood-sucking consumerism. Two of the last stand-alone cinemas in Bangkok, the Lido and Scala, are movie houses, and something more: they're personal museums, the same way that movies are eternally personal. They're memory boxes, living archeological remains of this country's film-going history.
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In rocks we trust
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/03/2012
» Our boat cut through the dark water in search of light. Salt-sprayed, wind-whipped and guided by shadows, we finally found it: in the lagoon of Kudu Island, a screen had been erected and projector installed. Gently bobbing before it was a floating lounge, a deconstructible auditorium for the castaways who imbibed cinema, hoping (or dreaming) that it were elixir. Soon a beam of light from the projecting tower pierced the darkness and illuminated the white canvas: it was indeed a cinema, and a unique cinematic experience. Hardly men had gone before to such length to enjoy movies. And of course, this is Thailand.
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Of witch and vampire
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/05/2012
» The Collins mansion is fashionably decrepit and predictably haunted. With the wispy chandelier like fluorescent jellyfish, a wide staircase entwined by carved serpents and crumbling, pre-Victorian opulence, the estate mirrors the inhabitants: Tim Burton's greatest hits of weirdos, lost children, glamourous widows, and embittered souls living out their Gothic soap. The house is a museum of Burton's chic grotesquerie _ childish, moonstruck, cartoonishly scary _ and this time, it is vamped up by a vampire and the 1970s rock'n roll nostalgia. At one point Alice Cooper makes an appearance, and that's one of the few highs Dark Shadows has dished out (and young viewers would go, Alice Cooper who?).
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Storming oscar's language barrier
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/09/2012
» The end of September is when countries submit their representatives for the Oscar's Best Foreign Language Film, the only category the rest of the world can take part in for Hollywood's mostly self-celebratory awards show.
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Out of Isan
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/10/2012
» In the Northeastern province of Khon Kaen, a young man returns home from Bangkok and the ghosts, dust, dreams and unrequited romance of his past visit him. Meanwhile, the television reports on the convulsive riots in the capital fuelled by, among other things, the bottled hurt and long-locked anger of the Isan populace.
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Dross, debris and da Bone
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/01/2013
» Canadian photographer Liam Morgan invites us to contemplate the consequences of being forsaken. Rust, dirt, moss, dust, flakes of forgotten concrete, muck-caked walls, floors and ceilings, the extraterrestrial landscape of abandonment; in all, the cadavers of construction, without life and yet only half undead. In his first solo exhibition, "Abandon And Decay", currently on display at Kathmandu Gallery, the Bangkok-based Morgan attempts an exploration into the nature of decay and finds abstract fascination in the discarded and the leftover. You look _ and something compels you to move closer for a better view.
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Space Oddity
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/04/2013
» The vast, wasted and elegantly desperate post-alien-invasion world is the setting of Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion. In the science-fiction film that opened in Thailand yesterday, Kosinski puts Tom Cruise in the role of Jack Harper, a patrolman and drone-fixer left to station Earth after everyone else has headed for the safe haven of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Kosinski's debut feature in 2010 was Tron: Legacy, a film that picked up the hallucinatory imagination of sci-fi devotees nearly 30 years after the original.
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Poles Apart
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2013
» The spirit of rebirth is almost palpable as you walk the streets and hear the stories of Warsaw. Wiped off the map in the 19th century, reduced to ashes by German planes and panzers in 1939 and consigned to suspended animation during the four decades of repressive Stalinist rule that followed, this metropolis _ and the country of which it is capital _ has endured a succession of traumatic misfortunes that it has somehow survived, integrity intact, to reassert its proud identity in the 21st century.
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Silly 'Arab' soap opera lights the fires of mistrust
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/08/2013
» The Middle East becomes a scene of a great romance. The people are cool. The camels are cute. The sky is blue, boundless, and the smooth ridges of the sand dunes are as seductive as the chiselled face of the beardless Muslim sheikh, whose handsome head is wrapped in a chequered keffiyeh.
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Power for the people isn't a matter of class
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/09/2013
» Even the man-eating tigers that have prowled the forest for centuries would become victims if the project isn't scrapped or reconsidered. "No sane person in the world would agree to this project", says an engineer on the environmental committee. To demonstrate their staunch objection, "protesters are making a 400km march in a bid to draw greater attention to what's at stake", reported Time magazine this week.
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