Showing 1 - 5 of 5
Northern lights
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/09/2016
» With over 400 movies on the slot, the Toronto International Film Festival was a feast and a maze. The latest edition of this North American showcase concluded last Sunday, with Damein Chazelle's La La Land winning the People's Choice Award, a bellwether for the bright Oscar season (Toronto, unlike other major festivals, has no prominent juried competition, instead letting the audiences decide the big winner). The festival is known as a launch pad for Oscar hopefuls as well as independent titles looking for distribution. It also features a strong experimental section that casts its radical net far and wide.
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.
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?
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.
Psycho-killers, interviewed
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/08/2019
» The series didn't drop with as much ballyhoo as most Netflix new releases; instead it creepy-crawled into the algorithm of fans with chilly stealth last Friday. Mindhunter Season 2, created by Joe Penhall with several episodes directed by David Fincher, is a cerebral remedy to Netflix's glut of story-driven series and formulaic cliffhangers. Mindhunter takes almost a geeky pride in its dialogue-heavy exploration of the most vicious minds in the anthology of American true crime, the procession of ultra-violent serial murderers, pathological rapists and sadistic torturers, and in the way it isn't fixated on solving any particular cases (as is expected from a detective show) but taking time to study the methodological eccentricity of each crime and the increasingly dark obsession of the detectives, sucked ever more inextricably into the transgressive vortex.