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Goal! The Dream Begins (2005)

6.5 (2 Ratings) Rate It

Movie

Santiago Munez is a poor Mexican-American immigrant who seems destined to follow his father into...

21st Century Innovation Systems for Japan and the United States: Lessons from a Decade of Change: Report of a Symposium

Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy, Policy and Global Affairs and National Research Co

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Book

Recognizing that a capacity to innovate and commercialize new high-technology products is...

A Song to My City: Washington, DC

Carol Lancaster and Douglas Farrar

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Book

This deeply felt memoir is a love letter to Washington, DC. Carol Lancaster, a third-generation...

How to Do Things with International Law

Ian Hurd

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Book

A provocative reassessment of the rule of law in world politics Conventionally understood as a set...

Vince Clarke recommended Bookends by Simon & Garfunkel in Music (curated)

Bookends by Simon & Garfunkel

1968 | Folk

8.0

(2 Ratings)

Album Favorite

"I saw the film The Graduate when I was 15 and heard the track 'The Sound Of Silence' and I immediately went out and bought the songbook and learned every song. Hearing Simon & Garfunkel was the thing that made me decide I would really like to make music for a living. I could play the songs, and suddenly music seemed much less foreign to me. Before that it was watching people on Top Of The Pops doing their thing, and it was just another world to me, it didn't seem like something that could be homegrown or that I could possibly achieve. At the time I'd just started going to the school guitar club and learning basic chords, and this music came along and I thought, ""Ah, I can learn that"". I like the simplicity of the lyrics, and there's a naivety to the songwriting, and when they write about New York and that, now I live here and have been visiting for years, I can see where their inspirations came from. You can't deliberately be naive, you write simple songs I guess, and hopefully something that you do happens in the writing process. I'm really into melody, I couldn't listen to a jazz fusion record for instance, I'm the opposite end of the scale, that's all."

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Olivier Assayas recommended Rififi (1955) in Movies (curated)

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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