Showing 1-10 of 29 results
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Film festival needs direction
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/02/2012
» If the Red Carpet works, the film festival works. That seems to be the motto of the hype machine behind last weekend's Hua Hin International Film Festival, which proudly paraded stars down the sandy, horse-free beach of the InterContinental while the cinemas were haunted by ghosts. Nothing's wrong with using a movie festival to support tourism, as long as some attention is paid to what it's all about: film, and the film-going experience.
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Cambodian classics re-emerge
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/03/2012
» The Khmer Rouge, headlong and senseless, arrived in Phnom Penh and spoiled the party. During the so-called Golden Age of Cambodian cinema, from the 1960s to the early '70s, almost 400 films were released in the country. A number of them travelled across the border and were screened in Thai cinemas, some gaining the status of popular entertainment, and at least one, featuring a chattering snake and his love affair with a beautiful woman, becoming a classic remembered today by Thais as a lost, distant dream.
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Lao new wave
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/04/2012
» For decades, the light has been out in Laos. The movie screens have become totally dark, and the profession known elsewhere as "actor" is, up to today, still non-existent. For so many years our land-locked neighbour has subsisted on a staple of Thai TV soaps and movies, cultural imports that have travelled, or been smuggled, through airwaves and distribution channels, and so much is our cross-Mekong dominance that Lao people have almost forgotten what it's like to watch a Lao film.
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Regionalcross-Over
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/08/2012
» It helps that the part doesn't require him to speak much. Playing a soldier stationed in the Spratlys, a group of disputed islands in the South China Sea several nations lay claim to with some even flexing their military might, Ananda Everingham, in the new Filipino film Kalayaan, only has to speak three sentences in Tagalog.
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Learning from Laos
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/12/2012
» I was in Luang Prabang last weekend _ for a film festival, of all things. A giant screen was put up in the main square near the Handicraft Market, and for five nights people _ mostly local, with a fair sprinkling of tourists _ turned up in the hundreds to watch movies under the black night. Luang Prabang, with its functional archaeology of ancient, glorious buildings, has no cinemas. That's even better, we could say, for the effort to boost the appetite for moving images and the idea of movies as a collective experience.
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From Laos with love
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/06/2013
» The first all-Lao film to be released in Thailand in decades, Hak Um Lum occupies that territory between naivete and honesty. Made on a paltry budget of around 1 million baht, the romantic comedy will mainly draw Thai viewers who're curious about a homemade flick from our land-locked neighbour, while those who ride the high horse of cultural snobbery will dismiss this freshman effort as totally unnecessary.
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Ready to launch
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/11/2013
» Officially and conceptually, this is an Australian film. Linguistically and thematically, it is a Lao one, while practically and physically, it is very much Thai. Never mind nationality, a good film is a good film. And in a dream that seems wild but certainly not the wildest, The Rocket is perhaps good enough (it has to be lucky enough too) to make it to the shortlist for the best foreign language Oscar, which means the Lao and Thai actors, along with the Australian filmmakers, will get to saunter down the famous red carpet in Los Angeles next February to present this lovely film.
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Cream of the cinematic crop
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/11/2013
» Here we go again. The 11th World Film Festival of Bangkok kicks off tonight with The Rocket, and over the next 10 days more than 50 films will be made available for your perusal at SF World Cinema at Central World.
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Conceptual reality
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/01/2014
» It is ill-fated irony that an art exhibition which is probably most relevant to the current political havoc is unable to be viewed because of that havoc itself.
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Don’t they know it’s ‘our’ Songkran?
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/03/2014
» Your Honour, ladies and gentlemen of the tribunal of the International Court of Universal Justice. I’ve come to this court today to represent the Cultural Watchdog and Tourism Authority of Thailand, and I henceforth present to the esteemed tribunal the grave, scandalous, hair-raising offence committed by a group of people in Singapore (I think) against the splendid and extremely wet Siamese tradition known as Songkran.
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