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Gimme Shelter (2014)
Gimme Shelter (2014)
2014 | Drama
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"Another one of my five favorite films would be Gimme Shelter, by the Maysles brothers. I spent many years making documentary films between my first film and my second film, Blue Valentine, and I learned to really embrace, and be humbled by life, and by telling a story where you’re telling someone else’s story. And there’s something about the Maysles brothers, and especially that movie, where they were able to witness these moments. Especially with Gimme Shelter, you know, these moments of American history — this concert at Altamont that turned into kind of the bad trip of Woodstock. And I love how they frame it with the band, the Stones, watching the footage, watching their memories; this document, this witness to this incredible time in American life — and this crime, this real crime in America. Also, for nothing else than the moment where Mick Jagger has to watch Tina Turner. Again, like watching the Scorsese movie — and the Pasolini movie — their use of music, you know, is to watch a real rock and roll movie in the theater, with that sound. It’s great."

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Rache (174 KP) rated S'Laughter in Podcasts

Nov 26, 2018  
S'Laughter
S'Laughter
Comedy, Society & Culture
10
7.0 (2 Ratings)
Podcast Rating
Research (3 more)
Humour
True Crime
Conversational
Occasional audio artefacts (0 more)
Criminally Madcap
Two British teachers discuss true crimes and the insanity that surrounds them, with a twist of wry British humour, sarcastic barbs sharp enough to have sunk the Titanic, and a sprinkling of anecdotes that will leave you thinking that teachers must be some of the bravest people on Earth.
Not as slick as most of the American podcasts you will come across, but charming enough that you really don't mind.
  
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Eleanor (1463 KP) rated S-Town in Podcasts

May 22, 2019  
S-Town
S-Town
Society & Culture
8
8.5 (21 Ratings)
Podcast Rating
Story-telling (1 more)
Characters
Not what was expected (may disappoint crime buffs) but worth sticking with (0 more)
An unexpected emotional ride.
As a fan of the Serial and This American Life podcasts I jumped on this podcast from the same makers. I love true crime and the initial hype around this sounded like it was going to be an investigative reporting adventure into a town where a rich boys murder had been covered up. However over the course of the podcast it changed into something quite unique.

Focusing on the person who initially contacted this American Life, John McLemore, it’s based in the small town of Woodstock and gives a stark look into the world of small town Alabama.. We get to know John well, he’s a horologist (clock maker / repairer - it was the new word of the week for me) who seems to be pretty well known in the industry for his restoration skills. John is an amazing character and as the podcast takes a dramatic change of direction we end up getting sucked into his story which is moving and full of lessons on living in a place you don’t feel you fit in.

It was an emotional ride and if you like This American Life, this is like an episode on steroids and then some.
  
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Milleen (47 KP) rated The Woods in Books

Nov 14, 2018  
The Woods
The Woods
Harlan Coben | 2007 | Fiction & Poetry, Thriller
8
7.3 (4 Ratings)
Book Rating
A suspenseful thriller from American author Harlan Coben, released a few years ago but this is a good Ôstand aloneÕ story that will introduce you to the dark world of gritty crime that he writes so well.
The central character, Paul Copeland, is the County Prosecutor of Essex, New Jersey. Twenty years ago his sister, and three other teenagers, disappeared from a summer camp and now ÔCopeÕ finds himself embroiled in a case that may provide some answers to their disappearance. A great thriller with plenty of interesting characters and plot twists.
  
Your House Will Pay
Your House Will Pay
Steph Cha | 2019 | Crime, Mystery, Thriller
9
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Your House Will Pay is about racial tensions in LA, and it follows two families - one Korean-American, the other African-American - and the shooting of a black girl in the 1990’s. Shaun Matthews sister, Ava, was that teenaged girl, and the killing of another black teenager and the subsequent rallies and demonstrations bring back bad memories of that time. His family is trying hard to keep on the straight and narrow, especially after his cousin Ray is released from prison.

Grace Parks is a pharmacist in a Korean pharmacy and lives with her parents. She has a strained relationship with her sister who left home and refused to speak to her mother thereafter. She won’t, however, tell Grace why she won’t talk to their mother.

When a terrible crime happens, Grace is confronted with another crime that happened 30 years before, and the Parks family are forced to face the Matthews family.

I really loved this book - the build up and the slow reveal was really well done, I thought. It looked at a part of American life that I, as a white British female, would have little personal knowledge of - other than what I’ve read. It was so thought provoking. This isn’t an escapist read, and I could feel the tension coming off the page, but it was a page turner that I didn’t want to put down. I read this on The Pigeonhole, so due to the fact that they released a stave a day for 10 days, I HAD to wait 24 hours for each instalment!

Many thanks to The Pigeonhole for choosing such a great book for us to read!
  
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anantomy of a Murder Trial
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anantomy of a Murder Trial
Janet Malcolm | 2012 | Biography, Crime, History & Politics, Law, Music & Dance
(0 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"Janet Malcolm is such an intellectual badass. This book was an extension of her piece of journalism in the New Yorker, where Malcolm has been a contributor for decades. It’s the fascinating story of a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, in which a young physician is accused of hiring an assassin to kill her estranged husband, a respected orthodontist. Malcolm uses the case as a way to examine how a murder trial is conducted, and to look at the American judicial system as a whole. It was the book that first sparked my interest in true crime."

