Showing 71-80 of 121 results
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King still with us, in photos and memories
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/10/2016
» On the screen we see the King in his Land Rover sluicing through mud in rough terrain. Again on the screen, he is a wiry young man in dark sunglasses and saffron robe, walking barefoot in a royal temple. Next, His Majesty King Bhumibol in dinner jacket -- the footage slightly scratchy -- is deep in a jam session with Western musicians sometime in the last century. Then we see the monarch in full regalia, captured on a Kodak motion picture film, as he proceeds down the street in the opulent pomp of Coronation Day in 1950.
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Charter tune plays like a broken record
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/06/2016
» One song is championed, the other outlawed. One song hides its prejudices in the subconscious, the other clear in its messages. Both songs are about the referendum. That is, in case we still have the referendum, because it's almost safer now to bet on Albania winning Euro 2016 than on our slippery Aug 7 poll taking place.
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Losing faith in the laws of the land
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/06/2016
» Lawlessness is the new law. What's that term they're now using? "The new normal" -- right, say it even when there's nothing new and everything abnormal. But it's something more primitive that's making a screaming comeback.
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Punishment that doesn't fit the crime
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/05/2016
» There's crime and there's punishment. In Dostoevsky's novel, crime is punishment. In Thailand, halted at the crossroads of history, the relationship between the two is confusing, sometimes absurd, and mostly impenetrable.
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Even 'khon dee' can need a stiff drink
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/01/2016
» Building a booze-free, smoke-free, sin-free society is a utopian dream of moralistic teetotalers, and we should sincerely admire ThaiHealth Promotion Foundation for trying. To pursue that dream, the embattled ThaiHealth goes to all lengths: flirting with conflicts of interest, questionable funding practices, and assuming a pose of moral superiority demonising drinkers, smokers and sometimes suggesting a brutal connection between the working class and alcohol binges.
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Huffing and puffing puts us in a spin
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/01/2016
» For your weekend reading, you have two gripping options: The draft of the new constitution, or the government’s proudly presented “Photobook Infographics: Government for the People”, a 104-page hodgepodge of self-congratulatory news clippings. Either way, we brace ourselves for whatever comes, for our fate is not really ours to contend.
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Blind love of nation is the blindest of all
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/11/2015
» Feel the force of Thai jingoism. Feel it online and at the US embassy, as they march forward like sandmen with sticks to battle the evil Darth Vader. How dare the meddling imperialist. How rude, how hypocritical!, shout the vanguards, waving bamboo spears. This is because on Thursday the new US ambassador Glyn T Davies said something that rattled the patriots — something sensible — about how people who peacefully voice their opinion shouldn’t be put in jail, referring to the excessive punishment of the lese majeste law. As expected, just hours later the nationalists banged their kettledrums.
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Asean on screen
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/08/2015
» When was the last time you saw a Malaysian film? An Indonesian? A Vietnamese? The odds are even lower for a Myanmar or a Bruneian. As the Asean banner is being splashed across the region, with the emphasis on the economic free-flow, the cultural exchange among Southeast Asians remains a glaring deficit. Cinema, perhaps the most accessible form of cultural expression, is no exception.
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In the land where time stands still
Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/06/2015
» The past, as they say, is not even past. Just look around, scan the headlines, or smell the Cretaceous swamps that haven’t been pumped for ages. It feels strange watching the view outside the train window become a blur of movement, only to realise, with horror or apathy, that it’s not us who’re moving and leaving a trail of hazy landscape behind. It’s the outside world that’s speeding ahead while we’re stuck on the interminable platform.
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The poetic ramblings of John Torres
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/06/2015
» John Torres, a Filipino filmmaker and punk-rock musician, makes films that look and sound like symbolist poems. Thoughts, images, history, vignettes, fiction, fact, faces in the crowds and disembodied voices floating in and out — they come together, clash and converse, coalescing into a stream as lucid as it is mysterious. In Todo Todo Teros (2006), Torres imagines moviemaking as a form of terrorism, which is perhaps what cinema should be, not only in Manila, where the director lives and works, but everywhere on this typhoon-infested side of the world. In Years When I Was A Child Outside (2008), the haunting secret about the filmmaker's father becomes a dream from which he cannot wake up. In Refrains Happen Like Revolutions In A Song (2010), a girl who's not exactly herself goes around a village as the past and the present become indistinguishable (as in poetry, why should they?).
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