Category: Film

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

For the most part, we writers are allowed to pick the films we review for Spectrum Culture. There are limitations, of course, especially for those of us who live in more remote areas that don’t offer advance screenings of major releases for critics. Still, every week afford us the opportunity to peruse the vast array of new movies coming out, picking the title we’d like to cover. I was a little uncertain when looking at my choices for this week, finally narrowing it down to two different options. I finally asked my partner in all things to help me settle … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

I pitched in for both of my regular areas this week at Spectrum Culture. On the film side, I wrote a review of a new documentary on the widely protested incarceration of Mumia Abu-Jamal. I actually took this one on for a very specific reason: I’ve now spent at least twenty years hearing cries of “Free Mumia” from a certain, impassioned subsection of society, without ever hearing a corresponding explanation for why his sentence is unjust. I presumed the documentary would provide that, but it instead glossed over the particulars of the situation in much the same way I was … Continue reading Spectrum Check

Film, MusicLeave a comment

Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

I had a fairly light week on Spectrum Culture, in part because the film I chose for this week never came through. As I recall, it had something to do with Wisconsin. Sorry I couldn’t write about you, native state. So I had only one full-length review this week: Willy Mason’s Carry On. He’s one of those performers who first edged onto my personal radar because of some gushing write-ups in Mojo magazine, which contributed to my take on him perhaps becoming overly concerned with the relative success he’s had in the U.K. That’s what happens when I don’t actually … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Forty-Eight

Dan Seeger

#48 — Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963) Eight years before Peter Bogdanovich’s exceptional adaptation of The Last Picture Show, writer Larry McMurtry had his first dalliance with the silver screen when his debut novel, 1961’s Horseman, Pass By, was transformed into Hud. This film holds a defining star turn by Paul Newman and an astonishing, Oscar-winning performance by Patricia Neal. It also inspired a vital early essay by Pauline Kael in which she laid bare her own conflicted feelings about the work in such compelling terms that it was one of the cornerstones of her legend and could legitimately lay claim … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 60s — Number Forty-Eight