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Showing 11-17 of 17 results

  • News & article

    Picks of the year

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/12/2013

    » Like ravenous hunter-gatherers, we forage the thick forest of cinema and emerge with our pickings. Or maybe: like a mental patient, we plunge into the dark asylum of movie theatres in search of sanity, of light, of secrets. Most of the times we come out empty-handed, but the point, for madmen and women out there, is to keep looking.

  • News & article

    Vacant homes and empty heads

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/09/2013

    » Meet the Spring-break revellers from hell. Sometimes clad in Pussy Riot-style balaclavas, but most of the time in fluorescent bikinis, Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine) orchestrate the year's most hallucinatory orgy to date, a candy-coloured bacchanalia of robbery, bong parties, contraband firearms, murders and a C-cup binge; all of this lubricated by endlessly flowing booze and a riotous beachside cacophony. Bored kids looking for gratifying oblivion, pushing and pushing and pushing the limit of fun. Spring Breakers is driven by the anxiety of excess, visually and psychologically, showing us how an American-style pursuit of happiness can edge pursuers over the cliff and into the sunshine of hell, where they feel right at home and become even more happy.

  • News & article

    Passion for film, football out of control

    News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/05/2013

    » The only thing that inspires more passion than cinema is football. And vice versa. As social and literary critic Roland Barthes rightly said, everyone is an expert when it comes to movies and sport. A cheeky hyperbole, but not entirely false. What Barthes was actually saying, I think, is that everyone is entitled to have a strong, vehement opinion when it comes to those two subjects. Barthes was French (of course), and this week France has seen footballing and cinematic events that pumped a rush of blood to the head and boiled the haemoglobin of spectators.

  • News & article

    Celebration of juvenile subversiveness

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/01/2013

    » Starring Mei Gwei-lun, Rhydian Vaughan and Chang Hsiao-chuan. Directed by Yang Ye-che. At House RCA.

  • News & article

    Take good care of Mr Bean's right to insult

    News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/11/2012

    » Without a wink, Mr Bean is asking for the right to insult. At Westminster, the King of Caustic Put-Downs and (sometimes, like at the Olympics) the Grand Duke of Fart Jokes, launched a campaign to object to a section of the Public Order Act that, he says, has fostered intolerance and advanced "the creeping culture of censoriousness" by outlawing insults. Startling - for Mr Bean operates in England, the fertile hotbed of sardonic wit, televised mockery and creative foul-mouthedness. Try Southeast Asia, my Duke, my Blackadder, my Johnny English - and you'll choke and churn, roil and run riot. Do less than what you've been doing, and here you'd meet a fate much worse than an Elizabethan dungeon in the Tower of London.

  • News & article

    Airing new agendas

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/10/2012

    » The 27-rai compound of low-rise, industrial-chic grey buildings on Vibhavadi Rangsit Road is a picture of calm authority. Nearly 900 people work here in the offices, studios and control rooms of the country's only public television station, the non-profit, four-and-a-half-year-old, largely admired if sometimes embattled TV Thai, better known as Thai PBS.

  • News & article

    Mean streets

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/06/2012

    » Director Kongkiat Khomsiri's professed love for Martin Scorsese's mean-street movies is evident, beyond all doubts, in his new film Anthapan (The Hooligan). Think Goodfellas, with the 1950s Bangkok substituting New York's Little Italy, and an ingenuous Thai rookie replacing Ray Liotta. But then, we also see Chinese triads, brutal knife fights, Western-style shootout, the reference to Field Marshall Sarit's coup d'etat and the rise of the police as the force more wicked than the mafia _ and Kongkiat's film is a melange of influence, style, and politics.

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