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    Riding Home

    Tim Hayes

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    Throughout history, people have loved, owned and ridden horses. They fascinate us, and we are drawn...

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Pat Healy recommended The Graduate (1967) in Movies (curated)

 
The Graduate (1967)
The Graduate (1967)
1967 | Classics, Comedy, Drama

"What can be said about this movie that hasn’t already been said? Mike Nichols’s masterpiece precipitated the sixties youth movement in all its melancholic glory while also being a hilarious satire of contemporary consumer culture. My brother Jim has always been an early adopter of movie technology. The first Criterion release I ever remember seeing was the Graduate laserdisc in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen (we had seen the film previously only on a pan-and-scan VHS borrowed from our local library). It has one of the first commentary tracks I ever heard on a disc (maybe the first), by film scholar Howard Suber. I learned a lot about film analysis listening to that track in 1987. But the new Blu-ray also features one of Nichols’s many commentaries in conversation with the great Steven Soderbergh. They have done several together (Catch-22 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and they are never less than fully engaging and fascinating. When making my own film, I took to heart Nichols’s assertion that “a movie is about something, but it is also about something else.” And in this new transfer, The Graduate has never looked or sounded better. Robert Surtees’s brilliant compositions are a touchstone of modern cinema. Often imitated, never duplicated. By casting Dustin Hoffman, Nichols also flipped the idea of what a leading man was and could be, and changed the history of cinema."

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Kick Inside Soundtrack by Kate Bush
Kick Inside Soundtrack by Kate Bush
1990 | Rock
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"Well, it’s got ‘Wuthering Heights’ on it, that’s the big song… But it’s one of those albums that made me realise that there is more than one way to skin a cat, you know, because I always used to feel slightly inadequate about my voice. I always wanted to sound like Steven Tyler or Bon Scott or someone like that... but actually I sound more like Kate Bush! I didn’t really acknowledge that before and then when I was listening to that stuff I thought that she makes a lot of the same choices I would make, melodically and stuff – and possibly presentation-wise! I discovered this around 2003. We’d already made our album by the way – we didn’t copy hers [laughs]. But it made me feel better about everything really. It’s hard to go and record stuff or go out and perform when you’re having a confidence crisis. But listening to that made me feel a million times better. There are beautiful songs on this. She’s a beautiful songwriter. I actually heard a rumour that at 18 she had that record ready to go but the record label wouldn’t let her because they thought it would destroy her, because it was so powerful it would engulf her and she would drown in her own success… [laughs] but I don’t know how true it is. So I’ve bought everything that she’s ever released now and I’m still researching it, but that’s where you start isn’t it?"

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Kirk Bage (1775 KP) rated Schindler's List (1993) in Movies

Jan 18, 2021 (Updated Feb 25, 2021)  
Schindler's List (1993)
Schindler's List (1993)
1993 | Biography, Drama, History
The fourth in my series of films you would recommend to an alien to explain humanity dovetails nicely with my Hall of Fame inductee this week. It is Steven Spielberg’s seminal anti war epic Shindler’s List (1993).

This one speaks for itself in many ways. As an exploration of evil and the men behind the atrocities committed during the late 30s and early 40s by Nazi Germany it is indispensable. The role played by Ralph Fiennes is especially brave and resonant in reminding us of how ego and power can corrupt beyond the point of anything recognisably human. But it is in the moments of resilience, defiance and sacrifice by the survivors that we fully appreciate the depths of the human spirit. A career defining performance by both Liam Neeson and Sir Ben Kingsley makes this a breathtaking and heartbreaking spectacle in every brutally emotional scene.

I will never forget seeing this in the cinema on its initial release and experiencing the absolute silence as the credits rolled and everyone left the screen and into the night with their thoughts and reflections, simply stunned by its impact. It demonstrates the very best and the very worst of human action and inaction in one perfect movie. Never an easy watch under any circumstances, but one worth dissecting and appreciating for all its genius – the directing, acting, cinematography, music, editing, everything is as near perfect as a film can be.