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From the Archive: Awakenings

Dan Seeger

Rest in peace, Robin. We lead off our home video segment with the release of one of last year’s most emotionally powerful films: the Penny Marshall-directed film AWAKENINGS. AWAKENINGS details the work of a doctor, played to perfection by Robin Williams, who takes on the perplexing case of several people who have been in comas for several years, but still have functioning motor skills. They’re able to catch a falling pen, or play an odd game of catch by propelling a beach ball to one another. Williams formulates a potential cure for these patients that succeeds in drawing them out … Continue reading From the Archive: Awakenings

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Lauren Bacall, 1924-2014

Dan Seeger

Her friends, it seemed, called her Betty. I believe this to be the case because I once saw Lauren Bacall make an appearance on The Tonight Show back when Johnny Carson, the only host of that program who truly mattered, presided over it. He kept calling her “Betty,” always with a level of purely smitten appreciation that I rarely saw in the preternaturally composed entertainer. It wasn’t hard to figure out why this upstanding Midwestern gentleman might find himself a little bit swoony in the presence of her. She was decades past her debut as a willowy ingenue in the … Continue reading Lauren Bacall, 1924-2014

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Robin Williams, 1951-2014

Dan Seeger

I remember watching Happy Days on the first night that an episode entitled “My Favorite Orkan” aired. I didn’t know that was the title of the episode. I only knew it was like nothing I’d ever seen on the nostalgia-driven sitcom. It was remarkable enough that the program focused on a space alien who visits the Cunningham home, but the actor playing that extra-terrestrial was an absolutely astounding force of nature, bending off oddball jokes at a rate that raced ahead of the speed of thought. I was seven years old, and I was prepared to tell everyone it was … Continue reading Robin Williams, 1951-2014

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From the Archive: Graffiti Bridge

Dan Seeger

As can be gleaned from the introductory hook to the review, this was written for the radio show The Reel Thing. I think we traveled to Madison to screen it, which was a long way to go for such a terrible movie. (The other films included in the same episode were Rocky V and White Palace, both of which I know opened in our smaller town.) In the writing of it, I didn’t mention the most memorable moment in the film, in which Morris Day urinates on a plant in Prince’s club, then promptly sets the plant on fire, implying … Continue reading From the Archive: Graffiti Bridge

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You said, it’s time to get your clothes on, you said, it’s time to leave the planet

Dan Seeger

Guardians of the Galaxy is the first film that’s convinced me Marvel Studios might be able to make a go of this moviemaking thing longterm. That might seem ridiculous given the fact that the offshoot of Marvel Comics has had an enviable box office run ever since they decided to take their characters in the own hands, beginning with Iron Man, released in 2008. Though the projects are costly, their lowest worldwide gross with a film was still over $250 million, and the bulk of them have handily crossed the half-billion mark. Artistically, though, they’ve floundered just enough to cast … Continue reading You said, it’s time to get your clothes on, you said, it’s time to leave the planet

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Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Three

Dan Seeger

#23 — The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952) There was a time when Hollywood was all klieg lights and high glamor, at least in its calculated depictions of self. It was lucrative to preserve the myth of happy creative miracles, dreams captured on celluloid for all to enjoy. By the nineteen-fifties, some cynicism was starting to creep in, and filmmakers allowed that their chosen business had a corrosion at its heart. Some of this was surely attributable to the general social shell shock felt in the post-war years, but I think there’s also the slide of Hollywood itself to … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Three