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Condemned: Criminal Origins
Condemned: Criminal Origins
Action/Adventure
Scary Spooky
Condemned: Criminal Origins (known in Europe as Condemned) is a first-person survival horror video game, that is very good but underrated.

Condemned: Criminal Origins places an emphasis on melee combat and puzzle solving, including searching for fingerprints and gathering evidence. Lets talk more about the crime scene's, and gathing evidence.

Condemned directly involves the player in crime scene investigations, offering the ability to, at the press of a context-sensitive button, call upon a suite of forensic tools to find and record evidence. The player character is linked to an FBI lab via his mobile phone throughout the investigation, allowing (almost immediate) remote examination and analysis by his support worker, Rosa. Crime scene evidence can be used to solve puzzles, allowing the player to pass previously impassable barriers, and provide clues to the overall mysteries of the story.

Examples of evidence include fingerprints, footprints, fibers, fluids (such as blood or chemicals), particles, residues, markings/etchings, material, imprints, wounds, small objects, documents, and body parts.

The player character is gifted with the instinctual ability to detect when forensic evidence is nearby, allowing players to bring up the detection and collection tools when appropriate. However, the "instincts" of the character only vaguely highlight the area in which the evidence resides; it is up to the player to methodically sweep the scene and catalog any findings.

Lets talk about the plot: Condemned: Criminal Origins is set in the fictional American city of Metro. The player takes on the role of Ethan Thomas, a crime scene investigation agent with the FBI's Serial Crime Unit, as he traverses the seedier sides of the city. His journey takes him through a number of condemned buildings as he searches for the one who framed him for murder, the evasive Serial Killer X. Along the way, Ethan must use his investigative intuition and technology to examine evidence left behind by SKX, all the while fighting off the violently psychotic denizens of Metro City, who seem to be driven to such madness by a mysterious, yet seemingly extraneous force.

Their are two different ends: but really its the same ending.

If you do like psychological, crime solving horror games than you will like this one.
  
Making A Murderer - Season 1
Making A Murderer - Season 1
2015 | Crime, Documentary
So gripping and compulsive (0 more)
Possibly heavily one-sided (0 more)
Not normally a true-crime or documentary fan, I wanted to see what the fuss was all about (but safely after all the buzz has died down). I absolutely loved the documentary. To see how the American justice system, trial by camera, trust in authority figures, all fits together and just how open to abuse it is is incredible.
I mean, obviously the documentary is edited in such a way as to make you believe his innocence, but even just weighing up all the oddities with the evidence and all the different pathways that lead to the same two questionable police officers would lead any sane person to believe he was framed.
The fact that the series covers the case over the span of 10 episodes, without losing traction at any point is incredible.
I have become somewhat obsessed with the case and am currently reading through 220 pages of Avery's latest appeal, and spent far too long watching videos showing the crime scene photos were photo-shopped.
  
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Olivier Assayas recommended Rififi (1955) in Movies (curated)

 
Rififi (1955)
Rififi (1955)
1955 | Crime, Drama, Thriller
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"Rififi is a strange animal, based on a novel by a typically French crime writer, Auguste Le Breton, and shot in Paris as the first foreign-language film by a great American filmmaker at the height of his powers, whose career had been broken by McCarthyism. Jules Dassin’s previous film, made in London five years earlier, Night and the City, is his masterpiece. This inspired hybrid of French and American noir—which I discovered as a child on French TV—has constantly impressed me with its violence, its despair, its darkness, and its beauty. It has also been hugely influential, not only on Melville—so much of his work derives from Rififi—but also on a lot of minor figures of French genre. Dassin reinvented the whole syntax, and the after-effects have been felt for a long time. I am a fan of Michael Mann; he is one of the most inspired stylists in American cinema today, but it was all there from the start. In Thief, his first feature, you have echoes of Melville (it goes full circle), a sharp eye for realism, but also profound human characters with precisely drawn relationships, and great acting. Mann’s fascination with a geometrical modernity, even if it is always mediated by genre filmmaking, is genuinely reminiscent of Antonioni—explicitly so in the last scenes of Heat."

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Olivier Assayas recommended Thief (1981) in Movies (curated)

 
Thief (1981)
Thief (1981)
1981 | Action, Drama, Mystery
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"Rififi is a strange animal, based on a novel by a typically French crime writer, Auguste Le Breton, and shot in Paris as the first foreign-language film by a great American filmmaker at the height of his powers, whose career had been broken by McCarthyism. Jules Dassin’s previous film, made in London five years earlier, Night and the City, is his masterpiece. This inspired hybrid of French and American noir—which I discovered as a child on French TV—has constantly impressed me with its violence, its despair, its darkness, and its beauty. It has also been hugely influential, not only on Melville—so much of his work derives from Rififi—but also on a lot of minor figures of French genre. Dassin reinvented the whole syntax, and the after-effects have been felt for a long time. I am a fan of Michael Mann; he is one of the most inspired stylists in American cinema today, but it was all there from the start. In Thief, his first feature, you have echoes of Melville (it goes full circle), a sharp eye for realism, but also profound human characters with precisely drawn relationships, and great acting. Mann’s fascination with a geometrical modernity, even if it is always mediated by genre filmmaking, is genuinely reminiscent of Antonioni—explicitly so in the last scenes of Heat."

Source