Author: Dan Seeger

FilmLeave a comment

Bertolucci, Boden and Fleck, Bozzo, Coffin and Renaud, Levinson

Dan Seeger

The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987). Bertolucci’s masterwork probably won its Best Picture Oscar due to its effortless embrace of the epic, but its the acute realization of the most intimate portions of its story that makes it a great film. It follows the life of the last emperor of China from his coronation while still a toddler to his later years toiling as an anonymous gardener after his royal role had disappeared. The sweep of history is what the film moves through, but Bertolucci and his co-screenwriter Mark Peploe rightly realize that the intricacies of the different personality entanglements … Continue reading Bertolucci, Boden and Fleck, Bozzo, Coffin and Renaud, Levinson

Music4 Comments

College Countdown: Winter 1991, 15-11

Dan Seeger

And now…on with the countdown… 15. They Might Be Giants, “Hey Mr. DJ, I Thought We Had a Deal” This is the band that we would sometimes refer to as “the Two Johns,” since it was entirely populated by John Flansburgh and John Linnell. They were perhaps the oddest band that I had a working knowledge of before arriving at the radio station, built largely because MTV couldn’t resist the intoxicatingly goofy video for their first single. They were then a major part of my college radio experience. Their second album, the outstanding Lincoln, was plopped into Heavy Rotation at … Continue reading College Countdown: Winter 1991, 15-11

MusicLeave a comment

One for Friday: The Trilobites, “I Can’t Wait For Summer to End”

Dan Seeger

Including my years as an undergraduate student, I’ve moved to the rhythms of a traditional academic year most of my adult life. This means I get to recapture a little of that childhood feeling about summer, that it’s a break, or at least a change. Often my summers were actually busier when I was in school at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. It was a much smaller group of students who stuck around in the summer months, dedicated to keeping the college radio station going. During some stretches, it wasn’t uncommon for me to be on the air every day, … Continue reading One for Friday: The Trilobites, “I Can’t Wait For Summer to End”

PoliticsLeave a comment

Strong and warm and wild and free

Dan Seeger

I recently watched the 1979 film Real Life, the first feature directed by Albert Brooks. There’s plenty to say about it as a film and a comedy, especially in light of its retroactive relevance as a satire of reality-based filmmaking in a programming era in which no city’s pampered, appalling self-absorbed housewives are safe from the profitable scrutiny of Bravo’s fleet of cameras. Separate from the facets that are the usual fodder for cinematic analysis, I found something particularly striking. At two completely different points, Brooks uses the word “abortion” in punchlines. Indeed, in the second instance, the word is … Continue reading Strong and warm and wild and free

FilmLeave a comment

Edel, Farrow, Hitchcock, Jordan, Siegel

Dan Seeger

His Kind of Woman (John Farrow, 1951). How many other actors completely own a genre of film the way that Robert Mitchum does film noir? It’s like he was born into a delivery room filled with murky shadows and cigarette smoke, the doctor instructing the nurse to slap his bottom by growling, “Give him what’s comin’ to him, and make him sing when you do it.” He moves through this story of scheming and duplicity at a Mexican resort as if he’s walking through his own front door, tossing of aloof wisecracks with the ease of a guy who’s already … Continue reading Edel, Farrow, Hitchcock, Jordan, Siegel