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Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/07/2020
» Evil is not banal in Ju-on: Origins, a particularly grisly six-part Netflix series. The J-horror wave that broke at the turn of the millennium may no longer be in vogue, but this supposed origin story of the 2001 Ju-On: The Grudge is probably even more extreme in its depiction of ghostly malice and vengeance. It's scarier too -- if you have a stomach for murder, disembowelment, matricide and self-combustibility -- because here the origin of violence is mostly domestic: the violence committed by father against mother, mother against daughter, husband against wife, friend against friend. It's a series (or you could see it as a three-hour film) about monsters that shows us that monstrosity really is born and raised first and foremost by humans.
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The vagabond returns
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/01/2023
» A film once overlooked and misunderstood may have found its moment many years later, the work's peculiar vibrations finally detected and at last appreciated.
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Sexy, savage spy
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/08/2017
» The Berlin kitsch of the late 1980s -- neon galore, rave clubs, Communist chic -- serves up a gaudy backdrop to the Cold War violence and betrayals in Atomic Blonde. Charlize Theron, in a wardrobe as striking as it is tongue-in-cheek, plays Lorraine Broughton, a hard-boiled British spy sent to West Germany to retrieve a valuable top-secret list.
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Human traffic
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/11/2017
» Edmund Yeo started writing the film Aqerat before the word "Rohingya" would make world news headlines -- entirely for a distressing reason. Now the Malaysian film, which had its premiere in the main competition of the 30th Tokyo International Film Festival this week, has proved prescient as over 500,000 of Myanmar's Rohingya minority have fled violence for Bangladesh in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in years.
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Lots to love about The Hateful Eight
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/01/2016
» In the stewpot of Quentin Tarantino's tough-to-chew ingredients: graphic violence, racial animosity (if not racist hyperbole), linguistic provocation (counting the "n" word has become a sort of a game), indulgence in profanity and political incorrectness of all stripe, then in The Hateful Eight, the nearly three-hour-long film is largely set in just one room. Heads smashed, women bashed, scrotum busted, black-man-white-man paranoia in full display -- the director's well-oiled strategy is to couch his exploitation exercise in cynical black comedy and gabby digressions -- those delicious, funny, grandiloquent lectures on history and justice that he lately seems to favour.
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A look at prison muay Thai
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/05/2017
» Thailand is splashed across the main screen of the Cannes Film Festival this year. A Prayer Before Dawn is not a Thai film, but this UK-France production takes place entirely in Thailand -- precisely in the rancid, violence-prone prison where inmates are crammed into small dormitories and fight to stay alive. Based on a book by ex-convict William Moore, who spent years at Klong Prem Prison for selling ya ba, the film, directed by Jean-Stephane Sauvaire, is an intense look at hard life in the hellhole, before Moore (played by British actor Joe Cole) finds redemption in the prison's muay Thai boxing programme.
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Humanity!
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/01/2017
» Mankind is doomed. We're hard-wired to be selfish, paranoid, prone to violence. We like war, among us humans or with the alien. What may redeem us, however, is compassion, generosity, language, love, grace, and so on -- all those teary-eyed emotions that is sometimes called "lyrical" in a movie. Or simpler, what may save us is a last-act manipulation of time and plot points, a wily trick nonetheless pulled off smoothly through the moving performance by Amy Adams.
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The passion of Pasolini
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/06/2022
» Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna on March 5, 1922, and died in a violent, mysterious circumstance on the outskirts of Rome in November 1975. This year marks the centenary of the Italian poet's and filmmaker's birth, and this Sunday at 1pm, the Thai Film Archive will screen Pasolini's first film as director, Accattone, a gloriously austere ode to underclass plight. It will be the first time the 1961 film is screened in Thailand.
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The Darkest Hours
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/08/2015
» A psychosexual Thai gay film is a rare treat -- actually it's almost unprecedented. Anucha Boonyawatana's Onthakarn (The Blue Hour) arrives at SF cinemas this week with a strong tail wind after its premiere in Berlin in February. Nightmarish, oblique and deliberately disjointed, the film is in part ambient horror and in part a brooding drama about family violence centred around a gay teenager. We savour its chilly mood, its haunting wasteland of disaffected youth, though we sometimes wince at the stilted dialogue. What we see is also a confident switch between what's real and what's not, which is to say The Blue Hour is not something for the impatient and the literal-minded.
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The dark side of wife
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/10/2014
» In Fight Club (1999), David Fincher dishes out a mockery at male machoism, the sweat-soiled, hyperbole manliness manifest through smug violence and Brad Pitt's swagger. What happened, however, was that Fincher's stylish film somehow became a trophy movie for those he aimed his sarcasm at — the macho type adores the film, which isn't that surprising given how cool it is. Flash forward to what we have this week in cinemas worldwide, Gone Girl, a thriller that's probably replicating that curious logic in pop-culture destiny. The film about the absurdity of married life, a dark warning against the cost of domestic bliss, is perhaps a perfect date movie for happy or unhappy couples, since the film's extreme satire takes cover under the sharp, highly engaging narrative and storytelling heft. It's a film worth showing at every wedding anniversary, for entertainment, yes, and to remind the participants of their parts in their own personal movies.
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