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Peter Sarsgaard recommended The Hunt (2012) in Movies (curated)

 
The Hunt (2012)
The Hunt (2012)
2012 | Drama
8.5 (2 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"The Hunt. It’s a Danish movie about a guy (Mads Mikkelsen) and he’s been accused of molesting a kid. The other thing that’s great in that movie is he’s got a very noble quality as a man who believes in himself. He’s the kind of guy that if it were to happen to him, the self-righteous indignation, at first, completely f***s him. He rejects it so hard and then he looks guilty. The self-preservation is… He’s not trying to explain himself at all because it’s so insulting: a great quality to act. And that’s like what’s great is that the actor in that film helps solve the puzzle of the movie. If an actor played it differently… What’s great is his flaw; his character flaw is what makes the whole storyline happen. If he could just be a little more direct and not so disdainful, more kind of humble and understanding, it wouldn’t have all gone down. It’s just because he circles the wagons way too quickly; he gets angry too quickly and just makes himself look guilty. So, yeah. I love films like that where you find yourself yelling back at the screen."

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Neil Gaiman recommended If... (1968) in Movies (curated)

 
If... (1968)
If... (1968)
1968 | Crime, Drama
7.5 (2 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"""The first one would be Lindsay Anderson’s If… It’s a film that I love because it allows me sometimes try and explain what it was like to be a kid at an English Public School — I was a scholarship boy in the early 1970s — late ’60s where you were in — even though it’s set earlier than that and was made earlier than that — you were in a culture that hasn’t changed. I remember just watching it and suddenly feeling understood. Which was a completely new one for me. I’d be, you know, This is my world. It was like, OK, here is something Malcolm McDowell–starring, the idea of kids — while we didn’t actually shoot up the school in rebellion, it was the kind of strange stuffy environment that needed to come tumbling down, and I’d never seen that before depicted on film. For years I wondered about why some sequences were in black and white, and many years later I was reading an interview with Lindsey Anderson and discovered it was because they ran out of money for color film, so they just went over to black and white stock, which works in several places through the story."""

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Brett Anderson recommended Scott 3 by Scott Walker in Music (curated)

 
Scott 3 by Scott Walker
Scott 3 by Scott Walker
1969 | Pop, Singer-Songwriter
7.0 (1 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"I got to Scott Walker quite late. I got into him because I read a lot of comparisons between Dog Man Star or 'The Big Time', the B-side to [Suede's] 'Animal Nitrate', and him. I knew The Walker Brothers of course, but I didn't know his solo stuff. What I like about Scott Walker is that it's millimetres away from easy listening, but is still not easy listening. There's the occasional little detail or bar that he puts in there that makes it not easy listening. Scott 3 for me is an amazing record. The first few songs on that, especially songs like 'Big Louise', are such powerful pieces of music. He's one of the greatest singers ever. It's amazing to see how powerful a voice can be, I don't mean in a macho sense, but how if the voice is doing something fascinating how minimal the music can be. I love the way he's still making strange records, like The Drift and Tilt. You've got to admire him for marginalising himself, and still doing interesting stuff at his age, because it's quite rare isn't it? You wonder where he's going to go next."

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Cee-Lo Green recommended Raw Power by The Stooges in Music (curated)

 
Raw Power by The Stooges
Raw Power by The Stooges
1973 | Punk, Rock
8.4 (9 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"Iggy reminds me a lot of me. And it's all in that name; it's all in the title of that album. It’s raw power, you know? I like the funk that David Bowie was able to get behind Iggy. Believe it or not, I first saw an image of Iggy Pop at church, and they were talking about secret messages and backward masking - and they had [a picture of] Iggy Pop looking crazy. I didn't get into it until later, but I think how I was introduced to it was 'I Wanna Be Your Dog'. And what I like about Iggy is it's just genuine raunch. And the album seems like it’s all done in one take. 'Let's do that one, leave it, just try something else'. With his energy on stage, it seems as if the studio was just destroyed after that album - or at least you'd like to believe that. I just read an interview with him in which he said he wrote a lot of it in Hyde Park sitting under a tree wearing pyjama's too, which gave it a cool twist as well. I just love 'Search And Destroy' and 'I Need Somebody' as well."

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All-Time Greatest Hits by Fats Domino
All-Time Greatest Hits by Fats Domino
1990 | Rock
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"’Blueberry Hill’ was one of the first songs that made an impression on me as a child. I remember hearing it at my parent’s friends’ house, along the road where I grew up on. I would have been very young, but my ears immediately pricked up. “I was brought up with lots of music, but this song captivated me and I asked to hear it again. It was just one of those songs that was a catalyst for me getting into, I guess you could say soul music, in a way. “My love of this track comes back to the melody, which to me is the most important thing; both the melody and the delivery of the melody. I can’t really fathom the words to describe what it was about this song, but it was always going to feature. From my early childhood, it was either going to be this or ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T. & the M.G.'s. I heard those two songs on the same day and they have stayed with me as benchmarks for what you can do with melody and relatively few instruments."

