Category: Everything Else

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Give me your hands, show me the door

Dan Seeger

I spent a significant amount of my time today in the surprisingly exhausting process of writing trivia questions for a campus program. That’s pummeled away any energy I have for making a meaningful written contribution to this space this evening. Instead, I’ll share my favorite question of the night, with a special hat tip to a dear friend: “What is the name of the fictional school that has as part of its campus both North Cafeteria, named after Admiral William North, and the English Memorial Spanish Center, which is named after a Portuguese sailor named English Memorial?” And the answer … Continue reading Give me your hands, show me the door

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

We had another shortened week at Spectrum Culture, because that’s the way the summer goes sometimes. It coincided nicely with my own week away, but I still managed to slip in one major review, writing on a unique new documentary covering mass killings in Indonesia. It’s a complicated topic and, amazingly, an even more complicated movie, which caused me to put an awful lot of effort into the piece at a time when it would have been handier to dash one off. I hope I did it justice. I also pulled together a few words for our feature on the … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Duke, Hitchcock, Lang, Lorenz, Rees

Dan Seeger

Trouble with the Curve (Robert Lorenz, 2012). A longtime Clint Eastwood collaborator–multiple credits as a producer and assistant director–makes his feature directorial debut, and it predictably looks like one of his pal’s stodgier efforts, right down to the venerable actor doing a variation of his Gran Torino gravel-voiced grump complaining about the kids these days. In Trouble with the Curve, Eastwood plays a old baseball scout who’s disparaged by the moneyball adherents in the deluxe offices, even though there’s some things you just can’t tell about a prospect from looking at a computer screen. The film is painfully simplistic, setting … Continue reading Duke, Hitchcock, Lang, Lorenz, Rees