SEARCH

Showing 1-10 of 93 results

  • LIFE

    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.

  • LIFE

    Harry shows Bangkok some Styles

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/03/2023

    » The accessory du jour was the fluffy pink boa. The colour scheme was hot pink -- pink pants, pink boots, pink cowboy hats, pink eyeshadow, pink hijabs. Or if not pink, then anything in the tooth-aching shades of the rainbow. It was a lively, joyous sight on Saturday night, a show of hot-hue aesthetics in a defiant contrast to the brutalist concrete skeleton of Rajamangala Stadium. How I wish concrete-mad Bangkok could look like this every day!

  • LIFE

    Families: born into or built

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/08/2015

    » Put simply, Hirokazu Kore-eda has made another one of his films: delicate, heart-tugging, sweet but not cloying, a meandering stream of limpid water under which an eddy of emotions, unsettled pasts and unspoken worries swirl. As in most films by the Japanese director, Our Little Sister is about family -- the joy it brings along with the complications too. It's not hard to love this tender drama featuring four attractive women in their nice old house and it's not hard either to feel that Kore-eda (Nobody Knows, Air Doll, I Wish) is so assured in his dramaturgy and use of visual language, so much so that the whole thing comes across a little light and safe. 

  • LIFE

    To dump or not to dump

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/12/2019

    » The title of a new Thai film is a bilingual wordplay: How To Ting is literally translated as "how to dump". That, I think, is sharper than its tired official English title, Happy Old Year. To dump or not to dump -- things and people, mementos and memories -- that is the question. In the film, a young designer who's dressed like a Muji model, and who has just returned from studying in the minimalist-paradise Sweden, plans to dump all useless objects from her maximalist Bangkok house, where she lives with her mother and brother, and to turn it into an all-white, supremely sparse and unapologetically decluttered interior nirvana -- a home office lifted straight from a Scandinavian style book.

  • LIFE

    House RCA retrospective honours Japanese Palme d'Or winner

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/07/2018

    » Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters will open in Thailand on Aug 2, two months after the film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival. Among modern Japanese filmmakers, Kore-eda has amassed the strongest following in Thailand, largely due to the fortunate fact that most of his films -- not all, mind you -- have opened commercially here since 2004. To pave the mood for Shoplifters, a gem of a family drama that finally brought the 56-year-old director one of the highest honours in international cinema, the Thai distribution Mongkol Major brings back seven films by the master in a Kore-eda Retrospective programme at House RCA, starting today.

  • LIFE

    Looking for redemption

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/05/2019

    » Young Ahmed believes he's a true Muslim, one of the few in his Muslim neighbourhood in Belgium. He refuses to shake hands with women, quotes verses from the Koran, berates his mother when she drinks, and condemns Jews and pretty much everyone else as infidels. Fellow Belgian-Muslims who do not subscribe to his imam's rigid interpretation of Islam are branded heretics unworthy of uttering the prophet's name. Young Ahmed, 13, is packed tight on the assembly line of Islamic radicalisation, fired up by a sense of self-righteousness so extreme and narrow that we wonder if it leaves room for something else in him, like love, forgiveness or humanity.

  • LIFE

    Quentin's Hollywood, circa 1969

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2019

    » Not everything ended in the year 1969. Not every sunshiny starlet died gruesomely in her own Cielo Drive villa at the hands of crazed hippies. And not every potbellied actor, fading cowboy and washed-up stunt double bit the Hollywood dust kicked up by the changing of the guard and the closing of that heady decade. Not, at least, in Quentin Tarantino's affectionate, good-humoured, and surprisingly elegiac film about Hollywood and its oddball residents.

  • LIFE

    When literature becomes light

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/07/2018

    » Haruki Murakami's books exert a strange pull that's earned him a devoted following around the world -- and Thailand is no exception. One foot planted in the reality of the modern world, the other trudging through a surreal dreamland as the ground beneath his characters' feet keeps shifting, Murakami entrances and confuses, lulls and hallucinates. His novels and short stories also occupy that exclusive territory in the literary world: he's a best-selling author who's also every bookmaker's favourite to win the Nobel Prize. He's also one of a few post-war Japanese writers whose style and substance transcend cultural and national boundaries.

  • LIFE

    Two international stars, two divergent styles

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/04/2018

    » Early next week will see two performers arriving in Bangkok. On Monday, Bruno Mars will hit Impact Arena with all his funky fanfare. On Tuesday, Jake Bugg will play live at the Scala, an intimate venue perfect for his acoustic set.

  • LIFE

    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.

Your recent history

  • Recently searched

    • Recently viewed links

      Did you find what you were looking for? Have you got some comments for us?