Category: Film

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From the Archive: A River Runs Through It

Dan Seeger

This review comes from The Pointer, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. While hardly an epic, I’m a little surprised at the length of this piece. Certainly I was trying to make the case for a film I though was excellent and all too likely to be ignored by my fellow twentysomethings, but it still looks to me like it would have wound up being an awful lot of column inches devoted to my opinions. I remember endlessly championing cinematographer Philippe Rousselot by name when Oscar season came around, but I clearly hadn’t gotten his French moniker … Continue reading From the Archive: A River Runs Through It

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Black, Buck and Lee, Emmerich, Frankel, Wells

Dan Seeger

Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013). The most successful animated feature in the traditional Disney mold (fairy tale structure, a bevy of Broadway-esque songs) since the studio’s nineteen-nineties heyday, Frozen is charming enough if a little flat. Like a lot of modern Disney fables, it’s more interesting for the ways it compulsively upends the legacy tropes–the “true love” with a man, the oversimplified villainy–than for the actual merits of what winds up onscreen freed from meta examinations. The songbook provided by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez may have launched a thousand (or more) YouTube videos on the strength of … Continue reading Black, Buck and Lee, Emmerich, Frankel, Wells

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From the Archive: Last Action Hero

Dan Seeger

Besides the weekly radio show, my cohort and I occasionally experimented with slightly different ways to deliver reviews over the air, especially after I graduated and holding down a hourlong block that would be better devoted to students seemed wrong to me. Hence the creation of “Reel Thing Reports,” a prerecorded segment lasting only a few minutes that was dropped in a couple times per day. It kept our reviews on the air, but the lack of interplay between the two of us made for a less satisfying chunk of programming. It also keyed me to in to how much … Continue reading From the Archive: Last Action Hero

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From the Archive: The Aristocrats

Dan Seeger

This review originally appeared in my original online home. This wasn’t the first full review I posted there, but I tend to think of this as the piece that made me decide I was going to commit to writing about film on a regular basis in that space. I felt more like I was tinkering with the previous reviews I’d included there (including my assessment of The Constant Gardener, which this was coupled with, explained the “Then there…” that opens the review), but this effort helped me rediscover the pleasure of grappling with a movie, breaking apart what did and … Continue reading From the Archive: The Aristocrats

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From the Archive: I Come in Peace

Dan Seeger

Spending Saturdays revisiting old–sometimes very old–reviews means regular reminders of films I’d completely and totally forgotten about. This goofy sci-fi action flick hasn’t crossed my mind in years. Maybe decades in the more accurate measurement of time. For what it’s worth, my view of Dolph Lundgren’s acting abilities mellowed quite a bit from the scathing assessment below, I think in part from cable viewings of this very film. My archeological commitment to preserving the original writing with only the most superficial changes compels me to keep in a complete atrociously convoluted sentences. I do not stand by them. My original … Continue reading From the Archive: I Come in Peace