Author: Dan Seeger

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Like a Sunday in Salem”

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. Gene Cotton was a singer-songwriter who worked primarily in the nineteen-seventies, racking up a few moderately successful singles, four of which landed in the Billboard Top 40. Among that quartet was a 1978 duet with Kim Carnes on the song “You’re a Part of Me,” a track that stood as her first trip to the Billboard charts, two years before she made it … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Like a Sunday in Salem”

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Well can’t you see me standing here, I’ve got my back against the record machine

Dan Seeger

At some point, the meta magic of filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller is going to wear so thin it can’t hold up a flimsy excuse for a movie concept, but the inevitable erosion hasn’t happened yet. Mere months after their astonishing and daring subversion of the corporate synergy movie model turned The Lego Movie into the most unlikely critical hit in ages (the film’s commercial success, while more impressive than expected, wasn’t exactly in doubt) they’ve returned with a sequel to 2012’s television show adaptation 21 Jump Street, itself a headlong dive into the rabbit hole of mocking self-awareness. … Continue reading Well can’t you see me standing here, I’ve got my back against the record machine

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From the Archive: The Cutting Edge and Straight Talk

Dan Seeger

This might be a good place to acknowledge that I was dead wrong in my presumptive assessment of The Babe as one of the more interesting movies of the spring of 1992. The Player is great (that’s the film I was really pining for). Unfortunately, it took long enough to get to our town that it arrived on the same weekend as Batman Returns, which played to full houses while Robert Altman’s masterful film sold a couple tickets per showing. I don’t have much to add about the two films reviewed. Even in the capsules here, it’s clear I didn’t … Continue reading From the Archive: The Cutting Edge and Straight Talk

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One for Friday: The dB’s, “Working for Somebody Else”

Dan Seeger

I’ve long been under the impression that I’m not supposed to like The Sound of Music, the last album credited to the dB’s during their original run. (Reunions happen.) In the canon of cool, the first dB’s album justly holds an honored place with every subsequent effort a dissipating echo. Certainly declaring allegiance to one of the albums recorded after band co-founder and stellar pop songwriter Chris Stamey is highly suspect. And yet the record that has the strongest nostalgic pull for me is not the masterful Stands for Decibels. It is indeed that final album. It is The Sound … Continue reading One for Friday: The dB’s, “Working for Somebody Else”

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Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-One

Dan Seeger

#31 — The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955) The Night of the Hunter is famously the only film directed by esteemed character actor Charles Laughton. I’ve also seen it cited more than once as the finest film ever directed by someone whose main gig was on the other side of the camera. It’s absolutely one of the most striking and distinctive such efforts, especially for its time. In adapting the bestselling novel by Davis Grubb, first published in 1953, Laughton and his collaborators made a grim, expressionistic work, one that veered away from the growing trend towards tenderized … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-One