Category: Film

FilmLeave a comment

From the Archive: Hot Shots!

Dan Seeger

This review was written for our old movie review radio show during a stretch of the summer of 1991 dire enough that one of the other films covered on the same episode was Return to the Blue Lagoon. While I’m already fairly down on the film in this review, I suspect Hot Shots! is one of those films that aged particularly poorly.  It may seem a little late for a parody of the Tom Cruise smash hit Top Gun. After all, it has been five years since Cruise squeezed his smug grin into a navy fighter plane and soared to … Continue reading From the Archive: Hot Shots!

FilmLeave a comment

Top Ten Movies of 2016 — Number Six

Dan Seeger

Grief is easy in the movies. For filmmakers, it’s a shortcut, imbuing characters with emotions that can be grasped quickly. Beyond stating the simplest narrative fact that explains what has brought the character to sorrowful place, there’s not much internal layering that’s required. And any emergence from that aching state can feel so cathartic for an audience that trite turns of character outlook are often accepted gratefully by audiences, even if the progression doesn’t really play plausibly. But Kenneth Lonergan doesn’t do easy. With Manchester by the Sea, the writer-director doesn’t treat grief as a gloss of emotional profundity. Instead, it’s … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2016 — Number Six

FilmLeave a comment

Top Ten Movies of 2016 — Number Seven

Dan Seeger

Hell or High Water is sharp and funny and wise. The longer it sits with me, though, the more one quality it holds grows more resonant and true. Hell or High Water is forlorn. Taylor Sheridan’s finely honed screenplay tells the story of two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) who embark on a bank robbing spree across the dry, aching expanse of Texas. It also follows the Texas Rangers (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham) who wearily pursue the criminals. This, then, is a cops and robbers tale, bleached with the starkness of a modernized Hollywood Western. But it moves past … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2016 — Number Seven

FilmLeave a comment

From the Archive: Broken Flowers

Dan Seeger

The latest film from writer-director Jim Jarmusch dribbles into my town this weekend. As a good little cinema devotee, I should head out to the local multiplex to take it in — especially since the film has earned strong reviews, notably for star Adam Driver — but I’ll admit that I probably won’t. Since I wrote the piece shared here, I’ve come around to some of Jarmusch’s earlier features, but he remains a distancing artist for me. I could go on, but that’s basically what I write about in this review from my former online home, so…. I suppose I … Continue reading From the Archive: Broken Flowers

FilmLeave a comment

Top Ten Movies of 2016 — Number Eight

Dan Seeger

The impulse to belong is powerful, especially for girls of a certain age. In The Fits, the feature directorial debut of Anna Rose Holmer, the girl trying to find her place in the world is Toni (Royalty Hightower). She regularly accompanies her brother (Da’Sean Minor) to the local community center, where he trains as a boxer. Toni half-heartedly participates in that brutish gym work until she spies the workouts of a dance troupe in an adjacent gym. Shortly after she falls in with that group, individual girls on the squad start falling victim to unexplained, seizure-like attacks, each a little … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2016 — Number Eight

Film, TelevisionLeave a comment

Top Ten Movies of 2016 — Number Nine

Dan Seeger

There are movies that I love unreservedly, quoting them with the hopped-up reverence of a devoted Bible thumper. 13th is a movie that I wield. Since viewing Ava DuVernay’s exceptional documentary on — for starters — the perpetuation of black persecution through the establishment of a skewed judicial system and incarceration complex, I find myself continually referencing it in spirited debates about current affairs. I have operated in multiculturally mindful academia and engaged with leftward political commentary enough to be comfortably acquainted with notions of institutionalized oppression, so there’s little in 13th that is fully revelatory to me. But I … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2016 — Number Nine

FilmLeave a comment

John Hurt, 1940 – 2017

Dan Seeger

“When I say that acting is just a rather more sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians, it’s my way of trying to quash all the pretentious crap that’s said about acting. What I mean is, if you pretend well enough, the audience will believe you.” –John Hurt, 1990, as quoted in The New York Times I can’t honestly say that John Hurt was ever an actor whose films I actively sought out solely because of his presence. On some level, I think that might have pleased him. There was a proper retreat from ostentation in Hurt’s work. He never … Continue reading John Hurt, 1940 – 2017

FilmLeave a comment

From the Archive: Pride & Prejudice

Dan Seeger

This was written fairly early in my return to movie reviews, when I was finally figuring out how to make reasonable use out these online tundras. When adapting a Jane Austen novel such as Pride & Prejudice, it must be sorely tempting to try every conceivable trick to make it visually engaging. This sort of period piece from the Approved Canon of Great Literature is especially prone to becoming the sort of staid veddy, veddy English film that Eddie Izzard once identified as “a room with a view with a staircase and a pond type movies.” (“What is it, Sebastian? … Continue reading From the Archive: Pride & Prejudice

FilmLeave a comment

Top Ten Movies of 2016 — Number Ten

Dan Seeger

There is a splendid modesty to The Witch, the feature debut from writer-director Robert Eggers. Positioned with false comfort as “A New-England Fable,” the film progresses with a stern leanness, as if its a spiritual sequel to Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt’s saga of tragic pioneers. Set in the seventeenth century, The Witch covers the hardships of a family struggling to make do out in the rural outskirts after being cast out of their community. The tension increases when the family’s infant goes missing while being looked after by eldest daughter Thomasin (marvelous newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy), a vanishing that happens in … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2016 — Number Ten

Film, MusicLeave a comment

Top Ten Movies of 2016 — An Introduction

Dan Seeger

We can say this: 2016 was memorable. Aside from a history-making improbability delivered by the Chicago National League ball club in the fall, though, I’m confident most folks are going to look back at the those twelve months of broader global culture — popular, political, and social — with a measure of contempt. The only way 2016 doesn’t stand as a banner year for misery, is if 2017 is even worse. So far, it’s on track. A year so thoroughly scorched by overwhelmingly miserable news can make the very act of retrospective celebration feel hollow and pointless. And yet here we are. As … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2016 — An Introduction