Showing 51-60 of 79 results
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A tale of two cinemas
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/07/2015
» The benefits of reviving a century-old movie house are more than just monetary
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Best films of 2014
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/12/2014
» Another year, another December ritual of best-ofs. Is the high worth the pain at the cinemas? Mostly yes, 2014 has yielded a crop of films that excite, touch, baffle, entrance and stun us in many ways.
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Cannes and misdemeanours
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» At the 66th Cannes film Festival, off-screen drama attempts to steal the limelight from on-screen offerings. Last Friday, the news of a diamond robbery at a hotel room from which a burglar made off with US$1 million (about 30 million baht) worth of Chopard jewellery astonished (and amused) festival-goers; the crime took pace hours after the screening of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, about brazen heists of celebrity homes.
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A place in history
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» When people ask why Cannes Film Festival is important, one way to answer that is to look at a film such as Adieu Au Langage (Goodbye To Language). Jean-Luc Godard, 84, is the oldest filmmaker in this year’s competition, and with this latest movie he turns out to be the most exciting. Fifty years ago Godard and friends, under the watch of theorist Andre Bazin, waged a ferocious war to prove that cinema is art and filmmakers are artists, that they worked and thought like Picasso or Balzac or Rodin did. Godard and Co won that battle, but he’s still far from finished — simply because cinema is far from finished. In other words, film is part of art history, and history is being written all the time, sometimes, prominently, at places like Cannes.
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Be afraid, but not very afraid
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/10/2014
» Bring me the heads of horror filmmakers, for this Halloween Thai cinemas are auspiciously crawling with ghosts. Two new Thai films — one passably creepy, the other disappointing — are in theatres to supply a spook fix during this demon-infested weekend; there are rotten-faced zombies and posthumous vengeance, and hysterical possession and haunted infrastructure (hospital, house, factory, bathroom, you name it). Lately, Thai horror movies aren't getting high readings on the scare-o-meter, and yet in the land of a million spirit houses, ghosts still reign as a sound business venture and cinematic catalyst. Of the two new films, the more thought-out and carefully-scripted is The Eyes Diary, directed by Chookiat Sakveerakul. By his standard — Chookiat made the grisly 13 Beloved and teen romance The Love Of Siam — the new film is a minor exercise. The Eyes Diary sets out to probe a litany of themes — guilt, love, sacrifice, fatal obsession — but as one of Thailand's most reliable scriptwriters, I only wish Chookiat would've twisted them harder and darker.
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Thawan Duchanee: Losing a legend
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/09/2014
» National Artist Thawan Duchanee passed away yesterday, but his work and most important philosophy and contribution to popular Thai thought and art will live on
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Novel ideas to feed a hungry dissenter
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/06/2014
» If nothing else, please permit metaphors. Please allow room for symbols, gestures, analogies, allusions, literature, metonymy, for one-, two-, three-, four and five-fingered salutes, because they’re defiant yet desperate, hopeful yet powerless. They ruffle, but they can’t and won’t change anything, not in the short run at least.
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Isan asserts its presence
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/06/2014
» The cinemas in the Northeast didn’t expect a phenomenon last weekend, but they certainly got one. The sensation came not from the behemoth King Naresuan 5, nor the Tom Cruise-starring alien romp Edge Of Tomorrow, but from the low-budget, unmarketed, Northeast-set and northeastern-speaking movie Poo Bao Tai Ban: E-San Indy.
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Industrialisation of Young Hope
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2014
» No wonder this was a mainland hit. Peter Chan’s American Dreams In China is a rags-to-riches story that shows how the underdog Chinese beat the Americans at their own game — first through the industrialisation of dreams, then through free market capitalism. Luck, bumps, over-ambition and shattered friendships are necessary mixes along the path, but at the end the message is as clear as the surface of a Jiuzhaigou lake — while aspiring Chinese of the 1980s looked up to the US as the beacon of wealth and economic wonder, today it’s China Inc — its riches, its values, its bombast and its never-give-up defiance that shame the falling-from-grace Americans.
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From the panelled page to the silver screen
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/05/2014
» In mid-2000s, Ekasith Thairat wrote a Thai comic book with a killer plot: A desperate salary man receives a mysterious phone call that changes his life, for the blood-splashing worse. The caller dares him to complete a series of missions, each more gruesome than the last. For each accomplished task, he’s rewarded with an instant cash transfer into his bank account. The 13th mission, not surprisingly, comes with a 100 million baht prize — if he has the stomach and immoral strength to see it through.
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