Showing 91-100 of 121 results
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Zero is a sign of our brave new times
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/08/2014
» With a fanfare the captain arrived at the stadium. He blew his magnificent whistle and kicked out the previous teams, the sordid squads of pirates, crooks, and assassins. Who'd let them in in the first place? The captain then installed the audience on the stands and asked them to cheer him on. He composed the team song. He picked the cheerleaders, the referees, the linesmen. He picked a new set of rules, the match day, the kick-off time. In the greatest move since Pele, Socrates and Aristotle combined, he picked the players — strikers, defenders, goalies, coaches, ball boys, mascots, etc. Everyone is on the same team, got it? That's why there's only one goal, not two. Then the captain took the field, dribbled like Messi + Ronaldo + Santa Claus, waltzing past immobile players (who're on his team), then he scored, and scored, and scored. He was crowned man of the match and the world cheered and roared.
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A passport to happiness is all you need
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/07/2014
» Like a sinner praying for salvation, I pray that the Ministry of Education will launch the "good deeds passports" project before the next full moon. Kids, parents and disciplinarians are dying to wave it around like a diploma of sanity, or an amulet against ghosts and anarchism. The Education Ministry is so educated that it has tapped into the zeitgeist: moral bookkeeping, and control of the happiness barometer (check out the military carnival at Sanam Luang), will guarantee the bright future of democratic Thailand.
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A decade at House
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/06/2014
» House has been a home for small films — small in Thailand at least — for the past 10 years. In a city where stand-alone cinemas are listed as a severely endangered species, the boutique theatre House in the RCA strip (of all places) is a welcome anomaly in the scene dominated by neon-splashed multiplexes that dictate the popular taste of the whole country.
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Open up to spur cultural revolution
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/06/2014
» Alarmed by the sight of zombies stampeding to get free tickets to see the film Legend of King Naresuan 5, former Culture Minister Nipit Intarasombat, of the Democrat stripe, lamented aloud about the need for a “cultural revolution”.
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Word-wise web
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2014
» Last week a video clip went viral. It features a mock interview with a Westerner who recounts his first experience of being cursed at by Thai people. Deftly using comical expletives and po-faced humour, the clip clocked up one million hits within 24 hours. At the end of the five-minute video, called BKK 1st Time, the clip reveals itself to be an advertisement for a new book, a lighthearted piece of non-fiction written by a Thai student. The gist of the matter is that this publication, entitled New York 1st Time, is to be launched at the 42nd National Book Fair, the country’s largest annual gathering of booksellers and readers, which is currently under way at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center.
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Never forget, death is not an illusion
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/03/2014
» In our season of mass delusion, what is real? Life and death are real, but particularly death. Death by suicide or by murder, but particularly murder. Deaths of adults and of children, but particularly of children, at Ratchaprasong and in Trat, as well as in Narathiwat, where three siblings, the eldest 11, were killed on Feb 3, and which of course we’ve almost forgotten about because even in death there’s a hierarchy of public attention and allotment of air time. There was also the 14-year-old boy Kunakorn Srisuwan, shot dead by a military bullet (as the Criminal Court ruled) near Soi Mor Leng in the red-shirt riots of May 2010. That’s one death we've definitely forgotten. The only story that orphan boy ever had in his life is about his death.
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The art of war
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/02/2014
» The best and wittiest joke about the relationship between art and World War II — a strange and imaginary relationship — is in a short story by Roberto Bolano. In it, a Spanish soldier had been sent by mistake to an SS battalion that was later quashed by a Russian troop. Suspected of being a Nazi, the Spaniard was captured and tortured by having his tongue pulled, and in the throes of pain, he cursed in his language cono!, an equivalent of the c-word expletive in English. The Russian torturer, who knew a few German words, stopped in his track. He thought the soldier, whose pronunciation was twisted because his tongue was being pulled, was yelling kunst, kunst, kunst — meaning art in German. Cono became kunst, and the Russian assumed that the Spaniard wasn’t SS but an artist. He was set free. In the midst of war, art, “which soothes the savage beast”, saved his life.
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The old(ish) man and the sea
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/02/2014
» JC Chandor's All Is Lost is a taut maritime drama about a man who struggles to survive in the Indian Ocean after his yacht is holed and slowly starts to sink. The entire film has only one character, an unnamed man played by Robert Redford, and we're stuck with him on his vessel and later on a life raft, watching him calmly struggling against the waves, the storm, the disorientation, the hopelessness. We don't know who this man is (he's merely described as "Our Man" in the credits) or why he's there, and the film doesn't have any flashback or any cutaway to, say, his family anxiously waiting for news of him. There are no other external perspectives. We're stranded with him. We are, literally, in the same boat with him and we see everything as he sees it; it's almost an hour into the movie before there's a long shot from above showing him surrounded by a vast body of water. Our Man, his radio inoperative after the yacht gets flooded, speaks only twice during this 105-minute film. The third time he opens his mouth is the only time the film allows him a howl of despair.
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Nature versus nurture
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/12/2013
» Always gentle, always composed, the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda also register quiet devastation, often within the family. The stirring _ the earthquake, even _ usually happens beneath the surface of calm. Two years ago he gave us I Wish, a story about children of divorced parents, and before that, the sublime Still Walking, about a family wound that members prefer not to discuss. And, of course, Kore-eda's biggest hit in Bangkok was in 2003 with Nobody Knows, a painfully moving story of children left to fend for themselves after their mother walked out on them. That film packed Scala for more than a month.
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In the book of exile, Thaksin pens his legacy
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/11/2013
» There are exiles that last a lifetime and others that last a weekend. To be exiled, says the self-exiled writer Roberto Bolano, "is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self".
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