Showing 81 - 90 of 159
Righteous women sock it to ‘big men’
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/02/2016
» Big men beware, for the strongest political statements this week came from women. First off: Beyonce at the Super Bowl halftime gig, where the singer smuggled in Black Panther iconology and a nod to Malcom X in a traffic-stopping spectacle that showed how pop could rattle the establishment. Coming in second, with less coverage though with go-hard-or-go-home directness, was Madonna at her first concert in Bangkok on Tuesday night. “When those fascist dictators posing as righteous men come for you with their big leather boots to shut you up,” she belted out to the well-heeled crowd, “you’d better be prepared to fight for what you believe in.”
The hateful eight gang up on one activist
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/01/2016
» If your heart hasn’t been too hardened, you must have seen that the arrest of the student activist on Wednesday night was a foul act unjustified by law.
Banned transgender-themed film stirs up debate about 'arbitrary' censorship
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/12/2015
» For five years Tanwarin Sukkhapisit fought an unprecedented court case, and last week she lost. But what's more important, says the film director of Insects in the Backyard, is how the case has exposed the loose, arbitrary interpretation of the Film Act 2008 that led her film to be banned in the first place.
The force is strong with this one
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/12/2015
» This Thursday, the sequel of Star Wars will monopolise cinemas around the world. According to most predictions by box office pundits, the space opera conceived nearly 40 years ago will be the year's biggest blockbuster, not to mention a perpetuation of one of pop culture's greatest mythologies.
Playing the Trump card in our backyard
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/12/2015
» Is there a pattern here? The world watches in incredulity at the apparent display of right-wing, ultra-nationalist, anti-otherness outpouring that crosses the line from ideology into bigotry — from Donald Trump and his “No-Muslim” policy to the xenophobia-toeing Marine Le Pen in France, to Thailand’s own finger-pointing mobs shouting hatred at student activists, the threat of mass arrests and now the criminalisation of Facebook’s “likes”. Seriously? When squeezed, a wound bursts with pus. And pus is everywhere in the news.
Living in a void of white wilderness
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/12/2015
» They look like modern art, those blank spaces in the International New York Times, an emptiness in the forest of stories.
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.
Our blood runs cold in a burning sun
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/11/2015
» In Truman Capote’s true-crime book, In Cold Blood, a rural town in Kansas was rattled by brutal murders. Four people killed in their own home, late at night, three shot point-blank in the face, the other had his throat slit, then shot in the head. It was a robbery turned massacre. The morning after committing the crime, the book reports, one of the two killers, Dick Hickock, went back to his house and had toast for breakfast with his family, laughing, unperturbed, as if nothing so inhuman had happened just hours before.
Arpat uproar points to censorship flaws
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/10/2015
» The hullabaloo around the Thai film Arpat, which features a misbehaving young monk, is the latest example of problems caused by what some people in the film industry perceive as flaws in the Film and Video Act 2008.
Film studio cuts 'Arbat' to placate censor
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/10/2015
» The studio that produces the banned film Arbat is working on a new cut to placate the censors and will submit the re-edited version to the committee by Friday, says the publicist.