Category: Film

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Capra, Hopkins, Kieslowski, Lee, Pichel

Dan Seeger

Summer of Sam (Spike Lee, 1999). Lee certainly wasn’t lacking in ambition with this film. It depicts the sweltering New York summer of 1977, marked by an ascendant Yankees ballclub, record-setting heat, and paralyzing fear over the unpredictable Son of Sam serial killer. Bringing his own distinctive flourishes to a screenplay by actor friends Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli, Lee piles more story and heavy import than just about any film could bear. Discotheques and punk rockers, gritty urban newscasts and brash bellowing neighborhoods, and it quickly collapses under its own weight. As with all of his more compromised efforts, … Continue reading Capra, Hopkins, Kieslowski, Lee, Pichel

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Top Fifty Films of the 90s — An Introduction

Dan Seeger

And something of a post-mortem on the Top Fifty Films of the 00s. You know. While we’re here. When I embarked on that little jaunt across the past ten years of moviemaking, trying the best I could to rank the films I loved most, and identify why I loved them, it was with the hope that grappling with each of the entries would be a rewarding challenge. It was that, and then some. I’m not sure if the unexpected praise I received after typing out those last thousand words or so upon reaching the number one film on New Year’s … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — An Introduction

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Ephron, Hunt, Kieslowski, Kieslowski, Tykwer

Dan Seeger

Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993). The first film in Kieslowski’s famed Three Colors trilogy stars Juliette Binoche as a woman dealing with the recent death of her famous husband and young daughter in a car crash. She retreats from the world, getting drawn back only reluctantly, in part due to interest and controversy over her spouse’s last, incomplete work. There’s tremendous thematic heft in the work, with the specter of mortality drawn over the entire work, enhanced by the sense of all the ways in which life itself drifts away from us. Binoche is moving and insightful in her … Continue reading Ephron, Hunt, Kieslowski, Kieslowski, Tykwer