Showing 1-10 of 40 results
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In search of big ideas
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/01/2018
» BangkokEdge Festival, billed as an "idea festival", returns to its old quarters of Bangkok this weekend. Spearheaded by MR Narisa Chakrabongse, the two-day event is a vibrant smorgasbord of literature, music, art, history and politics, anchored in the charming venues of Museum Siam, Chakrabongse Villas and Rajini School. There will be talks -- plenty of panels and discussions, on subjects ranging from "What Makes The Chao Phraya A World Monument?" to "The Power Of Slam Poetry", from "Populism, Religion and Neo-Nationalism In The 21st Century" to "Years Of Living Dangerously: A Woman's Take On War". The list of participants is starry, including writers, journalists, poets, historians and artists, Thai and international. Come evening, the lawn of Museum Siam will play host to film screenings (Pop Aye on Saturday and Citizen Dog on Sunday), as well as concerts by Hugo, Yena, Rasmee Isan Soul and more.
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Paris show features stolen crown
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/03/2015
» An imitation of the royal crown replica that was stolen from a Paris museum in a high-profile art heist earlier this month will be exhibited in Paris tomorrow.
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Spirits run deep
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/03/2016
» Downstairs: a vintage Fiat, a vintage Austin Mini, a few Mercedes. Upstairs: a wild museum of spiritual imagery, Brahmin, Buddhism, animism -- tall effigies of leopard-striped hermits and beautiful Buddha statues, talismanic scrolls of occult origins and prints of Khmer calligraphy.
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The passion of Pasolini
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/06/2022
» Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna on March 5, 1922, and died in a violent, mysterious circumstance on the outskirts of Rome in November 1975. This year marks the centenary of the Italian poet's and filmmaker's birth, and this Sunday at 1pm, the Thai Film Archive will screen Pasolini's first film as director, Accattone, a gloriously austere ode to underclass plight. It will be the first time the 1961 film is screened in Thailand.
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Through the prism of history
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/10/2019
» The book's title is printed on its spine: Prism Of Photography: Dispersion Of Knowledge And Memories Of The 6 October Massacre. Thereafter, from the first page on, we have only photographs with no captions.
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Uncle Boonmee at 10
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/05/2020
» Rumour had spread early that morning that the Thai film would win big that night. How big? We daren't dream. The runner-up prize maybe? The Cannes grapevine, in those embryonic days of Facebook and Twitter, was fairly dependable but not downright on the money. It gives you the shape but never the details. The Thai film "will definitely win something", said one of my supposedly well-connected friends, accompanied by a speculative wink.
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Fierce and pitiful
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/03/2019
» Krasue is a Thai ghost beside whom vampires -- and other blood-lusting Western monsters -- pale in comparison. Basically a detached head of a woman floating around in the dark, lit up by a phosphorescent glow from her still-beating heart, and with her bloody entrails dangling below the head like an infested creeper, krasue feeds on, naturally, filth, blood, corpses and carcasses. Sometimes it's compared, for the sake of convenience, with Gothic-era will-o'-the-wisp or jack-o'-lantern. But seriously, please, that is a gross under-characterisation that discounts the supreme grotesqueness of krasue, born by the pulpy fantasy of our equatorial folklorists.
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Time is not on our side
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/01/2018
» This is a note on an important Thai film that is unlikely to be shown in Thailand. Such is the fate of home-grown cinema in a time of disease, the time of a black hole.
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Squaring off at Cannes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/06/2017
» It was "a bad year", "a disappointing year", "a weak year", and so on. Curmudgeonly, typically, sometime jeeringly -- I count myself in the pack -- the critics bemoaned Cannes' official selection in the year it was supposed to be all glory and fireworks as the world's most important film festival blew its 70th candle. To the press corps present, the consensus (or something close) was that the "elite" competition titles were a catalogue of predictable provocations and unrealised ambitions, on top of the more-of-the-same arthouse fare from directors who attract attention by their names rather than by their latest works. It's true. But as always with Cannes, the expectation is too high, the collective hallucination too overpowering, and the four-to-five-films-a-day ordeal took a toll on enthusiasm even to the most passionate out there.
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Art, revenge, despair
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/11/2016
» Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals opens with a montage of naked, fat-rippling, extremely obese women, their bodies wrapped in the American flag as they dance to the beat. We then cut to the opening of an art exhibition featuring those naked women on platforms, curled up as live installation pieces, or as morbid glitz, an excess of grotesquerie amid the well-dressed LA crowd.
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