Category: Film

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From the Archive: Juno

Dan Seeger

Few filmmakers experienced quite as precipitous a drop as Jason Reitman. He went from back-to-back Best Director nominations to a pair of films that were universally panned (with, it’s worth noting, one compromised but ambition feature in between). Through it all, he’s at least had the live reads, regular events that brought together impressive groups of actors to offer one-time-only, live stage performances of some truly beloved screenplays. Though the event is officially retired as an ongoing concern, Reitman is clearly keeping it in his back pocket, ready to throw on the table when the moment is right, such as a … Continue reading From the Archive: Juno

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From the Archive: Dreamgirls

Dan Seeger

The proper way for me to raid my own writing history to align with the major release this weekend entails unearthing my original radio review for the animated classic Beauty and the Beast, from 1991. I did write one at the time. And I was fairly proud of it, if I’m recalling correctly. That review is lost to the eroding waters of time (or at least taped into a box that hasn’t been accessed in a good long time). So I’ll instead look to the director of the new live-action take on Disney’s finest animated effort (Pixar movies don’t count). … Continue reading From the Archive: Dreamgirls

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Now Playing: Kong: Skull Island

Dan Seeger

When sitting before a modern aspiring blockbuster, I often feel like I know what the pitch must have sounded like as the filmmakers cajoled a major studio into giving them piles of money to build on vital piece of the cinematic franchise. In the case of Kong: Skull Island, I instead found myself thinking about what must have enticing the actors to sign on the bottom line, beyond the promise of filthy lucre, of course. What kind of exuberance director Jordan Vogt-Roberts and his collaborators must have brought to meetings in which they regaled the potential onscreen talent with the promise … Continue reading Now Playing: Kong: Skull Island

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Collet-Serra, Davis, Heisler, Levine, Lewis

Dan Seeger

Lion (Garth Davis, 2016). The feature debut from Garth Davis — who has major cred in my book for directing half of Jane Campion’s great Top of the Lake — looks like the same achingly earnest, self-consciously award-hungry cinema the Weinsteins have been delivering since their Miramax days. For the first half of the film anyway, it’s far sharper and more compelling than that. When five-year-old Indian boy Saroo (played at that age by Sunny Pawar) gets separated from his family after boarding the wrong train, his travails lost, alone, and unable to effectively communicate about where he’s from are … Continue reading Collet-Serra, Davis, Heisler, Levine, Lewis

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From the Archive: Double Impact

Dan Seeger

I know it’s not true, but sometimes my memory tricks me into believing I needed to see a new Jean-Claude Van Damme movie about every other week when I was one-half of a movie review radio program in the early nineteen-nineties. Maybe that’s in part because, on deep level of my subconscious, I count this movie twice.   Double Impact is the kind of film that can frighten you just with its premise. It’s not that the film is intended to be a masterpiece of horror. It’s just that by discovering the film’s plot and reading through the credits, one realizes … Continue reading From the Archive: Double Impact

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Now Playing: Logan

Dan Seeger

I’m glad Logan doesn’t end with a bonus scene plopped in the midst or at the end of the closing credits. In the cinematic landscape that is slowly, steadily being engulfed by the mighty Marvel model of moviemaking, the choice is novel enough to prompt a flurry of online interviews that call upon director James Mangold to explain himself. He has a few different explanations, slightly nuanced from each other, but the crux of it is always the same, and it speaks to precisely why I so appreciate the choice. Logan is — being blunt about it — a real movie … Continue reading Now Playing: Logan

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The Art of the Sell: “The Silence of the Lambs” movie poster

Dan Seeger

These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art.  I could definitely be wrong, but this is how I remember it. There was a trip to Madison, an occasional necessity when attempting to generate content for a program filled with movie reviews on a radio station in a modest Central Wisconsin town. I was standing in the three screen bunker of a movie theater located in Westgate Mall, one of those ramshackle outposts of commerce that seemed to be on its last legs from the moment it … Continue reading The Art of the Sell: “The Silence of the Lambs” movie poster

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Greatish Performances #30

Dan Seeger

#30 — Bill Paxton as Dale “Hurricane” Dixon in One False Move (Carl Franklin, 1992) Bill Paxton’s most iconic performances tend toward emotive intensity. To a degree, that’s simply a product of the films that crossed over into broader public consciousness, especially since Paxton was one of director James Cameron’s go-to supporting actors, briefly playing a punk with a hair-trigger temper in The Terminator and famously wailing, “Game over, man!” in Aliens. (The one time Paxton got to try out understatement in a Cameron film, in Titanic, he was saddled with some of the most leaden exposition dialogue in the … Continue reading Greatish Performances #30

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Now Playing: Get Out

Dan Seeger

Sometimes the instinctual filing of a film into a single genre proves woefully inadequate. Get Out, the feature directorial debut of Jordan Peele, is a horror film. On the surface of it, that is clear and almost indisputable. It moves with rhythms familiar from a fleet of jolting predecessors, down to the particulars of a long drive down a highway book-ended by dense forest and a comic relief best pal who seems poised to somehow save the day.  There’s a haunted past and a slow accumulation of menace. As a horror film, Get Out is proficient and engaging. It is … Continue reading Now Playing: Get Out