Author: Dan Seeger

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Fox in the snow, where do you go to find something you can eat?

Dan Seeger

I suspect I’ve already tipped my hand about my pick for the best animated film of 2009, but if the Oscars let Wes Anderson accept a trophy in the same fashion that he employed for the National Board of Review awards ceremony, I may have to shift my rooting interest in the the relevant category to Fantastic Mr. Fox. They undoubtedly won’t, so I’ll be able to bypass those conflicting emotions. (Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”) Continue reading Fox in the snow, where do you go to find something you can eat?

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Capra, Hopkins, Kieslowski, Lee, Pichel

Dan Seeger

Summer of Sam (Spike Lee, 1999). Lee certainly wasn’t lacking in ambition with this film. It depicts the sweltering New York summer of 1977, marked by an ascendant Yankees ballclub, record-setting heat, and paralyzing fear over the unpredictable Son of Sam serial killer. Bringing his own distinctive flourishes to a screenplay by actor friends Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli, Lee piles more story and heavy import than just about any film could bear. Discotheques and punk rockers, gritty urban newscasts and brash bellowing neighborhoods, and it quickly collapses under its own weight. As with all of his more compromised efforts, … Continue reading Capra, Hopkins, Kieslowski, Lee, Pichel

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Top Fifty Films of the 90s — An Introduction

Dan Seeger

And something of a post-mortem on the Top Fifty Films of the 00s. You know. While we’re here. When I embarked on that little jaunt across the past ten years of moviemaking, trying the best I could to rank the films I loved most, and identify why I loved them, it was with the hope that grappling with each of the entries would be a rewarding challenge. It was that, and then some. I’m not sure if the unexpected praise I received after typing out those last thousand words or so upon reaching the number one film on New Year’s … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — An Introduction

Music4 Comments

One for Friday: Uncle Green, “Pass It By”

Dan Seeger

I think most students who gravitate to their college radio station do so because, first and foremost, they love music. Taking their first crack at the real world, or a simulacrum of such, they’re finally able to assert that inner part that connects to certain guitar chords or electronic beats or tangles of angular lyrics. Often it’s music that their high school compatriots didn’t get, dismissing it as weird as they pondered whether to vote for Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” or REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” for the prom theme. If commercial radio bothered to play it at all, it … Continue reading One for Friday: Uncle Green, “Pass It By”

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Great Moments in Literature

Dan Seeger

“The women cross their ankles, their flats kicked off and carried by Sissy back to the foyer, where they are paired and lined in rows: Pappagallos in various colors, sandals with daisies chiseled in the cowhide, or bright, artificial flowers attached to the straps. Now in the soft glow of the lighted room, the women’s feet, bare and colored at the toe, caress the Corsican rug. They have had another round of drinks; they are trying to think of what to say next.” –Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women, 2009 “AND I DON’T USE GUNS–THE INSANE WEAPON OF AN … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

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Ephron, Hunt, Kieslowski, Kieslowski, Tykwer

Dan Seeger

Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993). The first film in Kieslowski’s famed Three Colors trilogy stars Juliette Binoche as a woman dealing with the recent death of her famous husband and young daughter in a car crash. She retreats from the world, getting drawn back only reluctantly, in part due to interest and controversy over her spouse’s last, incomplete work. There’s tremendous thematic heft in the work, with the specter of mortality drawn over the entire work, enhanced by the sense of all the ways in which life itself drifts away from us. Binoche is moving and insightful in her … Continue reading Ephron, Hunt, Kieslowski, Kieslowski, Tykwer