Category: Film

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From the Archive: City Slickers

Dan Seeger

In picking old reviews that feel appropriate for unearthing in the warmer months, I’ve pulled twice previously from the edition of The Reel Thing, our bygone radio program, that looked back on the top-grossing films of summer 1991. So why not go ahead and complete the excavation of my portion of that particular show. City Slickers finished in the third position on the particular chart. It is with renewed amazement that I look at the numbers noted here, specifically that there were only three movies to cross the $100 million threshold that summer. Now if we have a summer in which only … Continue reading From the Archive: City Slickers

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twenty-Four

Dan Seeger

#24 — The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946) Some actors get it right from the very beginning. They find their onscreen persona, the approach to character that will run like a throbbing nerve through their entire career, unifying every role they play, no matter how disparate. To a degree, that can be chalked up to unfortunate pigeonholing, especially in the desperately safe era of the studio system, when constantly reinforcing audience expectations was the smartest strategy. The performer doesn’t land upon something in themselves so much as they’re forced to offer spectral repetition of the first thing they ever did, at … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twenty-Four

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Banks, Bergman, Hamilton, Limon, Polanski

Dan Seeger

1971 (Johanna Hamilton, 2014). Clearly positioned as a history lesson for those who venerate Edward Snowden for his digital freedom fighting in bringing to light information about the U.S. government’s shady spying on its own citizens, 1971 focuses in on a break-in at a Pennsylvania FBI office in the year of the title. Those who are shocked by the modern transgressions against privacy can watch this documentary for a bracing reminder that federal crime-fighting agencies are in full-scale same-as-it-ever-was territory, Patriot Act or not. Of course, that doesn’t make current abuses acceptable, but the indignation is best shaped as part of … Continue reading Banks, Bergman, Hamilton, Limon, Polanski

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From the Archive: After Dark, My Sweet

Dan Seeger

This is a review from early in the run of The Reel Thing, the 90FM movie review show that was conceived twenty-five years ago this summer. (Twenty-five years! Oy!) Plying our critical trade in dinky Stevens Point, Wisconsin made it difficult to fill a weekly, hour-long show with only releases that made it to one of our nine screens. So there were periodic jaunts to the metropolis of Madison to watch and then review films that were probably never going to land in our little burg. This episode this review was drawn from was heavy with those out-of-town titles. Besides … Continue reading From the Archive: After Dark, My Sweet

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Don’t tread on an ant, he’s done nothing to you, there might come a day when he’s treading on you

Dan Seeger

By now, I think I’m largely over the shock over exactly which characters from their vast library of costumed, super-powered heroes and villains Marvel manages to turn into legitimate big screen figures. Deprived of cornerstone heroes Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men, all licensed out before the long-time comic book publisher decided they could do movies on their own, Marvel boldly committed themselves to the next tier down, convinced that the multiplex wasn’t all the different from the spinner rack of old. The individual heroes weren’t as important as the perceived stamp of quality that came from having the word … Continue reading Don’t tread on an ant, he’s done nothing to you, there might come a day when he’s treading on you

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twenty-Five

Dan Seeger

#25 — Adam’s Rib (George Cukor, 1949) When considering classic Hollywood cinema, there exists a commonly held, wholly understandable desire to project more modern social belief systems onto certain films, celebrating them for an ahead-of-their-time embrace of, say, greater tolerance or general mindfulness. Fairly often, I suspect this is wishful thinking, an attempt to partially wipe away the decades of lamentable portrayals of, well, really anyone who wasn’t a white male. I love Duck Soup like few other films, but I get woozy with dismay every time I hear Groucho Marx deliver the joke in which “darkies” is a central part of … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twenty-Five

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Don’t say I never warned you when your train gets lost

Dan Seeger

No matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, the temptation is mighty to always ascribe cinematic authorship primarily (even solely) to the director. There’s good cause for that. Studying the filmographies of everyone from genuine artists like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese to abominable hacks like Brett Ratner and Michael Bay suggest just how much a director owns the final vision on the screen. On occasion, though, the genealogy of a film can be a little trickier than that. Trainwreck is unmistakably a Judd Apatow movie, maintaing the flavor and messiness of the director’s four prior features. But it … Continue reading Don’t say I never warned you when your train gets lost

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twenty-Six

Dan Seeger

#26 — Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) At the midpoint of this particular countdown, this is the fourth Howard Hawks film included. It says something significant about the director that each has belonged to a distinctly different genre. Sure, there’s a little bit of film noir blood running through both To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, but the former is a wartime drama and the latter a detective story, the shared pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall making them seem more similar than they really are. The other film covered thus far, His Girl Friday, can make a … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Twenty-Six

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From the Archive: Knocked Up

Dan Seeger

Now seems an opportune time to retrieve one of the old reviews of a Judd Apatow film that I wrote for an online site, but not this one. My original plan was to post my take on The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which I remember as one of my first stabs at reviving my film criticism for the brave new digital age. It was, but there’s barely anything to the review. It not’s even worth a hyperlink. By the time Apatow’s sophomore directorial effort arrived, I was more clearly back in the realm of full-length reviews.  If you want to understand why writer-director … Continue reading From the Archive: Knocked Up