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Alex Wolff recommended Ordinary People (1980) in Movies (curated)

"Those performances. Timothy Hutton’s performance in that is probably the most directly inspiring to me, and that’s a young guy at the top of his game, emotionally raw, and brings everything that a young actor could want in a performance. I feel that that film is the most heart-wrenching and true portrait of a family maybe I’ve ever seen. To describe it well would reveal too much. That’s what’s brilliant about it. Everyone should watch it and watch Mary Tyler Moore with Timothy Hutton and Judd Hirsch. I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe that movie. It seems like such a simple concept, and yet Robert Redford kills it. The scene that always gets me, hits me so hard, is a small scene that not many people would say they love. Most say the big breakdown scene with Judd Hirsh. For me, it’s the scene where Timothy Hutton has been going to Judd Hirsch for a little bit, and he’s opening up. It’s such a journey of what it means to be vulnerable and the importance of vulnerability in your own family, especially after trauma. My character in The Cat and the Moon is very much inspired by Timothy Hutton’s character in Ordinary People. His journey of being so closed off and edgy to cracking open into this well of unmined emotion. Particularly the scene where he and Donald Sutherland, who’s amazing as well, are decorating the tree — ugh, the Christmas tree. It’s such a sweet scene. Mary Tyler Moore comes home, and she’s got this cold, dark look on her face. I’ll never get over her facial expressions in that movie. What she’s thinking versus what she’s putting on the surface is the most genius magic trick. It’s the most exhilarating thing ever. That movie is the best."

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Laura Doe (1350 KP) rated The Seven Sisters (The Seven Sisters, #1) in Books

Jul 1, 2021

The idea of the book is fantastic, six sisters named after a constellation all adopted. None of them know where they came from, and when their father dies he gives each of them a clue - the coordinates of somewhere from their past and a quote written in Greek that should mean something to each of them.

This book follows the eldest sister Maia and her journey to find out who she is and where she came from. Her journey takes her to Brazil where she finds out who her real family are. A lot of the book focuses on her maternal great grandmother, her marriage and Christ the Redeemer being constructed. I found it quite disappointing that most of the book seemed to focus on her story and not Maia’s story, and that the part about Maia’s birth mother was quite rushed. The story about her great grandmother, Izabela, was interesting but could have been condensed quite a lot and didn’t need to be as long as it was.

I also found the writing quite clunky and it didn’t flow correctly in some parts, a bit like it had been translated from a different language and incorrectly.

It was fascinating learning about the construction of Christ the Redeemer and about Rio as it has always been on my bucket list of places to travel, but I felt that the book didn’t need to be quite as long as it was.

I am torn about whether I want to read on the rest of the books in the series, as I want to know what happens to the sisters and there are still some unanswered questions, but I don’t know if I could continue if the writing style doesn’t flow correctly still.

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Richard Hell recommended Journey to Italy (1954) in Movies (curated)

Journey to Italy (1954)

1954 | Drama, Romance

(0 Ratings)

Movie Favorite

"Blew my mind. I didn’t see it until I was middle-aged, after decades of thriving on the ongoing French New Wave. I thought of the New Wave as beginning in these subversive young Parisian cineastes’ love for American genre films. My jaw was dropped the whole length of Journey to see the sensibility and techniques of the New Wave appearing first in this Italian flick (though English-language, starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman). Later I read that Truffaut called it the “first modern movie,” and I believe he’s right. I haven’t researched, so don’t know if this is a commonplace, but, on a side note, it’s interesting to consider the parallels between Journey and Godard’s Contempt. They’re both about a couple whose marriage is failing, who are foreigners on a visit to Italy, where their stiff estrangement reaches a head amid the vital, pagan-slash-Catholic ancient culture of the area around Naples. Noble, erotically charged, millennia-old statuary reverently track-circled to swelling music. Local color, and travelogue landmarks of aesthetic and mythologically poetic power, integrated naturally into the story (almost Hitchcockian in a way, except with an emotional and intellectual justification). The most groundbreaking thing about it, though, is the way it’s not exactly a story, but rather a situation, depicted in fragments and episodes—the emotional situation of a couple, displaced within a continuously intruding, alien or disorienting environment, and one that keeps us conscious of death and history. A lot is pointedly artificial about it—to me the dialogue all feels like exposition, and is delivered that way, as presentation of the situation, rather than anything natural—or at least frankly cinema, but at the same time it feels like life in a way that movies hadn’t before."

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