Category: Film

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You think you’re alone until you realize you’re in it, now fear is here to stay, love is here for a visit

Dan Seeger

I’ve had a couple different conversations by now which involved listing all the other filmmakers that come to mind when watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. The director has already acknowledged a surprising influence from the early nineteen-eighties oeuvre of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, especially Top Secret!, and the film does often play like one of their outlandish comedies dragged through a heavy Anderson filter in much the same way that Punch Drunk Love is a standard Adam Sandler comedy given the same transformative treatment. There’s also the clearest echo of Robert Altman since Anderson’s Magnolia, if only in a clear resemblance to … Continue reading You think you’re alone until you realize you’re in it, now fear is here to stay, love is here for a visit

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Just try to do your very best, stand up and be counted with all the rest

Dan Seeger

In the immediate aftermath of watching Selma, I was one of those many people who marveled at what a leap forward it was for director Ava DuVernay, considering the perceived degree of difficulty in shifting from small, intimate dramas to a period picture on a wide scale depicting a signal moment in recent American history. Then I revisited my own review for DuVernay’s prior film, Middle of Nowhere, and I realized the resounding inaccuracy of that perception. Yes, the scale of Selma is very different, most evident in the scenes recreating the various attempts at mounting a protest march the fifty … Continue reading Just try to do your very best, stand up and be counted with all the rest

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Besson, Clooney, Gilroy, Jarmusch, Jones

Dan Seeger

Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014). Though based on a half-baked idea from the rambunctious mind of its director rather than anything that originally appeared on a printed page, Lucy can make a claim on being one of the best comic book movies of the past year, in that it establishes and locks in on its own suspicious and imaginative logic and then lets all other rules fall away in favor of what’s most thrillingly entertaining in any given moment. Scarlett Johansson plays the title character, a young woman whose scruffy boyfriend gets her ensnarled in a situation in which she’s an … Continue reading Besson, Clooney, Gilroy, Jarmusch, Jones

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By and by, Lord, by and by

Dan Seeger

Bringing the wartime experience of Louis Zamperini to the screen has been on the Universal Pictures wish list for so long that they once dangled the part to Tony Curtis. There’s nothing like a blockbuster book to suddenly propel a film project into being. Delivering the same sort of clear storytelling and reportorial depth that distinguished her earlier Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand tracked through Zamperini’s youth, athletic feats, military achievements, astounding endurance both lost in sea and as a prisoner of war in Japanese internment camps, and finally struggles with pronounced post-traumatic stress disorder after returning home. There is a staggering amount of … Continue reading By and by, Lord, by and by

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From the Archive: Beowulf

Dan Seeger

This is another review raided from my former online home. If nothing else, it’s a snapshot of a time when considering the relative value of a 3D viewing was still required when evaluating a film that has that option. By now, except in the rare occasions when it’s an enormous part of the intended experience, the technology is rarely brought up in reviews. I’ll also note that, following my habit of using song lyrics as the headlines to film reviews, this piece was original presented under the banner “The rain was there to wash away my tears, I wanted to … Continue reading From the Archive: Beowulf