Category: Film

FilmLeave a comment

From the Archive: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

Dan Seeger

According to the gimmicky title scrawled across the top of my radio script (“Reel Thing V: The Final Frontier”), this review was featured in the fifth episode of our weekly movie review program. This was clearly a week in which our modest college town didn’t get very many new films, necessitating a trip to Madison to catch art film screenings there. I’d barely seen any Akira Kurosawa films by this point (probably only Ran, and I may not have even seen that yet), a highly inconvenient fact I tried to cover up in the writing process with only the most … Continue reading From the Archive: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

FilmLeave a comment

From the Archive: Other People’s Money

Dan Seeger

This is the kind of good kid I was in preparation for the review below. Knowing that we’d be covering Other People’s Money on our radio program, The Reel Thing, I went to one of the upper floors of the UW-SP library and checked out a copy of Jerry Sterner’s play to read in advance of seeing the film. Part of the reason, then, this is a slightly longer review than the norm for our weekly show is I had all this deep background knowledge to share. The nineteen-eighties will be forever typified as the time when greed came to … Continue reading From the Archive: Other People’s Money

FilmLeave a comment

From the Archive: One Hundred and One Dalmatians

Dan Seeger

Though the release model was already suffering from the continuing explosion of the home video market, Disney was still slipping into their vaults for regular theatrical release of their animated classics. Not 3D version or even prints that were given anything but the most cursory clean-up, but instead they’d just drag one of the old favorites out confident that youthful moviegoers hadn’t had a chance to see it previously. One Hundred and One Dalmatians took its turn in the summer of 1991. As the mostly dutifully transcriptions below indicates, I had the official formatting of the title wrong. I’ve cleaned … Continue reading From the Archive: One Hundred and One Dalmatians

FilmLeave a comment

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

Dan Seeger

#28 — From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953) Any film from the first part of the nineteen-fifties is going to seem tame when measured against the norms at play some sixty years later, so its advisable to remember that the beach make-out scene in From Here to Eternity became iconic, at least in part, due to its raciness. The various censorious powers-that-been offered a fleet of suggestions as to how to make the moment palatable, from having the two lip-locked lovers demurely stand up to slapping a nice, thick bathrobe across Burt Lancaster’s bank vault torso. There was also … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Eight

FilmLeave a comment

Faxon and Rash, Kasdan, Lloyd, Lord and Miller, Snyder

Dan Seeger

Darling Companion (Lawrence Kasdan, 2012). I’ve got loads of residual affection for writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, but he sure doesn’t make it easy to be one of his defenders these days. Darling Companion was his first film in nearly decade, following the appallingly bad Stephen King adaptation Dreamcatcher. It doesn’t make an argument that he used his creative downtime wisely. As wispy of a film concept as anyone’s likely to come across, Kasdan’s story (co-written with his wife, Meg Kasdan) concerns an older couple who adopt a stray dog and then lose that new furry family member in the woods around … Continue reading Faxon and Rash, Kasdan, Lloyd, Lord and Miller, Snyder

FilmLeave a comment

Well can’t you see me standing here, I’ve got my back against the record machine

Dan Seeger

At some point, the meta magic of filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller is going to wear so thin it can’t hold up a flimsy excuse for a movie concept, but the inevitable erosion hasn’t happened yet. Mere months after their astonishing and daring subversion of the corporate synergy movie model turned The Lego Movie into the most unlikely critical hit in ages (the film’s commercial success, while more impressive than expected, wasn’t exactly in doubt) they’ve returned with a sequel to 2012’s television show adaptation 21 Jump Street, itself a headlong dive into the rabbit hole of mocking self-awareness. … Continue reading Well can’t you see me standing here, I’ve got my back against the record machine