Category: Film

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Trivia Answer of the Day: Nicholas and Copernicus

Dan Seeger

This weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia ContestTM. I’m a little preoccupied with preparations for that, including some significant travel. To provide some sense of the madness of minutiae that dominates my mind this week, I’ll return to a bit of a tradition around these parts and share a few personally memorable answers from the twenty-five years or so that I’ve been involved with this contest, in one way or another. In this instance, I’ve reminded myself of the answers by flipping through our team’s old answer sheets. There are questions I simply do not want to miss. … Continue reading Trivia Answer of the Day: Nicholas and Copernicus

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Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Forty

Dan Seeger

#40 — Meet John Doe (Frank Capra, 1941) For all the huffing and harrumphing that plenty of people resort to when engaged in discussions of the broken state of modern politics (and I include myself in that “plenty”), there’s a sad, corrosive truth at the core of our problems. To borrow a handy bit of phrasing, this dysfunction of our politics isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. That’s perhaps best evidenced by the ways in which the damage decried today as proof of the historic animosity and corruption within the power structure can be found recurring through U.S. history like the clearest … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Forty

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My Writers: Richard Price

Dan Seeger

There was a time in mid-nineteen-nineties — before my energy started to flag — when I actively sought out books that I knew were on their way to becoming potentially significant feature films. This was especially common, weirdly enough, after I no longer had a public outlet to review films, meaning I had no particular impetus — no mandate, imposed or otherwise — to fill in the background. Freed from the burden of collegiate assigned text, I felt I had the time (though I was routinely working well over forty hours per week) and I maintained a hangover principle from … Continue reading My Writers: Richard Price

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Greatish Performances #19

Dan Seeger

#19 — Eric Bogosian as Barry Champlain in Talk Radio (Oliver Stone, 1988) The play Talk Radio had its off-Broadway premiere in May of 1987, with its writer, Eric Bogosian, in the leading role. It wasn’t exactly viewed as transformational theatre (New York groused, “neither as drama nor as social psychology does it cut deep enough”), but it had the air of sensation to it. And it transformed Bogosian, however briefly, from that unique nineteen-eighties calling as “performance artist” into a more well-rounded creator who needed to be taken seriously. When the property was snapped up for a film adaptation, … Continue reading Greatish Performances #19

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I was on the inside when they pulled the four walls down

Dan Seeger

There are certainly of plenty of potential reasons for the current renaissance in indie horror, not the least of which is the well-established helpful ratio of low budgets and high potential box office reward that the genre offers. Just as road movies were once the handiest ways to develop high drama with limited dollars (and inspiration, quite frankly) so too are horror movies one of the most direct routes to getting a film made for a fledgling filmmaker. But I think the more interesting consideration is the growing proliferation of artistically rich horror films, particularly in terms of the visual … Continue reading I was on the inside when they pulled the four walls down

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Amirpour, Asante, Dobkin, Glatzer and Westmoreland, Roskam

Dan Seeger

Belle (Amma Asante, 2014). Based ever so lightly on real history — the only real source is a 1779 painting — this period drama tells the story of Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a young woman who is the offspring of a British naval officer (Matthew Goode) and an African-born slave. She’s raised among the British gentry by her grandparents (Tom Wilkinson and Sarah Gadon), treated as a beloved member of the family but also relegated to diminished status in her own home because of the conventions of the day. If the unconventional story elevates the film a bit past its restrained … Continue reading Amirpour, Asante, Dobkin, Glatzer and Westmoreland, Roskam

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Forty-Two

Dan Seeger

#42 — The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) “I’ve got some unfinished business with him. I need him like the axe needs the turkey.” That bit of barbed dialogue is hardly unique within the cascade of knotty language that spilled from movie screens throughout the nineteen-forties. Roughly a generation after movies learned to talk, they’d mastered talking sharp and hard. Any number of offerings — especially comedies — cut like hacksaws, the crazy strong ones made for getting through metal. But few of his contemporaries could weld cynicism and downright meanness onto a script and still keep it paradoxically light … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Forty-Two

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From the Archive: Straight Talk

Dan Seeger

I have a memory that endures far more than seems reasonable of my colleague of the radio show that feaured this review showing up as the station with a cassingle of “Straight Talk,” the song Dolly Parton released in conjunction with the film of the same name. We always tried to get appropriate music to accompany the reviews, so he now had this item in his collection, and I assure you it’s unlikely it would have arrived there in any other way.  There are several significant things that can happen to a film when Dolly Parton is cast in it. … Continue reading From the Archive: Straight Talk

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Forty-Three

Dan Seeger

#43 — Riff-Raff (Ted Tetzlaff, 1947) Ted Tetzlaff only directed a handful of movies, but he shot over one hundred. He starting working as a cinematographer in the nineteen-twenties (his handiwork was found in the 1926 films Atta Boy and Sunshine of Paradise), racking up some impressive credits over the course of the next couple of decades. Included in that number is striking, evocative work on Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Remarkably, his efforts on that film earned him no official accolades (Tetzlaff’s sole Oscar nomination came a few years earlier, for the George Stevens comedy The Talk of the Town), though it did … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Forty-Three