Showing 1-10 of 123 results
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Marina's soul searching in Bangkok
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/10/2023
» Like Dante guided by Virgil, Marina Abramovic drifts through the purgatory that is Bangkok chaperoned by the little monkey prince. After praying at shrines and temples of assorted spiritual inclinations, she is taken to the Monkey King (Pichet Klunchun), whose rhymed, melodic prophecy finally guides Abramovic to the prayer hall of Wat Pho where her salvation awaits clad in a saffron robe.
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Colourful journey into Thailand's soul
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/01/2017
» The train clangs ahead, moving people and dreams, as it has done since 1893. In Railway Sleepers, a minutely observed film shot entirely on-board a Thai train, we see kids on school trips, young men travelling north and south, hawkers selling food and horoscope books, families and lovers, vacationers who turn the sleeping car into a party venue. They're passengers, and they're also humans. They are, as director Sompot Chidgasornpongse says, a collection of faces that make up a portrait of Thailand.
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Poor Barbie... Oppenheimer's the bomb
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/03/2024
» The annual guessing game to read the minds of inscrutable Oscars voters is here.
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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?
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The skin I live in
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/01/2019
» The body is a temple. But it can also be a torture chamber, from which escape, while possible, is soul-crushing. Lukas Dhont's Girl is an emphatic, moving story about Lara (Victor Polster), a Belgian trans teen at an elite ballet school who's going through male-to-female gender reassignment. That she has to contend with her own hormones and pre-assigned biological specifics, as well as the fact that her chosen career mandates extreme rigour in how the body should bend and behave, Lara's fight is nothing short of heroic. And in that vein, the film is as well.
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Sometimes transcendental, always relevant
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/05/2018
» The American films were on short supply this year at Cannes -- which in turn deprived the assembly line of red carpet material -- but nobody seemed to mind that except, well, some American media and fashion bloggers. That superfluous caveat aside, the recently wrapped 71st Cannes Film Festival was nearly unanimously praised as one of the best editions in recent memory, with a string of good, sometimes very good, titles playing night after night -- and even the bad films weren't so offensively bad, as was often the case. In the midst of soul-searching following the question of relevance (the world wants Avengers), the rise of streaming (the world watches films on phones), the decline of arthouse popularity, Cannes insists on the sacredness of cinema, on the future of the art, and this year it paid off solidly.
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Strange brew
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/03/2018
» He went down to the crossroads, fell down on his knees, asked the Lord for mercy -- and somehow got it. In this biopic documentary, Eric Clapton -- his place in the pantheon of guitar god-dom guaranteed -- is a tragic genius denounced by his own mother and nurturing a desperate crush on his best friend's wife, which kept his guitar wailing and weeping. Here's a 60s-70s blues-rock maverick who sold his soul to heroin, cocaine, cognac, whatever, and when he emerged from the pit and things began to feel wonderful tonight, he lost his son in a terrible, terrible accident. That a new documentary about his life to date is allowed to end happily is proof that rock'n'roll (and life itself) can cheat the claws of fate and go on for longer than 12 bars.
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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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A new vision on Siam's enduring symbol
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/04/2017
» The elephant and the man, walking down the road to redemption and encountering the wounded and the marginalised, the madmen and the prostitutes. In the film Pop Aye, which will kick off Bangkok Asean Film Festival 2017 this evening (see sidebar), the fine-tusked beast accompanies the lost soul as the duo find their way home from Bangkok to the Northeast.
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Chasing the American dream
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/02/2017
» They're brashly young, scantily clad, sexed up boys and girls, and they smoke and drink and party hard all night to throbbing rap music and EDM before hitting the road, knocking on the doors that are opened by lonely housewives of the American Midwest. They're a magazine sales crew, the wandering troop that haunts highways, truck stops and roadside motels. They're at once very literal and curiously sensual, the image of the American dream, ever out of reach, soul-crushing and rescued only by love (and perhaps, God help us, by Shia LaBeouf).
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