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Maysles brothers, Melville, Ophüls, Scherfig, Scott

Dan Seeger

The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949). This was the last film made by the great German director Max Ophüls during a brief dalliance with Hollywood, and it exhibits both his mastery of the form and the knack for scratching away at tremulous morality that probably sealed the failure of Stateside tenure. Based on the Elisabeth Sanxay Holding novel The Blank Wall (which later became source material for the Tilda Swinton vehicle The Deep End), the film relates the story of an everyday woman who attempts to cover up a murder that she suspects was perpetrated by her daughter against a … Continue reading Maysles brothers, Melville, Ophüls, Scherfig, Scott

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Now he’s up above my head, hanging by a little thread

Dan Seeger

Longer ago than I care to admit (it can be measured in decades, sadly), I first started reviewing movies on a weekly radio program, originally adopting the strategy of treating each new film as strictly its own entity. Theoretically, a sizable percentage of our listening audience would be coming to these films fairly fresh, with no working knowledge of the director’s wider oeuvre, the history of the production or any of the other odd particulars that can fill the heads of seasoned moviegoers as the lights go dim in the theater. I figured I should do the best I could … Continue reading Now he’s up above my head, hanging by a little thread

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

The 4th of July holiday meant a little bit light week at Spectrum Culture, but I still had a few words go up. On the film side, I reviewed the new film from André Téchiné, the acclaimed French director of Wild Reeds and several others. It always feels a little uncomfortable to take shots at a director with a highly valued history, but the movie was plainly lacking. It was a labor to get through. I also wrote about Fiona Apple for the second straight week, offering up a brief assessment of her new outing in our survey of the … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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One for Friday: The 6ths, “Here in My Heart”

Dan Seeger

I’m not sure if there’s an official way to discover the songwriting of Stephin Merritt, a route that passes inspection with all the self-appointed keepers of indie cred. If there is, it probably doesn’t start with the 6ths, the side project Merritt developed in the mid-nineteen-nineties after his primary outfit, the Magnetic Fields, was already four or five albums deep into their catalog. Nevertheless, the debut release under this name, Wasps’ Nest, was my first knowing exposure to Merritt’s handicraft, this mixture of sharp and sweet that found Merritt recruiting a small gang of cult favorite singers to intone his … Continue reading One for Friday: The 6ths, “Here in My Heart”