Author: Dan Seeger

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Cassavetes, Corbijn, Fellini, Lumet, Scott

Dan Seeger

Unstoppable (Tony Scott, 2010). There are few funnier things a Tony Scott movie can offer than a “Inspired by True Events” credit at the beginning. Scott isn’t a director completely devoid of charm and panache (like his rough American equivalent Michael Bay), but a reasoned approach to preserving the integrity of a story that has its grounding in real life is simply not something that’s going to happen with the director of Top Gun and Days of Thunder at the helm. At least his usual camera jitters are toned down a bit, although he maintains his penchant for the shock … Continue reading Cassavetes, Corbijn, Fellini, Lumet, Scott

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

This week, I reviewed a fairly abstract, experimental movie that, were I a little more ambitious, could have being the starting point for an assessment of the very nature of cinema that could have run thousands upon thousands of words. I may actually get around to that take on it someday, as the film raises more questions than it’s really interested in answering. It strikes me as one of those efforts I might want to specifically revisit someday. I mean, why wouldn’t I, since I’m clearly willing to do something crazy, like watch Kevin Costner’s The Postman multiple times. Once … Continue reading Spectrum Check

Film, Music5 Comments

One for Friday: Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham, “If I Wanted”

Dan Seeger

Yesterday, I wrote about Jennifer Jason Leigh’s acting in The Hudsucker Proxy as part of the ongoing Greatish Performances series. As I noted when I first cooked up (okay, stole) that recurring feature, the inclusion of a specific performance doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m declaring it the very best work of the thespian in question. In fact, in the case of Leigh, there’s a very different turn that I instinctively invoke in those rare occasions when I might be asked to name her best screen performance. I don’t think Leigh was ever better than she was in the 1995 film … Continue reading One for Friday: Jennifer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham, “If I Wanted”

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Take a left, a sharp left, and another left, meet me on the corner and we’ll start again

Dan Seeger

There’s a wholly earned stereotype surrounding British films, best encapsulated by Eddie Izzard, who referred to the standard as Room with a View and a Staircase and a Pond type movies. These are the sort of efforts that reach their … Continue reading Take a left, a sharp left, and another left, meet me on the corner and we’ll start again

Music16 Comments

College Countdown: The Trouser Press Top 10 Albums of 1981, An Introduction

Dan Seeger

When I was a student treating the college radio station as a second home, one of the music magazines that loomed the largest for me was Trouser Press. And yet, to the best of my recollection, I’d never seen an issue of the publication. After all, it had ceded publication five years before I ever crossed the threshold of the station. Trouser Press co-founder and co-editor Ira Robbins presided over a fat paperback slab of incredibly thorough artist biographies and album-by-album reviews of their respective discographies (it’s the fourth edition of the book that sits proudly on the bookshelf in … Continue reading College Countdown: The Trouser Press Top 10 Albums of 1981, An Introduction

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

After a long stretch in which it felt like my name was all over the site, I had a fairly light week at Spectrum Culture. The only thing I had go up was a review of a new western. This led to the sort of mini-treatise on the state of the modern western that’s almost inevitable, even if the same basic thesis on the current dynamics of the once-dominant film genre has been pertinent for about forty years now. I actually wish I’d had more room to stretch out (or, more accurately, more time to write it, which was my … Continue reading Spectrum Check