Smashbomb

Search

Search results

All (1890)

Content

Romance Film: Passion Strategies in Film and Life

Norman Kagan

(0 Ratings) Rate It

Book

Romance Film is a critical history of significant romance films from Hollywood and abroad. Kagan...

Jon Savage recommended Rebel Without a Cause (1955) in Movies (curated)

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

1955 | Classics, Drama

8.2

(6 Ratings)

Movie Favorite Watch

"It's about the quality of the star, those people who the camera just loves, and James Dean is really amazing. He's moody, but there's a lot going on beneath the surface. He doesn't go with the crowd which is always very attractive. When you're dealing with adolescence you've always got the kids with that strength of character. I think that's very important. I watched Rebel Without A Cause in the eighties with a group of kids and they thought it was really funny and old fashioned. When you look at it it now it is obviously a bit melodramatic, but that's partly because it's influenced so many films since. It's also a very strange film, a fated film, because the three main juvenile leads, Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood and James Dean, died prematurely. Sal Mineo was murdered in the late seventies, Natalie Wood drowned in an accident, and of course JD was too fast too young."

Source

Kudos

Awix (3310 KP) rated Dracula Untold (2014) in Movies

Jan 10, 2021

Dracula Untold (2014)

2014 | Action, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi

7.0

(26 Ratings)

Movie Rating

Untold, uninspired, and underwhelming take on a Dracula origin story, very much in the style of a comic book movie. Historians look away: Vlad Tepes is a client king of the Turks, who is forced to rebel against them and seeks out demonic, blood-sucking powers to help him defeat his opponents. (Charles Dance, playing his mentor in evil, is the best thing in the movie.)

Mildly diverting as an empty spectacle (gasp as Superdrac uses his FIST OF BATS power to squish the Turks!) but essentially useless: the film fails to engage with either the historical Vlad the Impaler or the iconic Dracula. Luke Evans fails to communicate any essential darkness lurking in his character, just coming across as a nice guy who makes a bad decision under pressure. If Dracula's not going to be a properly evil monster, what's the point of him? Good effects and reasonable art direction, but misses the point in every narrative sense.

Kudos

SaleFinder

Lifestyle and Reference

(0 Ratings) Rate It

App

SaleFinder allows you to search and browse the latest catalogues and promotions from New Zealand’s...

Sara Cox (1845 KP) rated The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in Books

Aug 5, 2020

I was really looking forward to this book when I heard the synopsis. A prequel to The Hunger Game. The development of Snow and Panam. There were two speeds in this book: snail paced and space rocket. It was really nice that the author linked in aspects of the subsequent books and their origins, for example the Hanging Tree song and where the name Katnis came from. And I thought the origins of Coriolanus Snow was really interesting, but throughout the book I found it difficult to see how these series of events turned him into the character we see in The Hunger Games. If anything the events should have led to his character being a rebel and the reason described in this narrative seemed lazy. This could have been brilliant but for me as there was no clear character development to the Snow we see in The Hunger Game, it killed it for me