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Tyondai Braxton recommended Liedgut by Atom TM in Music (curated)

 
Liedgut by Atom TM
Liedgut by Atom TM
2009 | Dance, Electronic
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"Both of Atom TM's records on the Raster-Noton label are some of my favorite electronic records ever made. Liedgut was his first one for the label. It feels cinematic without being pandering. Inventive and beautiful. Being that it’s electronic, and just that it in its own particular style, it’s a lot more having to do with texture and sound design. But then there’s this weird kind of melodic framework that goes in and out throughout the record, that’s very “hypermelodic”. Very consonant. It almost sounds like… you know those snow-globes that have a twisting belt? Like a music box. It’s texturally focused sound design. And he’s able to go back and forth here in a way that’s really compelling. And again, you can tell it’s very intuitive - he’s just going where the music takes him. In a world of forward thinking electronic music, where anyone can pick up a computer and do this thing, his voice is so unique. I'd be able to pick him out of a thousand records – his own distinct voice. I really love his records, especially the ones he did for Raster-Noton."

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Karl Hyde recommended Untrue by Burial in Music (curated)

 
Untrue by Burial
Untrue by Burial
2007 | Electronic
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"There are a lot of parallels between this record and the roots of Underworld’s inspiration. Film music. Taking sounds and songs and melodies from other tunes and fusing them together with other music in a completely different key. And it just has this dusty, beautifully dirty quality – like film noir through a dirty window. I absolutely love it. We took it to Chile with us, Rick and I, and played it in our hotel room and decided it was the best thing we’d heard in years. It inspired us to start writing there and then in our hotel room – music that went on to be part of the download-only records we did. It encouraged us to be a little less produced. It’s an amazing soundtrack for what’s going on around you. There’s a link between these first three records – especially with James Blake – the way that the voice is treated. It was very exciting to hear the voices on the Burial record treated in such an unprecious way. Taking vocals as oscillators, as we’d always seen them, like another synthesiser that’s capable of generating incredible noises. That in itself was inspiring."

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Allan Arkush recommended Seven Samurai (1954) in Movies (curated)

 
Seven Samurai (1954)
Seven Samurai (1954)
1954 | Action, Adventure, Drama
7.7 (19 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"My father was a film buff. He instilled in me an appreciation of the art of movies. He felt that there was no cinema artist greater than Kurosawa. At a very young age he took me to see Throne of Blood and Seven Samurai. Since then I’ve seen Seven Samurai over fifty times, in theaters, on VHS, laserdisc, and DVD. The latest Criterion edition is my favorite version of my favorite action movie. I love all the extras, especially the history of the samurai, which really enhances the movie’s historical context. In the second season of Heroes, we did a story line set in seventeenth-century Japan. The Seven Samurai box set was an invaluable resource for the costume and art department. About half of our crew watched it and were really inspired by what they saw. It’s one of those movies that I can’t turn off. One minute of viewing and I’m hooked. I’ve heard many people say that about the first two Godfather films, but for me Seven Samurai is the one that lures me into watching multiple hours of a movie I know by heart."

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The Bonds of Blood (DI Dani Stephens #4)
The Bonds of Blood (DI Dani Stephens #4)
Rob Sinclair | 2021 | Crime, Thriller
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
This is the fourth instalment in the DI Dani Stephens Series however, the first that I have read. For me, I don't feel I have missed out too much not having read the previous three in the series, maybe on a bit of the backstory, but nothing that ended up being detrimental to my enjoyment of The Bonds of Blood and just makes me want to go back and read more.

This is a great story - it starts pretty brutally with the murder of a husband and wife in their bed so be prepared - and one that follows DI Stephens and her team's investigation into the brutal murder which is far from straight forward.

Full of lies, deceit and secrets, this is a tricky one to try and work out who did it which makes it all the more enjoyable. It's full of great characters and is written at a good pace and I would definitely recommend to those who love a police procedural where it's not obvious who the perpetrator is until close to the end.

Thank you to Canelo and NetGalley for my copy in return for an honest, unbiased and unedited review.
  
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Peter Strickland recommended Only You (1994) in Movies (curated)

 
Only You (1994)
Only You (1994)
1994 | Comedy, Romance

"I saw this at Helsinki’s Love and Anarchy Film Festival, only missed the beginning of the film, and had to leave early to present my own film at another cinema. This was just a great debut. Really stripped down and honest without the frills and trappings that often come with first film insecurity. I was completely immersed in the couple’s predicament and to my shameful ignorance, there was so much I didn’t know about IVF prior to seeing the film. I’d only seen Josh O’Connor in “God’s Own Country,” but he was just as believable and brilliant in “Only You,” and Laia Costa completely pulled me into the depths of her frustrations. It was also great to see not only a European character in a British film, but also a European played by a European rather than a Brit putting on an accent, which is still often the case. I wonder how that will pan out after Brexit. I had to leave the cinema when the protagonists had a row towards its final minutes and still don’t know or want to know how it ended until I watch it again."

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