Category: Film

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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

FilmLeave a comment

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

FilmLeave a comment

I never thought I would come of age, let alone on a moldy page

Dan Seeger

Young Adult reunites director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody four years after their shared breakthrough with Juno. In different ways, to different degrees, both creators come into the movie with a little something to prove. Despite an even better follow-up film, Reitman still has his vocal detractors, those who find his efforts a little too slick and glib. Cody, though an enthusiastic Oscar winner for her Juno efforts, faced an even sterner backlash, largely on the basis of another produced screenplay that was smothered into lifelessness by the same sort of dialogue of inventive slang that gained her attention … Continue reading I never thought I would come of age, let alone on a moldy page