Author: Dan Seeger

Film1 Comment

Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Forty-Seven

Dan Seeger

#47 — Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002) Far From Heaven is an exercise in adoration. It is an unabashed, spellbound, swooning tribute to the technicolor melodramas of the 1950’s, particularly those directed by Douglas Sirk. The titles alone reverberate with grandiloquence: Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, and the film that served as the most direct inspiration for Far From Heaven, All That Heaven Allows. Sirk’s films are famous for washing the screen with vibrant colors, sending the actors into teary-eyed overdrive with anguished dialogue, and approaching social issues with … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Forty-Seven

Everything ElseLeave a comment

A man’s bar is his castle, and this stool is my throne

Dan Seeger

I seem to be having trouble stringing words together well enough to finish writing about the film we saw this weekend to help celebrate someone’s birthday. So instead, I’d like to share Stephen Colbert‘s suggested slogans for a couple of popular American beers. Bud Light Lime: “It’s like drinking a Bud Light downwind of an artificial flavor factory.” Coors Light: “Delicious–it doesn’t taste at all like Palmolive dishwashing soap.” (Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”) Continue reading A man’s bar is his castle, and this stool is my throne

MusicLeave a comment

One for Friday: Half Miler, “Here Comes A Regular”

Dan Seeger

There was a time when I marked every summer with a baseball-centric trip with my friend Colin. In our fearless, energized youth, we would load up a vehicle with modest provisions and embark on cross-country journeys built around stops in cities that could boast a major league baseball team: Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, Toronto, and, to help properly date the era of these trips, Montreal. Through all this dedicated journeying, we only made a point of getting to one city that had no home team to root, root, root … Continue reading One for Friday: Half Miler, “Here Comes A Regular”

FilmLeave a comment

Pivotal Film Selling Out Your Monkey

Dan Seeger

Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007). This Oscar winner for Best Documentary Feature catalogs and condemns the harsh treatment of prisoners in the Bush administration’s zealous “war on terror.” Gibney lays out the evidence of vicious abuse and clear-cut torture perpetrated by the American military at prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Just as importantly–arguably even more importantly–he examines the ways in which the highest leaders created, encourages and perpetuated the environment for these horrendous practices and then casually, heartlessly blamed the enlisted men when the worst of it came to light. Like Charles Ferguson’s No … Continue reading Pivotal Film Selling Out Your Monkey

BooksLeave a comment

Great Moments in Literature

Dan Seeger

“It was all I could think of to say. I turned away from this woman and went to the bathroom, where I ran hot water over my hands, which is something I like to do in the colder months, it just makes me feel a little bit better. Then I touched my face with my warmed hands. It calms me down, it’s just this very normal thing that I do.” –Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances, 2008 “ON THE SURFACE, THIS MAY SEEM TO BE A SUPER-HERO ACTION THRILLER! BUT, IF YOU PROBE DOWN DEEP, IF YOU ANALYZE EACH SUBTLE NUANCE, IF … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature

Film2 Comments

Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Forty-Nine

Dan Seeger

#49 — The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001). For all the precision that Wes Anderson brings to his filmmaking–the carefully constructed shots, the pristine cinematography, the merging of imagery with the rock’n’roll soundtrack so complete that it feels like the movie itself is breathing in time with each song’s backbeat–it is the ungainly sprawl of The Royal Tenenbaums that impresses most. Anderson has been upfront about drawing upon the works of J.D. Salinger, particularly those involving the Glass family, for this film, and it indeed comes across as a wildly inventive, overstuffed novel. Set in a arch, Bohemian, colorful New York … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Forty-Nine