Showing 1-10 of 27 results
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View from the Far South
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/12/2019
» Young men lie face-down on the floor, their hands tied at the back. Uniformed officers punch and kick them. "Squeeze in!" they shout at the men on the ground. More kicks, more punches.
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Stop the tall tales about election dates
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/05/2018
» There's no way round it and there's no time for subtlety: The past four years have been a sham, a false dream stage-managed by false prophets.
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Killer and victim
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/12/2017
» Sandome no satsujin (The Third Murder) -- which is way more gripping and finely-crafted than Murder On The Orient Express -- is a Japanese whodunit wrought with the dramaturgy of a Russian novel. Right at the opening, we see a murder being committed: Takashi Misumi (Koji Yakusho) is clubbing a man -- the owner of a factory where he works -- to death on a riverbank. But in its staunchly reflective storyline, The Third Murder is as much about the murder itself as it is about the killer's complex motif that underlines the elusiveness of truth, reason, justice and victimhood -- of crime and punishment.
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'Bad Genius' exception to Thai film rule
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/10/2017
» She cheats because she wants money, and because she believes the system has cheated her first. No politics please! The exciting Thai pop-culture news of the week was the box-office triumph of the Thai film Chalard Games Goeng (Bad Genius in English), an exam-cheating thriller packed with heart-racing set pieces in which bright students orchestrate an elaborate international cheating ring, outsmarting the system on the expense of their moral equanimity. When you're 17, perhaps that's a small price to pay.
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Life, love, liberation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/09/2017
» In the sole Thai film showing at Toronto International Film Festival this week, a soap opera star stuck in a loveless marriage tangles with an eccentric hitman and a powerful cult. Samui Song is the latest feature film by Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, who's fashioned a crime thriller that also plays as a critique of many things: patriarchal oppression, faux-Buddhism, public healthcare and the act of cinema-making itself.
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On the road, with the elephant
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/06/2017
» Like all roads, this one promises redemption. Like most journeys, the destination is often where one starts off. Pop Aye, a road movie about a man and his elephant on a long trip to the Northeast, is a story of middle-class disillusionment (that's what the middle-class exists for) and the siren call of the rural -- the ambiguous call ringing in the ear of those who feel betrayed by the city.
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We're all in, or under, the army now
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/06/2017
» Consider a hypothetical scenario: You're driving and your car accidentally bumps into the vehicle in front of you. The driver of the other car steps out. It's just an accident, but the thing is, he's a military officer in his shining uniform. What would your first reaction be?
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Scarlett does non-human, again
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/03/2017
» It's possible that when we all die and are reborn as cyborgs or aliens, we'll look like Scarlett Johansson: white and bewildered, gamine-haired and supremely athletic, fierce on the outside and gentler within. The actor's recent list of post-human roles is impressive. She is an extraterrestrial seducer sucking men's souls in Under The Skin; a human-CPU-God hybrid in Lucy; a cybernetic assassin in Ghost In The Shell, which is our subject today. Mind you, even devoid of her physical self, she still embodies the voice of artificial intelligence, as in Her, in which she purrs her way into the consciousness of that world.
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View from a veteran
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/03/2017
» The list of hits he has created in the past 20 years is long and staggering: Visute Poolvoralaks, perhaps Thailand's best-known film producer, is the man behind the renaissance of Thai cinema in the mid-1990s with Dang Bireley's And Young Gangsters, Nang Nak and Satree Lex, before becoming part of the hit-making machine GTH to push Fan Chan, Hello Stranger and the highest-grossing Thai film of all time, Phi Mak Phrakanong. Estimated box-office intake commandeered from his desk: nearly 2 billion baht.
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Untangling our twisted tales of rights
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/03/2017
» It's always a tale of two human rights.
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