Showing 81-90 of 121 results
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Past actions lead to sense of numbness
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/07/2015
» The date is June 18, 2026, and this is a diary from the future. Thailand in 2026 feels like 2015 in many ways, except it’s worse, despite the half-finished high-speed rail to Chiang Mai — the budget bloated from three trillion baht to five trillion baht in 2020 — and the half-finished Pak Bara deep-sea port — the budget didn’t bloat, but the government shifted its priority to buying nuclear submarines.
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Superheroes of doctored democracy
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/04/2015
» This is the week when the draft constitution is being debated and the “citizen-centric” charter proposed by legal superheroes — Iron Menace, Thor-toise, Captain anti-America, etc — are scrutinised. The people will be at the centre of the new era, so they promise. The citizens, or at least “good citizens”, will be empowered to stand up against suit-and-tie crooks while judicial rat poison and ethical vanguards will ensure that Thais are cleansed of evil politics.
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Our ‘saviours’ say shut up, put up, pay up
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2015
» Death and taxes are the only two sure things in life, so the joke goes. I had a nice time at the tax office last week, three days before the deadline. It wasn’t a “fun time”, which is impossible, but nice enough in my dealings with a courteous tax lady who performed her arithmetic gifts with a pencil and calculator, smiling and helpful in her office full of paper and weary-looking taxpayers — some of them street vendors and odd-jobbers, I gathered. There’s something Kafka-esque about a visit to the Revenue Office: The mild dread (of what?), the anxious wait and, above all, the wild guess about the bureaucratic labyrinth that delivers our payment into the invisible state coffers.
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Missing Picture, Berkeley premiere at Salaya Doc
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» It’s funny and sad that some Thai academics are still embroiled in a debate about whether documentary film is film. Funny, because it is. Sad, because Cambodia, whose film industry and film schools are struggling hard to regain their cultural significance, has a documentary film that won a prize in Cannes and was nominated for the latest Oscars — in the foreign language category where it competed with four other fiction films. That film, The Missing Picture, will finally have a Thailand premier at the “4th Salaya International Documentary Film Festival”, a cine-event that has consistently gained ground and reinforced the importance of documentary filmmaking as art and as a social statement.
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Cannes Report: The Coens and Dutch gallows humour
Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» The hottest ticket in Cannes over the weekend is, surprisingly, a pre-Bob Dylan tale of a struggling folk singer steeped in his own hilarious myth: "Inside Llewyn Davis" is the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen starring Oscar Isaac as the title character, with the supporting act by Carey Mulligan (redeeming herself quite nicely from the nonsense of "The Great Gatsby", which opened Cannes last Wednesday) and Justin Timberlake, among others.
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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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Count to 12 and you'll be brainwashed
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/10/2014
» Friends often ask me, what movies are you looking forward to seeing? The vagaries of taste and fluctuations of mood always make this simple question difficult to answer. Gone Girl? Sure, for the perfect blend of satire and marital horror. Interstellar? Yes, for what looks like a nebula-warped cosmic philosophising. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay? Definitely, for what looks like an inadvertent allegory of our Golden Axe misadventure as the Capitol crumbles under the weight of the three-fingered salute. King Naresuan Part 6 and maybe 7 or why not 8 then please-bring-it-on 9? Yep, bless my soul with the whole shebang, for what looks like the umpteenth elephant circus and post-Koh Tao Myanmar bashing.
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Hushing up harsh facts into oblivion
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/11/2014
» You've heard the news, and you know what they're talking about even though they're not talking about it. Or maybe you don't know, but you think you do, and as they keep talking about it in codes, in murmurs, in paranoid whispers shielded by cupped hands, you're not sure if they're really talking about it. About what? Those policemen who fell from grace straight into the gutter, among other things. But what do you talk about when you talk about something people don't want to talk about, or not in public: you burrow into the deep stream, into the silo of speculations and rumour mills. You do it and I do it, and we contribute to our descent into an anti-knowledge society.
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The reels keep turning
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/09/2014
» The preservation of movies involves storing for posterity a popular form of entertainment, but perhaps more importantly this repository can also protect an invaluable body of knowledge and wisdom about the individuals and society from which these works emanated. It took this country a long time to realise that the conservation of film is a cultural duty, and that our audiovisual heritage is a museum of memories that plays a vital part in educating future generations about their collective past.
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Nationalism loses out to Hello Kitty
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/08/2014
» Two headlines caught my attention over the past week. First, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha wishes to see more movies that promote Thai values and historical education. Second, Hello Kitty is not a cat.
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