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Grace is Gone
Grace is Gone
Emily Elgar | 2020 | Philosophy, Psychology & Social Sciences, Thriller
6
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
This novel is told by Cara and Jon, two completely different characters. Cara is Grace’s friend and neighbour, her mom was best friends with Grace’s mother Meg. Cara knows Grace quite well, but was it well enough though? That is what she keeps asking herself over and over again. Jon is a journalist, who is trying to save his breaking family, and he has this strange obsession with Meg and Grace, he wants to find Grace, but I didn’t really understand why? Meg and Grace kind of ruined his life. I liked Jon and his parts of this book more, he was more interesting with his family drama and his past. Cara’s journey was okayish, she was very repetitive with all the regret about Grace, that I found quite irritating. It was very interesting to see how Meg and Grace had the community in their grip, by just being there.

The narrative was well delivered, I liked the investigation Cara and Jon were doing, as well as discovering more about Grace and Meg as the pages fly by. Even though Grace is missing, she plays a very important part in this search through her diary, that was very intriguing to read. The plot is pretty slow for about half of the book and I needed more pace and suspense, but it does pick up towards the end of the book, with quite intriguing twists and turns, so don’t give up on it.
  
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Awix (3310 KP) rated Pixie (2020) in Movies

Oct 25, 2020  
Pixie (2020)
Pixie (2020)
2020 | Comedy, Thriller
6
7.3 (3 Ratings)
Movie Rating
Knockabout comedy-thriller set in Northern Ireland. 'What do men see in irritating free spirits?' wondered Julia Roberts in a Tom Hanks movie a few years ago, and the question is still a live one: Olivia Cooke plays Pixie, who is not quite Holly Golightly recast as a feminist criminal mastermind, but getting there. Nearly everyone is entranced by her, including apparently the director, cameraman, and cinematographer, despite the fact she seems to be almost completely amoral: ripping off drug dealers, swindling her friends, and cold-blooded murder all seem to be part of her repertoire. Nevertheless she and her latest enamoured stooges zip about Ireland to a jangly western-style soundtrack while Alec Baldwin phones in a cameo as a gun-toting gangster-priest.

Surely people have got to get over this obsession with making Tarantino pastiches sooner or later? This one has the odd funny moment, but a lot of the jokes don't land and the plot constantly seems to be on the verge of unravelling. Olivia Cooke carries the film with predictable grace, but I felt almost commanded to like her without good enough reason: the film also suggests there's a thin line between idealising a character and objectifying them, as a rather lubricious tone occasionally threatens to manifest. Passably watchable in the end, but has no connection to reality: feels like a script somebody wrote in 1995 and then spent twenty-odd years finding the funding for. Cooke in particular deserves better.
  
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Colin Farrell recommended Paris, Texas (1984) in Movies (curated)

 
Paris, Texas (1984)
Paris, Texas (1984)
1984 | International, Drama, Romance
8.8 (4 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"The whole feel of this film was something that woke me up to cinema in a way. Before this film it was very much an Amblin world for me. Lots of Indiana Jones and John Hughes and Willy Wonka (the original) and Van Damme action movies and Richard Pryor comedies like Brewster’s Millions, etc. Then a friend introduced me to Paris, Texas. The aching loneliness and sense of lost love that pervades the film from the arid desolation of the desert landscape to the haunting strings of Ry Cooder’s soundtrack just blew me away. Maybe I was 17 or 18 when I saw it, but it stayed with me, and I go back to it about once a year. It also has one of the most honest portrayals of the loss of love between a couple, and the inherent danger within the nature of obsession. This lost love is broken down for the audience in what, to me, is possibly most quietly powerful monologue ever delivered in any film I’ve seen; when Harry Dean Stanton’s character, Travis, finally sits with the woman he loved and lost, and he recounts their story to her. Travis has to turn the chair around, so he’s facing away from her while he speaks. I assume because it’s too much to look at her while he’s expressing where and how such love disintegrated. Yeah, it’s a beautiful, beautiful film."

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