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Olivier Assayas recommended La Dolce Vita (1960) in Movies (curated)

La Dolce Vita (1960)

1960 | Comedy, Drama

8.0

(4 Ratings)

Movie Favorite

"I’ve never been very fond of Fellini—too baroque for me. But La dolce vita is an amazing film, summing up an era, a culture, a city; in its own way it is of historical importance. Maybe it is the great Italian film of that period, in the same way that The Mother and the Whore, by Jean Eustache, is the ultimate nouvelle vague film made ten years later, by someone who had been a marginal figure of the movement, and embodying a city, a time, a culture now all gone. My admiration for Jean-Pierre Melville has only been growing through the years. He is a minimalist, like Bresson, but not so much in the sense of emptying the frame—it’s more about getting rid of a lot of the visible to replace it with the invisible. I haven’t been filming a lot of gangsters, but I can understand his fascination for both outlaws and cops, for their world haunted by betrayal and death. In Army of Shadows, he adapts a semi-autobiographical novel by Joseph Kessel and makes the ultimate film of the French Resistance. Both Kessel and Melville had been involved with the Free French, and here cinema meets history. A great artist carried by historical circumstances transcends not just his own inspiration but the medium. Army of Shadows is not only one of the most important French films, it is also a national treasure."

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Kudos

Olivier Assayas recommended Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres) (1969) in Movies (curated)

Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres) (1969)

1969 | International, Drama

(0 Ratings)

Movie Favorite

Source

Kudos

LoganCrews (2861 KP) rated The Crush (1993) in Movies

Sep 19, 2020 (Updated Sep 19, 2020)

The Crush (1993)

1993 | Drama, Mystery

6.3

(3 Ratings)

Movie Rating

Men are shit and teenagers are psychopaths. Point-blank absurd, pure trash, and an outright blast - 𝘓𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘢 as one of the goofier and more fun beat-for-beat 𝘍𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘈𝘵𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 clones out there. What more of any value can I even say? This is exactly as advertised - checks off every bulletpoint for stalker flicks of the era but does so with a sublime verve and hearty layer of blunt sleaze. Alicia Silverstone is phenomenal, and the whole thing just looks fantastic, I mean really it's shot perfectly and has a real dope soundtrack to it as well. But apparently the director based the lead on a real girl he knew and just didn't change the name so he was legally forced to alter it; then he just swapped the place of one letter after it was completed and every time she's mentioned it's switched with some of the most hilariously shoddy dubbing since... damn, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘮𝘢𝘯? Lmao, love it. Also the carousel is just as hilarious and out-of-place as everyone has mentioned. Features no shortage of delightfully raucous segments but imo the best way to frame this is as a sick man being forced to be haunted by his own pedophilic tendencies over and over again, an endless cycle of pathetic men being rightfully tortured by the girls they (and society) prey upon. Helps that all these characters except for Silverstone are dumb as rocks. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘋𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘳.

Kudos

LoganCrews (2861 KP) rated The Conjuring (2013) in Movies

Oct 11, 2020

Have the exact same opinion from when I first saw it, it's fun and has its share of scary moments but holy hell is it also exhausting and conventional. Very handsomely made with a lot of visual personality (it's impossible for Wan to make a bad film simply because of how damn good they look) but otherwise short on nuance and running about fifteen minutes too lengthy. I mean this was practically made for normies to love but otherwise in terms of its acclaim even at the time, I don't really get it? I can't stress enough how much this did for modern horror as we know it and I of course applaud it for that, but I think most people were just shocked that a high-grossing studio horror movie could be shot and acted well back then imo. Putting aside the fact that they're real-life bullshit artists, the Warrens depicted here are just about as bland as can be - for me this whole affair just doesn't have the verve or the flavor of Wan's 𝘐𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴. His playfulness and the entire cast's conviction help ultimately sell this for me even in spite of its austerity; the moments when this feels like a rustic haunted house joyride make it work but the rest it of mostly *strains* man come on this shit is so beyond familiar territory even by this point. Fine, but could have been better.

Kudos

Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2474 KP) rated The Secret of Shadow Ranch in Books

Jul 15, 2019

The Secret of Shadow Ranch

Carolyn Keene | 1965 | Children, Mystery

8.7

(3 Ratings)

Book Rating

Is the Ranch Haunted?

It’s summer, and Nancy has been invited to spend it with her best friends Bess Marvin and George Fayne on the ranch their uncle Ed and aunt Bet have just bought in Arizona. However, she has barely landed when she learns that things aren’t going well on the ranch. Someone is trying to drive the new owners off the land with acts of sabotage, most of which are foreshadowed by a phantom horse. There is a legend that an old outlaw cursed the ranch, but Nancy thinks the culprits are more modern and very real. Can she figure out what is going on and why?

This may be the fifth book in the series, but this is the first time we are seeing Bess and George, Nancy’s usual sleuthing companions. They jump right in here for another action-packed story. The general plot outline is fairly obvious early on, including a massive coincidence in the story, but that didn’t keep me from turning pages as quickly as I could. As an adult I find the characters thinner than I remember, but we still like them enough to care about the outcome. Since the book was last updated in the 1950’s, some of the language is a little dated (it even stopped me a little), but I doubt it will slow down today’s kids as they race to see how Nancy will piece together this fun mystery.