Author: Dan Seeger

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A Week of Fridays: An Introduction

Dan Seeger

Tomorrow I leave for a week. I’m not going far, but, as a matter of choice, I’m not going to have access to the Wild West shootout that is The Interweb. I was in a similar situation right around this time last year, and I chose to let this site go dark for a week. After some consideration, I decided on a different approach this time around. For one thing, I don’t want to disrupt the marathon countdown that I’m right in the middle of. But I also wanted to use my absence as impetus to do something I’ve been … Continue reading A Week of Fridays: An Introduction

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Boorman, Capra, Jarecki, Koster, Lang

Dan Seeger

No Highway in the Sky (Henry Koster, 1951). This murky little thriller casts James Stewart as an American engineer working with Great Britain’s Royal Aircraft Establishment. He’s convinced that the design of the flagship Reindeer airliner is tragically flawed, causing the tail to fall off after a certain number of hours in flight. His worries comes to an head when he’s taking a transatlantic journey on the plane in question and discovers it’s nearing the fatal number of logged hours. It’s a fun premise, but the film unfortunately lacks either the ratcheted up suspense of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller or … Continue reading Boorman, Capra, Jarecki, Koster, Lang

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The Unwatchables: Alice in Wonderland

Dan Seeger

No director is in more dire need of a change of pace than Tim Burton. He needs some little story with two, maybe three characters just sitting around a simple, largely unadorned room. They should talk to one another, quiet little chats about their place in the world. There should be no music score and no special effects. Maybe then, just maybe, he’d be able to find his way back to making a movie with an ounce of humanity in it again. Until then, it’s safe to presume that he’ll follow his worrisome trend of grabbing onto well-established properties and … Continue reading The Unwatchables: Alice in Wonderland

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

Not much from me at Spectrum Culture this week, but I’m pretty fond of the one thing I did write. Specifically I wrote a review of the music compilation Those Shocking Shaking Days – Indonesia Hard, Psychedelic, Progressive Rock and Funk: 1970 – 1978. I’m not sure about the quality of my work–it’s still way to early for me to give it an honest assessment–but it was fun to tap into my Mojo reader muscle memory and try to come up with something that could run in their reissue section. On the basis of all the writing I need to … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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One for Friday: Baxendale, “Music For Girls”

Dan Seeger

I used to be pretty good at making mixes. I was better with tapes than CDs, and the lack of time boundaries offered by digital playlists stymies me completely. I liked the process of sitting down in front of the stereo and building the mix track by track, listening in real time as it evolved. Even the physical act of pressing the buttons offered some additional satisfaction that’s lost when moving file names around on a computer screen. I still make mixes, but they take me forever. Ironically, the ease of building them now has turned it into a strangely … Continue reading One for Friday: Baxendale, “Music For Girls”

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Arnold, Coppola, Nadel, Smight, Wallace

Dan Seeger

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009). At it’s strongest, Arnold’s film is as scrappy as its protagonist, a teenage girl in lower class Britain who pushes against what little disinterested authority exists in her life. The film expertly gets at the way passion burns to the surface so quickly at that age, while also considering how simple, inelegant endeavors like hip hop dancing can fuel dreams of escape. As an observant, uncompromising character study, the film is sharp and sensational. As it gets more plot driven, especially in a misguided third act, it falters terribly. The one thing that’s consistent throughout … Continue reading Arnold, Coppola, Nadel, Smight, Wallace