Showing 1-10 of 87 results
-
Of Naga and political dissidents
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2021
» The Naga is real but the murder is not. Or is it vice versa? What history chooses to remember and relegate to oblivion, what it enshrines as story and what it buries as hearsay, is how the narrative of a nation is forged in a mould of clay or a furnace of fire. Or in this particular case, in disembowelled bodies stuffed with concrete blocks. The murder is real but the Naga is not. This sounds more like it.
-
Hear her roar
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/05/2023
» The image of a girl taking off her hijab is wrought with cinematic symbolism. Kamila Andini shows it in her Indonesian film Yuni (2021); Hesome Chemamah in his Thai short I'm Not Your F*cking Stereotype (2019); Ana Lily Amirpour in the Iranian vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014). Subversion? Provocation? Liberation? At this year's Cannes Film Festival, we see that image in Amanda Nell Eu's Tiger Stripes, a work as playful as it is potent in its portrayal of adolescence and what it entails for a young woman's body.
-
Corona and the death of cinema (again)
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/03/2020
» "Cinema is an invention without a future," said Louis Lumiere who, along with his brother Auguste, invented the Cinematographe in 1895. From its birth, cinema was convinced of its own death. From the very beginning, cinema predicted its own eventual demise. And that was before the two world wars, the advent of home video, laser disc, DVDs, Blu-rays, terrorism, mass shootings, Netflix, and now the coronavirus, the latest scourge that has sealed shut cinema houses around the world.
-
Pandemonium
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/09/2022
» The first shot of Athena will be discussed in every writing about the film. A bravura choreography of movement that begins with an intimate close-up of a face and ends, after 10 blood-rushing minutes, with an explosion of revolutionary rage -- a la Les Miserables and Do You Hear The People Sing? transported to a predominantly-Muslim Paris suburb -- that opening shot is so hypnotising and immersive in its non-stop kineticism that we're led to forgive that it's also an earnest show-off, a proud enshrinement of style and attitude over everything else. Romain Gavras, a filmmaker known for making music videos for Jay Z and M.I.A, will cement that approach with many similar shots throughout the film -- long, seemingly uninterrupted shots with parkour camerawork full of angry bodies -- more than enough for aspiring filmmakers of the world to slobber over.
-
Romancing Bangkok
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/08/2016
» Paris had Paris Je T'aime, New York had New York I Love You. Now Bangkok has its own film ensemble drawn from different neighbourhoods of the city. Bangkok Stories, a portmanteau of six films telling tales of brief encounters and nebulous romance, will premier tonight at the 20th Short Film and Video Festival at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, before going on to cinema and television release later.
-
Soulful, sorrowful, tragic
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/08/2015
» Amy is a biographical documentary of the singer Amy Winehouse, but it is also a horror film. Watching it is like watching a ghost, a confused, tortured ghost of a woman who has boundless talent in singing and none in living. As we watch Amy Winehouse -- in home video footage, concert recordings, TV interviews, etc -- it hits us that we're watching her being killed slowly at every passing minute; killed by herself, her addiction, and by the cruel ecosystem of the fame industry that feeds first on her gift then more voraciously on her downfall. This is one of the best documentary films this year, and in some parts it's also one of the hardest to watch.
-
Life is short, Lav is long
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» The longest film at the 18th Thai Short Film and Video Festival will run at 250 minutes. That's not particularly short, but it speaks volumes about the cinematic health and enthusiasm offered by the festival that runs until Sept 7.
-
Ditch this witch
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/09/2016
» What an unnecessary movie. Seventeen years after The Blair Witch Project stormed Sundance and gave birth to the found-footage horror sub-genre -- in which we watch grainy video purportedly filmed by victims of horrifying phenomena -- this reboot comes late at the tail-end of our visual epoch flooded by smartphone clips, with handheld amateur images so abundant in our stream of perception that we no longer see the novelty or excitement in shaky pictures that supposedly contain gruesome scandals. It's awful, but aren't we seeing that almost every day online or in the news?
-
Time is not on anybody's side
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/10/2021
» There's the anatomy -- the bone and the flesh, supple or flaccid. Then there's time, the cruellest judge of all. In Jakrawal Nilthamrong's Anatomy Of Time (the Thai title is simpler, Wela), the first sound we hear is a tick-tock metronome like the soundtrack of the cosmos as we watch an old lady gently tending to her tubed and bedbound husband. Time will be folded back. The old woman will become young and her dying husband will appear as a spirited, dashing military captain fighting communist insurgents for the good of the nation.
-
Imagining Krabi
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/03/2020
» There's an archaeology of narrative in Krabi, 2562, a film by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers currently showing in select Bangkok cinemas. Layer upon layer, stratum upon stratum, dust on dust, it gives us a glimpse of how history, legend and biography is constructed. Like playful excavators, the two filmmakers peel off the palimpsest of a place and its people, real and imagined.
Your recent history
-
Recently searched
-
Recently viewed links
Did you find what you were looking for? Have you got some comments for us?
