Smashbomb

Search

Search results

All (2043)

Content

A Fine Bright Day Today

Philip Goulding

(0 Ratings) Rate It

Book

Since the death of her trawlerman husband 30 years ago, Margaret Harvey has lived with her daughter...

Renny Harlin recommended Cinema Paradiso (1988) in Movies (curated)

"Despite the kind of movies I make, I love small, little movies. I love foreign films in general, I love to see something that really moves me emotionally, and that moves me to tears. Maybe Cinema Paradiso is a little bit of a cliché, but I’m sure every cinema lover lists it as their favourite movie. There’s something so beautiful about it, I love the milieu of the little town and this boy’s story and what the whole thing says about how lives go and about our dreams and memories. When he grows up and goes to the movie theatre and sees all the bits that the priest cut out and it reminds him of his childhood… Cinema doesn’t get more beautiful. The whole film is about the incredible nostalgia of movies in general."

Source

Kudos

David Schwartz recommended All That Heaven Allows (1955) in Movies (curated)

All That Heaven Allows (1955)

1955 | Classics, Drama, Romance

8.0

(1 Ratings)

Movie Favorite

"Is there a greater, more suggestive and bittersweet movie title than All That Heaven Allows? (Well, yes, there is, Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But . . . , but that’s another story and another great Criterion disc.) Sirk dug beneath the surface of idyllic American small-town life in the 1950s, and the surface has never been more beautiful than in this Technicolor nightmare of conformity and the repressive nature of community and family life. It’s Freud vs. Walden, as pettiness, jealousy, and repression pair off against a bohemian vision of rural tranquility. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose brilliant essay on Sirk is included as an extra, remade the movie as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and it was also the model for Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven and Sanaa Hamri’s not-too-shabby Something New."

Source

Kudos

Mel (490 KP) rated Black Swan Green in Books

Oct 4, 2019

Black Swan Green

David Mitchell | 2015 | Fiction & Poetry

6.5

(2 Ratings)

Book Rating

Believable 80s nostalgia (0 more)

Not enough happening (0 more)

Having read three other David Mitchell books I had an idea in my head of what this one would be like. I think if I hadn't had those preconceptions I would have enjoyed it more because this one wasn't anything like the others.

The plot follows a year in the life of 13/14 year old Jason Taylor growing up in a small country town in the 80s. This digs deep into all of the trials and tribulations of growing up if you're not popular but instead a rather awkward stuttered.

I liked the nostalgia but I just felt that the story was a little too steady, I kept expecting some revelation that we might be building towards so ultimately I just felt a little underwhelmed.