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Joe Swanberg recommended Crumb (1994) in Movies (curated)

 
Crumb (1994)
Crumb (1994)
1994 | Documentary
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"It’s in my top five list of best films ever made. I just think it’s perfect. It’s an amazing portrait of an artist, an amazing portrait of a family, Crumb is an incredible central character. I feel like whenever I watch that movie — I sort of watch it every couple years — I start talking like him afterwards. I mean he really infects me in a way that totally changes the way that I look at the world. All great artists have that sort of ability. When I read some of my favorite novelists after I put down one of their books, I’m thinking in their words. I’m seeing the world through their eyes and it’s the same with Crumb. I’m a big fan of his comics, but that film does such an amazing job putting you kind of in his headspace. It also looks amazing, it’s shot on film, Zwigoff does an incredible job framing Crumb’s world, and the Jazz music. it’s just great, I just think it’s great. I think the movie’s a pleasure to watch. I mean, his brother Charles is f—ing incredible, man. Like, the idea that this family produced not one great artist, three great artists. And that Crumb was actually the one who was political enough and sophisticated enough and just barely enough of a people person that his art got seen. But, you know, Charles and Matt also were like really pushing the boundaries of the stuff and also hugely influential on Crumb’s stuff. You don’t get Robert without Charles. You just never sort of have access to those stories the way that this documentary has access to that family. It’s a lot to think about, the artwork that we end up getting as a culture, you know, often times is less about what’s better, and more about how savvy the artist is and how able they are to kind of be in the right place at the right time so that there’s an audience for the work."

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The Coffinmaker's Garden (Ash Henderson #3)
The Coffinmaker's Garden (Ash Henderson #3)
Stuart MacBride | 2021 | Crime, Thriller
8
8.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
The Coffinmakers Garden is a gritty thriller with a healthy dash of black humour. There is clearly a good reason why Ash Henderson is an ex-Detective Inspector, and it’s not just his severe arthritis. This is a man who will pretty much stop at nothing to bring the criminals to justice - unless he’s using criminals to help him get what he wants. Ash is a teeny bit corrupt, I think (for the record, I don’t think you can be a teeny bit anything: you’re either doing it, or you aren’t).

I really enjoyed the dark humour, and I’m not particularly squeamish, so the murdery bits didn’t bother me - in fact I really enjoyed the whole book. Yes, Ash’s actions were a bit OTT sometimes, but in my opinion, this is a piece of fiction, not a documentary on police procedure 🤷🏼‍♀️ It did read a bit like a cop film set in a big US city, except with a much smaller budget and Scottish accents. And let’s face it - Ash Henderson has a dog that he clearly adores, so he can’t be all bad!

I liked that there were actually two investigations running at the same time - one of which Ash is kicked off because of his poor behaviour. He still seems to manage to be involved with them both though, which must have been frankly exhausting for him!

The fact that I haven’t read the first two books in this series didn’t lessen my enjoyment, it merely made me curious as to what happened in the previous books. I wasn’t left not understanding what was going on. Short, appropriate explanations saw to that. The characters were richly described and fascinating to read about - they were all very different people.

So, another great book chosen by The Pigeonhole, and I really appreciated the short videos that Stuart McBride prepared for us to watch throughout the book.
  
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Ed Helms recommended Apocalypse Now (1979) in Movies (curated)

 
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
1979 | Action, Drama, War

"Going in a little different direction, Apocalypse Now is an unbelievable piece of cinema. Just the scale of the production and the performances. I feel like, narratively, it’s one of the… There’s a subgenre of Vietnam movies, obviously, and this one just feels so epic and operatic, in no small part because it uses Wagner’s Ring Cycle as the score for one of the great battle scenes. I don’t know, I can’t say enough about it. And then, of course, seeing Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about it. That just made me love it even more, because you can see the creative depth that Coppola went to, the depth of his soul that he dug into to not just make the movie and keep it together, but to sort of fight for coherence in a chaotic production, and I love the discovery. I mean, clearly, when Brando showed up on set, it was such a disaster, because he didn’t know his lines and he was a hundred pounds overweight or something, and he basically refused to learn his lines. But then Coppola worked with what he had, and to me that is the most… He wound up with something genius and more coherent than what may have even been on the page originally. There’s a quote by Orson Welles that the absence of limitations is the enemy of art, and I feel like Apocalypse Now is a kind of great tribute to that idea, because Coppola just faced so much adversity making the movie. Not just Coppola, the cast, the crew, everybody faced so much and dealt with so much and then created this transcendent piece of cinema that captures a dark piece of world conflict history and some very intimate stories of young people sucked into it, and then, of course, a meditation on the darkness of the human soul, which is an important thing to explore artistically from time to time."

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