Showing 61-70 of 150 results
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The late, late show
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/06/2016
» Normally prime time for television is 8-11pm or thereabouts, the period when the family gathers to watch news and series while having dinner. So it will come as a surprise to many that for Muslim audiences during this month of Ramadan, prime time for television is closer to a graveyard shift -- 3-4.30am, deep in the night while most people are asleep -- as families wake up for the pre-dawn meal before a full day of fasting.
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Romanticising the insurgency
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/07/2015
» Rarely do we see a Thai film set in the Deep South and rarely do we see a film with so many people saying "assalamu alaikum" to each other. So now that we have one in the cinema, it turns out to be such a piece of romantic fluff that it hardly does justice to the complicated reality of the region and its people. What should we expect when Latitude Tee Hok (Latitude No.6) has been financed by the military — the Internal Security Operations Command, to be precise — and produced by UCI Media, an affiliation of a company that sells communication equipment to the army?
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Colonia misses mark
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/04/2016
» Chile, 1973. General Augusto Pinochet stages a coup against the democratically elected Salvadore Allende and rounds up radicals, opponents, students and left-wing activists. That's the story we all know. In the film Colonia, German director Florian Gallenberger turns our attention to a sidebar -- the rise of Pinochet mirrored by the dark faux-Christian cult led by an ex-Nazi, headquartered in a fenced-off commune in a rural setting and specialising in brainwashing young people into mindless zombies. The dictatorship of the state fuels the dictatorship of the mind, and vice versa. It should have been a good story, only that, as told here, it is not.
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Scala doc to open film festival
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/03/2016
» Our cinematic monument of majesty, the last palatial cinema house in town, the Scala on Siam Square stands alone in defiance and melancholy as a remnant of a different era. As its fate -- the spectre of eventual demolition -- keeps popping up in the news every few years, the movie house is now the subject of a documentary film. The Scala, directed by Aditya Assarat, is part of a pan-Asia ensemble called The Power Of Asian Cinema that will screen as the opener of the 6th Salaya International tomorrow.
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Magical, musical tour
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/03/2015
» In the documentary Y/Our Music, the rustic soundscape of the Northeast clashes with the hipster cool of Bangkok's indie music scene. But it's not a deadly, destructive clash, says co-director Waraluck Hiransrettawat Every, and instead is a sonic journey that shows the vast diversity of cultures and sensibilities, all driven by the positive energy of music.
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Leaving a Thai impression
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/01/2016
» Once again, a small Thai film blew over Cannes Film Festival like a graceful lover. On Monday, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery Of Splendour (or Rak Ti Khon Kaen) was screened to a thundering 10-minute standing ovation in the Un Certain Regard section, where the film's elegant formalism and aching beauty, deeply rooted in the northeastern spirit and post-coup reflection, shook up the festival slumber.
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Bond's countdown clock still ticks
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/11/2015
» The first shot in Spectre begins above a carnivalesque party during Mexico's Day of the Dead; the camera then comes down to the ground, weaves among the masked revellers dressed as skeletons, glides into a hotel door, up the elevator, out of the elevator, slips into a bedroom where Her Majesty's secret agent kisses a woman, then follows him out of the window -- "I won't be long", he tells her -- then it goes up again to see Bond sneak across the roofs to a spot where he performs his first assassination in this 24th James Bond movie.
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Wild tales
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/11/2015
» 'Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had allowed to say…" -- so begins the story on each night of Tales Of 1,001 Nights, the fantastic yarns of peasants, kings, slaves, lovers, viziers, angels, sex, human anatomy (Night 449), devils in the bottle (Night 567), glory, injustice, pleasure, and all the mundane and the magical in the world. It is the collection of some of the greatest tales ever told. But then, what, exactly, is Arabian Nights all about?
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Braving the mainstream
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/09/2015
» What's so romantic about a public hospital examination room? "It's a small, closed space. The two people in there can't escape each other," says filmmaker Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit.
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Boundaries blurred
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/09/2015
» The Toronto International Film Festival, which runs until Sunday, is known as a showcase for big hitters -- movies with stars, budget and particularly Oscar ambition. The 40th edition of the festival screens over 350 titles, and those that dominate the headlines -- The Danish Girl, The Martian, Black Mass, Beasts Of No Nation, Spotlight, Every Brand Is Crisis, etc -- are those that you'll likely to read and hear a lot about as the award season kicks into high gear.
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