Kristen Sinclair

"Would you like me to seduce you?" Everyone knows the iconic still of Dustin Hoffman and a wedding dress-clad Katharine Ross looking relived and slightly bewildered sitting at the back of a bus. The actors’ expressions in this scene have gone on to become synonymous with Mike Nichols’ 1967 classic The Graduate . Recent East Coast graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), something of an over-achiever at college, returns to his home in the shallowness of white southern Californian suburbia, unsure of where his life is heading and surrounded by “plastics”. Following a family dinner party, Ben is seduced by his parents’ friend Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), spawning the classic line “Would you like me to seduce you?”. This then develops into a full-blown tremulous affair between the married and much older Mrs. Robinson and the virginal Ben. It soon becomes clear that Mrs. Robinson is in a loveless marriage and is only using Ben for sex. Coerced by his parents, ...

Listening to certain records, it’s sometimes hard to believe that they’re as old as they are. There are the obvious game changers – Sgt. Pepper’s , The Wall , Electric Ladyland , Highway 61 Revisited , Kind of Blue , I Feel Love , Nevermind , Dusty in Memphis , to name a few – but there somewhat less obvious records that have helped to shape modern music. After a lot of narrowing down, I settled with these five as my personal picks. ·          Rapper’s Delight – The Sugar Hill Gang Released in 1979, this ground-breaking hip-hop track sounds like something straight out of the nineties. Nurtured from freestyle created at a hip-hop event in the Bronx in ‘78, it has gone on to be, arguably, the first song to bring rap into the mainstream. The track features a bass line from Chic’s ‘Good Times’ and has influenced huge hits from Blondie’s hip-hop-inspired ‘Rapture’ to essentially Grandmaster Flash’s entire career. Fourteen minutes and thirty-fi...

Title: How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits Author(s): Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline De Maigret, Sophie Mas Publisher: Ebury Press (2014) ★★★★ “Be unfaithful: cheat on your perfume, but only on cold days.” This book is the bible of every wannabe-Parisienne. Four best friends and life-long inhabitants of the City of Light indulge supposedly satirical yet strangely convincing aphorisms, faux pas, colloquialisms, tips on etiquette, style, sex, home décor, recipes and how to spend idyllic days among the boulevards of the Île-de-France. Teeming with sometimes amusingly useless advice (“Always hire the less attractive babysitter”, “Randomly exclaim, ‘This is the most wonderful day of my life!’”), you often find yourself mentally taking note of the odd nugget of uniquely Parisienne wisdom: “Never wear your glasses, especially if you’re nearsighted. That way, you won’t have to acknowledge people you know. You’ll have that aloof look…”. It...

When it comes to films, I’ve never really been one for happy endings. It’s just too satisfying when you know that everything works out in the end and you can just forget about it, safe in the knowledge that the guy got the girl; the bad guy lost; they all lived happily ever after. I love a film that leaves you guessing, wondering long after you’ve left the cinema and brushed the popcorn off your clothes. I love a film with an ambiguous ending that’s open to endless interpretations, where there’s no definite answer and it’s all left to the viewer to decide what happens and how they want to story to end. Or perhaps not how they’d like it to end, but how they think it ends. A film like that will open discussion and linger on your mind even when you’ve forgotten the predictable finale of Endless Love . My Own Private Idaho: "This road will never end. It probably goes all around the world." An unclear film ending differs from a plot twist. Sure, unexpected twists are gr...

Jake Gyllenhaal as Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler, 2014 (Source: huffingtonpost.com) A few weeks ago I went to see Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal’s latest movie. The plot revolves around Louis Bloom, a petty thief who stumbles into a new career as a ‘nightcrawler’ – a nocturnal cameraman who, along with his assistant Rick (played by Riz Ahmed), scours the streets of LA in search of shocking and grisly crimes to photograph and film before the mainstream media. Gyllenhaal’s character catches people at their worst: dead, dying, mutilated, and all to satisfy the public’s morbid curiosity. Like Bloom says, “I like to think that if you see me, you're having the worst day of your life.” When Louis realises he can make some serious money ‘nightcrawling’ by selling his best and bloodiest footage to a failing news station, his hell-bent obsession with getting the ‘money shot’ has dire consequences. As someone who would like to work in journalism in the future, the film got me thinking: when...

This piece also featured in The Indiependent  here . Lou Reads! Source: blogspot.com Lou Reed has always been something of a fascination and an enigma to me. The Velvet Underground are one of my favourite bands, and a handful of Lou’s solo albums are among my most treasured. Whilst reading Mick Wall’s hastily penned biography Lou Reed: The Life , the stories behind two of his most famous songs, 'Venus in Furs' (from the Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut The Velvet Underground & Nico ) and 'Walk On the Wild Side' (from Bowie-produced 1972 solo album Transformer ) sparked my interest. Even the band’s name was inspired by a book! I had a lot of reading to do, it seemed. Legend has it that Lou Reed and John Cale found a copy of journalist Michael Leigh’s 1963 paperback Velvet Underground on the streets of New York and liked its title so much they decided to name their band after it. However, it was the book’s title that caught their attention, not so mu...

There are so many gorgeous stills from this film I could hardly choose one Source: ourgoldenage.com.au “ Qu'est-ce que c'est ‘dégueulasse’? ” In theory, I’m watching this film to improve my French… or because I’m a total sucker for a pretentious romance film. À bout de souffle , or Breathless , is director Jean-Luc Godard’s debut feature length film, released in France in 1960. The story follows petty criminal and scumbag Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who models himself on Humphrey Bogart and, having rashly killed a policeman pursuing him from Nice, flees to Paris and rekindles his relationship with American journalism student Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg). Poiccard attempts to collect debt from an underworld associate whilst trying (unsuccessfully) to convince Franchini, who sells copies of the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées to supplement her studying at the Sorbonne, to escape to Italy with him. Breathless was very innovative in its tim...