Author: Dan Seeger

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Sweet Maxine”

Dan Seeger

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. “Sweet Maxine” is a song by the Doobie Brothers. Released as the second single from their 1975 album, Stampede, it brought them their eighth trip to the Billboard Top 40, although just barely. Across their career, they’d make it into the Top 40 a total of sixteen times, including two instances when they topped the chart. Not knowing anything about this particular song … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Sweet Maxine”

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Some are dying slowly, some are dying fast, some of us hold on to life as long as we can last

Dan Seeger

In Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, the “Me” is Greg (Thomas Mann), a high school senior who has successfully navigated the perils of that particular treacherous habitat by expertly positioning himself as innocuously forgettable. As he explains in listing the various cliques that exist in his school, he’s managed to make himself a casually likable acquaintance to everyone. That is, he stays on the safe periphery to everyone except Earl (Ronald Cyler II), someone he’s known since kindergarten and who he refers to as a co-worker, due the dozens of silly amateur films they’ve directed together. Greg’s precarious equilibrium … Continue reading Some are dying slowly, some are dying fast, some of us hold on to life as long as we can last

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College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 27 – 25

Dan Seeger

27. Smoking Popes, Born to Quit Smoking Popes hailed from the ‘burbs of Chicago and played exactly the sort of brash, punk-punched pop music that was necessary to get noticed in that noisy, busy city. Born to Quit was the band’s sophomore album, released initially on the local ultra-indie Johann’s Face Records before being picked up and reissued by Capitol Records, effectively making it their major label debut (though it would be entirely reasonable to affix that descriptor to their follow-up, 1997’s Destination Failure, which was actually recorded for Capitol and lived down to its title as it was a … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 27 – 25

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From the Archive: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Dan Seeger

I find it a little dismaying that I can reach back twenty-five years to find reviews that are incredibly pertinent to new blockbuster-wannabe releases. James Cameron attests that the latest stab at perpetuating the franchise, Terminator: Genisys, is the true follow-up to his own final cinematic word the adventures of Sarah Connor and the cyborg assassin from the future. (I’m pretty sure he also once maintained that the theme park attraction he helped direct is also canon.) I don’t blame him for disavowing the other movies, but I know at least a couple people who would argue vehemently (preferably over beers) … Continue reading From the Archive: Terminator 2: Judgment Day

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One for Friday: Sam Phillips, “Tripping Over Gravity”

Dan Seeger

I’m fairly certain I found my way to Sam Phillips through Rolling Stone magazine. As I’ve noted before, I was a devoted disciple on the magazine through my high school years, doing the best I could to glean from it what I needed to know about the vast land of rock ‘n’ roll that my local radio stations weren’t providing. That got me trapped in the magazine’s wearying predilections (Neil Young is an important artist, but not every damn album in a masterpiece), but I occasionally had just enough of an instinct to remember the albums that were offered effusive if … Continue reading One for Friday: Sam Phillips, “Tripping Over Gravity”

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twenty-Eight

Dan Seeger

#28 — Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) It seems Notorious began with a desire on the part of director Alfred Hitchock to cast Ingrid Bergman as a woman involved in deceits and duplicitous machinations at the highest levels. This inkling would have come to him at right around the time Bergman was collecting accolades and a bright, shiny Academy Award for her work in Gaslight and as he was on the cusp of working with the actress on Spellbound, a film similarly preoccupied with the way madness can infiltrate as person’s psyche, including through the manipulations of others. Whether or not Hitchcock … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twenty-Eight

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Garland, Howard, Mangold, Ross, Taylor

Dan Seeger

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015). Novelist and screenwriter Garland makes his directorial debut with this smart, chilly science fiction film about a reclusive tech magnate (Oscar Isaac) who flies up an employee (Domhnall Gleeson), supposedly selected at random, to help him test out some remarkable new artificial intelligence he’s created. Complicating the test subjects reactions is the little detail that the A.I. has been loaded into an android with a notably lovely female form and visage (Alicia Vikander). Garland builds his script with almost malicious psychological cunning, fomenting uncertainty as to whether the genius inventor is a simmering madman or … Continue reading Garland, Howard, Mangold, Ross, Taylor

Books6 Comments

My Writers: John Irving

Dan Seeger

When I was a kid, few things drew me to a book more assuredly than the existence of a corresponding movie. This could go in either direction, by the way. The nineteen-seventies and eighties were a sort of golden age for novelizations of movies, and I was happy to devour them. Similarly, if a movie was based on a book, inexpensive paperback copies were usually readily available, stocked generously into racks at the supermarket. In retrospect, I think I used it as a rough guidepost as to which books were worthy of my scattered attention. If the story existed in … Continue reading My Writers: John Irving

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twenty-Nine

Dan Seeger

#29 — Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) There is something about film noir during its heyday that bought out the twisty darkness in every filmmaker who waded into its murky depths. While director Otto Preminger had a career that was varied enough to defy easy categorization, I generally think of his works as clean and resolutely open-eyed, utilizing careful craft to tell relatively straightforward stories. Even a great film fringed with darkness like Anatomy of a Murder becomes methodical under Preminger’s guidance, almost anticipating modern procedurals in its keen attention to the simple progression of events, the whirring machinery of a court … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twenty-Nine

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College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 30 – 28

Dan Seeger

30. Bush, Sixteen Stone A few year backs, when I called a different online space my digital home, I spent an entire day watching Michael Bay films and chronicling the experience for anyone who cared to read. I’d sworn off the efforts of the director following the appalling Armageddon, and decided, for reasons that escape me now, to watch everything I’d missed, in chronological order, across one morning and afternoon, culminating with an evening viewing of Transformers. I tried reading a book afterward and couldn’t do it. That’s how bad the endless march of terrible filmmaking scrambled my brain. While recently … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1995, 30 – 28