Author: Dan Seeger

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One for Friday: Blue Rodeo, “What Am I Doing Here?”

Dan Seeger

I’ve long thought that opening act has to be about the worst gig possible. The audience isn’t there for that band, so they generally alternate between rudely ignoring the performance or, even worse, loudly announcing their impatience. Slogging through a set that’s met with nothing but indifference has to be incredibly disheartening, perhaps almost as disheartening as killing time on a music stage during a county fair. Which brings me to the best opening act set I ever saw: Blue Rodeo before an Edie Brickell and New Bohemians performance in Milwaukee, circa 1991. Brickell and the boys had recently put … Continue reading One for Friday: Blue Rodeo, “What Am I Doing Here?”

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Klores and Stevens, Schrader, Toback, Wyler, Zonca

Dan Seeger

Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978). Two years after the breakthrough success of Taxi Driver, which he scripted for Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader made his directorial debut with a film about struggling auto workers who battle their callous bosses, inept union heads and ultimately each other. As should probably be expected from Schrader, especially at this point in his career, the film is raw and potent, getting into the muscular, profane urgency of these men as they struggle to accept their lot in life, including the inherent betrayals of principle that come with any efforts at upward mobility, and the dangers … Continue reading Klores and Stevens, Schrader, Toback, Wyler, Zonca

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Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Ten

Dan Seeger

We buy our tickets in an era in which remakes have given way to reboots, as good an indicator as any as to the degree to which major studios have planed away any remaining aspirations towards art in their respective business models. Instead creative efforts are tagged with the same term used to describe the latest outpost of a nationwide food chain, and possess a level of quality akin to mass-produced burgers. To find something operating well within that framework that also manages to be fresh, inventive, witty, smart and wildly entertaining is plainly stunning. Director J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — Number Ten

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Top Ten Movies of 2009 — An Introduction

Dan Seeger

Sometimes a movie year just breaks me. As I noted around this time last year, designating an end to a movie year is matter of choice instead of obedience to the calendar. I live in a place where a year’s official releases take some time to trickle into town, especially at this time of year, when smaller films are held back in the hope of capitalizing on interest generated by award nominations. I do my best to dutifully see everything I should to be, in my view, a responsible contributor to the public discourse about film excellence, using the Oscar … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2009 — An Introduction

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One for Friday: Trotsky Icepick, “El Kabong”

Dan Seeger

I’ve always been a sucker for pop references, at least pop references I was fluent in. Throughout college, I had a strong band of friends, many of whom regularly seasoned conversation with lines of movie dialogue or quoted song lyrics. We built metaphors around obscure television characters and routinely proclaimed one another “like school on a Saturday” in tribute to Fat Albert. Since this was my daily language, I was always very pleased when I would discover a kindred approach to such communication somewhere within the music I built into my playlists at 90FM, some band namechecking Alan Moore or … Continue reading One for Friday: Trotsky Icepick, “El Kabong”

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Abraham, Hiller, Lau and Mak, Lynch, Swanberg

Dan Seeger

Flash of Genius (Marc Abraham, 2008). Based on a New Yorker article, Marc Abraham’s directorial debut relates the story of Bob Kearns, a Detroit man whose invention of the intermittent windshield wiper was illegally appropriated by the big automakers. Dutifully tracing events from the early nineteen-sixties when Kearns drew his sizable family into the process of creating the device through the nineties when the court cases he pursued to get due credit finally reached their culmination, the film is serious, somber and sorely lacking in verve or any other enlivening spirit. It’s thankfully not overly pompous about its subject, but … Continue reading Abraham, Hiller, Lau and Mak, Lynch, Swanberg