Showing 1-10 of 38 results
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Return to paradise
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/01/2022
» At Maya Bay, hawk-eyed park officials patrol the sandy stretch, whistles at the ready. It was a gorgeous morning last Thursday, just days after the fabled beach on Phi Phi Leh Island had reopened after three years of closure, and the 300 or so holidaymakers, masked or otherwise, were ambling or striking catwalk poses on the pillow-soft sand, awestruck by the emerald splendour around them.
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Pedro Almodovar celebrates life in all its messy turns
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/11/2021
» Pedro Almodovar's films turn camp into art, or art into camp. Or even better, he isn't bothered all that much whether the candy-coloured hijinks, the sexual anything-goes, the carnal perfidy and maternal heartbreak in his movies are a form of art or a celebration of camp. And we, the audience, shouldn't either. Almodovar, the internationally best-known Spanish filmmaker, thrives on something much simpler, I think. Freedom.
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Melancholy and absurdity
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/05/2021
» Chaitanya Tamhane was 27 years old when his breakthrough film Court became a critical sensation and won the Lion of the Future Award at the Venice festival in 2014. A film of understated power about India's Kafkaesque judicial tribulation, Court announced the arrival of an exceptional talent from Mumbai, a proud cinema city usually associated with rambunctious Bollywood titles.
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The old skeleton in the closet
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/04/2019
» Motherly ghosts are Southeast Asia's fiercest creatures, as they cling to their memories with a vengeance. In Marn-Da (The Only Mom), a Myanmar-Thai haunted-house horror, a motherless child wanders her old colonial house -- she was already dead, sure -- looking for love and hugs. When a new family moves in, the girl-ghost finds the perfect mother she never had and the old skeleton in the closet comes tumbling out.
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Bismillah, Freddie will not let us go
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/11/2018
» Freddie Mercury, played with an earnest commitment bordering on fetishism by Rami Malek in the biographical film Bohemian Rhapsody, is a rock star the likes of which we hadn't seen before the 1970s and haven't since: An Asian frontman of a British rock outfit, a four-octave opera lover who sang in leotards and thongs, a proud organiser of orgiastic jamborees, and a gay man who endeared himself to the hard-rock audience that, in all likelihood in those pre-diversity days, either failed to realise that their mustachioed rock-god was out-and-out queer or suppressed their suspicion so completely that they didn't feel any cognitive dissonance in their devotion to Queen. Even the name Freddie gave the band laid it all bare.
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A nation of millions can't hold them back
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/10/2018
» Rhymes and misdemeanours. Yo, yo. Rappers are threatened to be thrown in a slammer.
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Hope lives on as cave rescue crisis unfolds
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/06/2018
» Time is not on their side, and not on ours. To beat nature and to outrun time -- and what cruel nature and pitiless time -- we give it everything we have.
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Dream, murder and reality
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/05/2018
» The 11-day Cannes Film Festival will close tomorrow, and as the race for the Palme d'Or is the most breathtaking in years, we look at some of the highlights of the second week of the world's largest movie festival
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Thai TV not yet destined for global love
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/03/2018
» The soap series Bupphaesannivas (Love Destiny) is all the rage these days in Thailand. I enjoy some parts of it, especially one memorable episode a few weeks back when the female lead, a beautiful vixen in 17th century Ayutthaya, displays her vituperative talent by shouting at her servant, "Shut up or I'll smack your mouth with my piss pot." Neither did we see the piss nor the pot, but we get the picture. There's even a YouTube clip of that.
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Where will the gongs go?
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/03/2018
» To me, the most accomplished film among the Oscar contenders is Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, which means it's not going to win big. The film, which is in Thai cinemas now, stars Daniel Day-Lewis as a fastidious couturier whose obsessive quest for artistic perfection hits a snag when he falls in love with a waitress. It's an exquisite drama, a sophisticated study of human impulses, obsessions and contradictions, constructed with formal elegance to reflect the interior of a man's emotion through a story that takes place almost entirely in a townhouse.
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