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Showing 11-20 of 71 results

  • LIFE

    A trip to the other world

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/11/2016

    » A quick lowdown on Thai love motels: trashy lighting, soap-smelling beds, bad pillows, cheap porn on the TV and a trove of hush-hush secrets guarded by naked walls. Outside, the thick tarp curtains separate the public from the personal, the exposed from the invisible, the respectable from the randy. Inside, it is another world, a fantasy world, an alien world.

  • OPINION

    Hanuman help us from a 'happy' ogre

    News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/09/2016

    » The crusader has returned to the gate, ready to crush the infidels. I thought the new buzzword was "Thailand 4.0", whatever that means, and yet this week we're still arguing if a portrayal of a mythical ogre in a music video is blasphemy, a transgression against the high culture of Siam, the culture that stares down from a pedestal, that exists like a taxidermied animal on the altar of an abandoned temple.

  • OPINION

    Autocratic filmmaking is our forte

    News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/12/2014

    » In the week Sony censored itself and shelved the Christmas Day release of The Interview, a comedy about the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, I'm reminded of this slim book on my desk which I sometimes flip to random pages. One has this: "In the capitalist system of filmmaking the director is called 'director' but, in fact, the right of supervision and control over film production is entirely in the hands of the tycoons of the filmmaking industry who have the money, whereas the directors are nothing but their agents."

  • LIFE

    A copy of his mind

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/04/2016

    » In the Indonesian film A Copy Of My Mind, a pirate DVD seller falls in love with a salon worker. Two working-class lovers struggling in a vast city, their relationship is just as heated as the smoke-choking street of Jakarta, and around them looms the tense shadow of politics as a presidential election nears.

  • OPINION

    Fear of social change a step back

    News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/08/2014

    » Those who live permanently in the past can't see the inevitability of the present. Those who worship the stegosaurus would do something so comical, so anachronistic as banning a computer game that most people have never heard of, prompting nearly everyone to hear about it and wanting to play it — just for kicks, just for a slap to the face, just to prove that techno-terrorism will leave the dinosaurs behind. In the world of bandwidth, in a time when information always slips through the iron fist like water or like pus, in short, in the downloadable, Wiki-leakable 21st century — banning data is the practice of ants trapped in prehistoric amber.

  • LIFE

    Expanding the Asean screen

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/10/2015

    » Across Indochina the movie houses are bubbling with energy, and as the region's big brother in popular culture, Thai film is quick to tap into these growing markets. Some recent examples: The teen comedy May Who?, which came out here earlier this month, has just opened in Laos and Cambodia (with the same familiar posters, but with the wriggling scripts of the local languages).

  • LIFE

    The (sur)real world

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/03/2015

    » Chulayarnnon Siriphol can't keep his jokes to himself. He has the boyish — some might say nerdy — looks of a milk-fed goody two-shoes mama's boy, but in his films, the 29-year-old often thrives on pranks, satire, mischief and a brand of droll, childlike humour that cuts through the slough of hypocrisy.

  • LIFE

    That's entertainment!

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/12/2014

    » The year in Thai movies, music and theatre

  • LIFE

    Art as our escape

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/09/2020

    » This year's theme is at once hopeful and ironic: "Escape Routes" suggests a flight from our unusual times of pathological disruption and political cataclysm -- here, there and everywhere -- and yet the theme is an acknowledgment of those in-our-face uncertainties from which we struggle to find an exit.

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