Category: Film

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From the Archive: The Cutting Edge and Straight Talk

Dan Seeger

This might be a good place to acknowledge that I was dead wrong in my presumptive assessment of The Babe as one of the more interesting movies of the spring of 1992. The Player is great (that’s the film I was really pining for). Unfortunately, it took long enough to get to our town that it arrived on the same weekend as Batman Returns, which played to full houses while Robert Altman’s masterful film sold a couple tickets per showing. I don’t have much to add about the two films reviewed. Even in the capsules here, it’s clear I didn’t … Continue reading From the Archive: The Cutting Edge and Straight Talk

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Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-One

Dan Seeger

#31 — The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955) The Night of the Hunter is famously the only film directed by esteemed character actor Charles Laughton. I’ve also seen it cited more than once as the finest film ever directed by someone whose main gig was on the other side of the camera. It’s absolutely one of the most striking and distinctive such efforts, especially for its time. In adapting the bestselling novel by Davis Grubb, first published in 1953, Laughton and his collaborators made a grim, expressionistic work, one that veered away from the growing trend towards tenderized … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-One

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From the Archive: Point Break

Dan Seeger

Much as I’ve admired Kathryn Bigelow’s recent and somewhat sudden escalation to the upper ranks of “important” modern filmmakers–the two films responsible for the shift are both formidable works–I still struggle with the cognitive dissonance of the director of Point Break as an exalted Oscar-winner. That’s how much I disliked that film, an ire that’s only grown over the years as plenty of people have cited it as a willfully dumb pleasure. Despite what it might seem like, I can get behind grandly, deliberately dopey summer popcorn fare, old or new, but I’ve never understood the affection for this particular … Continue reading From the Archive: Point Break

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From the Archive: A Perfect World

Dan Seeger

This review was written for the drops we created to slip into regular programming after the weekly radio show ended in 1993. I can tell from the script that it was written on the already-antiquated computer that resided on the desk of the closet-sized manager’s office in the movie theater where I worked. It’s one big block of all-capitalized text, making it brutally difficult to read during the recording process. I see I was pushing back against the critical instinct to overpraise the supposed deeper meanings of Eastwood’s directorial efforts even then. And I’m somewhat surprised that “Lazy charm” was … Continue reading From the Archive: A Perfect World

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From the Archive: Sneakers

Dan Seeger

As with all writing from the early nineteen-nineties that touches upon computer-based technologies, the limited grasp of the information revolution on the way is adorable. This was written from the student newspaper The Pointer. I think it was one of my earlier pieces, which might explain why we evidently hadn’t settled on a style choice for the title of the films (in quotes? italicized?) leaving it simply capitalized, which looks wholly inadequate to me know. I left that formatting in place, but I did fix the editing mistake the printed the name of a certain Academy Award-winning trailblazer as Sidney … Continue reading From the Archive: Sneakers