Author: Dan Seeger

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One for Friday: Toni Basil, “Shoppin’ From A to Z”

Dan Seeger

As long as I went ahead and gave a shout-out to Thanksgiving in yesterday’s post, I may as well concede my digital space to the sorry fact that today is the busiest shopping day of the year. I’m certainly not going to participate by doing something a hellishly masochistic as going to the mall. Toni Basil was a choreographer with credits that included Head and American Graffiti and an actress who, among others things, was sitting across the booth from Jack Nicholson when he delivered one of his most famous lines. She released her debut album, Word of Mouth, in … Continue reading One for Friday: Toni Basil, “Shoppin’ From A to Z”

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Ficarra and Requa, Friedkin, Gillespie, Penn, Rafelson

Dan Seeger

Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975). Gene Hackman plays a seedy private detective named Harry Moseby who gets drawn into a case that involves tracking down a missing teenage girl, played by Melanie Griffith in one of her first real film roles. The film is entirely of its era, in good and bad ways. It’s nicely gritty and dark, but it also gets completely mired in a sense of existential dread until it become subsumed by its own fatalism. Nothing good can even come of this world, which the film labors to proves across its overly calculated third act. The film … Continue reading Ficarra and Requa, Friedkin, Gillespie, Penn, Rafelson

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Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Six

Dan Seeger

#6 — Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987) By the time I was in a college film class in the early nineties, the textbook was already citing the James L. Brooks screenplay for Broadcast News as a ideal example of how writing for film should work. Specifically, the author spent several pages marveling over the efficiency of Brooks’s dialogue in developing character. That’s for good reason: scene after scene, the conversations that happen between characters are natural, funny and engaging, but always have a deeper purpose. Brooks doesn’t build foreshadowing puzzles into the dialogue nor rigidly constructed plot point delivery. … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Six

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

With my countdown of nineteen-eighties films approaching the end, I’ve been trying to both watch and rewatch important movies from the prior decade in preparation for the next naturally step backwards in my tops of the decade project. As for the latter endeavor, there are simply some movies that I haven’t seen in approaching thirty years (and perhaps never saw properly, given that my exposure to them was dictated by the way I watched the material on cable, not always the most ideal manner to take them in) and in order to figure out their placement on the pending list, … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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One for Friday: The Spliffs, “You Know What They’ll Say”

Dan Seeger

While the deep denizens of the Internet have been shockingly good about documenting pop culture topics like movies and music with great thoroughness, there’s still all sorts of things that they miss. One of the fascinating things to me about our current information age is the way that absolutely everything that’s happening now will leave a digital footprint, but there were be more than a few phantoms from the days before the nineteen-nineties. As far as I can tell, there’s no entry at the impressively exhaustive allmusic website for the band The Spliffs, and there’s certainly no Wikipedia page for … Continue reading One for Friday: The Spliffs, “You Know What They’ll Say”