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Antin, Duplass and Duplass, Fellini, La Cava, Ray

Dan Seeger

Cyrus (Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass, 2010). After establishing themselves as slightly cheekier members of the mumblecore movement with the fun, cleverly self-referential Baghead, the Duplass brothers made their first venture into a film with actors carrying impressive resumes with them with the genially bleak relationship comedy Cyrus. John C. Reilly plays a despondent guy who begins to emerge from his post-divorce funk when he stumbles into a relationship with a beautiful woman played by Marisa Tomei. Matters are complicated, however, by her dependent son played by Jonah Hill, in one of his first real attempts at breaking the typecasting … Continue reading Antin, Duplass and Duplass, Fellini, La Cava, Ray

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

After a customary end-of-the-year rest, the Spectrum Culture site returned with a spiffy new redesign this week. It was fairly low-content for the first week back, so my contributions were limited to pitching in on a couple of lists. First, I wrote on the latest Black Keys albums for our collection of the “honorable mentions” when it came to the best albums of last year. Besides that, the site has an annual tradition–in keeping with the features built around assessing older albums and films with fresh eyes–of kicking off the new year by looking back to the best pop culture … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Top Fifty Films of the 70s — An Introduction

Dan Seeger

And thus our recurring exercise in nostalgic evaluation takes a turn into especially tricky territory. In tracking through my picks for the best films of the the first ten years of the 2000s, then the nineteen-nineties and the nineteen-eighties, I was always considering time frames with which I had at least some level of personal connection concurrent with their actual occurrence. Sure, I was awfully young when the eighties began, but those were hugely formative years as I matured with the movies, for good or ill, as one of my primary influences. If I’d conceived of a top fifty in … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — An Introduction

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So far from the ordinary things I once knew while I wait for the chance to tell you what is true

Dan Seeger

It’s always a unique disappointment to see an excellent performance shellacked into the misery of a bad movie. In the new film My Week with Marilyn, Michelle Williams is consistently sensational as Marilyn Monroe. She’s charged with not only playing … Continue reading So far from the ordinary things I once knew while I wait for the chance to tell you what is true