Tag: from the archive

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From the Archive: Graffiti Bridge

Dan Seeger

As can be gleaned from the introductory hook to the review, this was written for the radio show The Reel Thing. I think we traveled to Madison to screen it, which was a long way to go for such a terrible movie. (The other films included in the same episode were Rocky V and White Palace, both of which I know opened in our smaller town.) In the writing of it, I didn’t mention the most memorable moment in the film, in which Morris Day urinates on a plant in Prince’s club, then promptly sets the plant on fire, implying … Continue reading From the Archive: Graffiti Bridge

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From the Archive: Walk the Line

Dan Seeger

As I’ve noted before, 2005 was the year that I took advantage of the bountiful blank page afforded me by the interweb and started writing movie reviews again. I tend to to think of it as a relatively slow development process, from noodling around to full-length reviews. But it seems I got to the destination a little more quickly than I remember, as this take on the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, written just a few months after I’d recommitted to writing about movies, has a hearty word count. There are two moments in the new Johnny Cash biopic … Continue reading From the Archive: Walk the Line

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From the Archive: Edward Scissorhands

Dan Seeger

We started our movie review radio program, The Reel Thing, in the fall of 1990, which meant that we had to contend with the still expanding market of home video. That was how a significant number of people did their movie viewing, and the home video release of a film could be as important of a story as its first sojourn through theaters. Besides, doing home video reviews helped us fill a few more minutes in an hour-long show. Now, I wish we’d more often used the opportunity of another review a few months later to find a way to … Continue reading From the Archive: Edward Scissorhands

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From the Archive: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

Dan Seeger

According to the gimmicky title scrawled across the top of my radio script (“Reel Thing V: The Final Frontier”), this review was featured in the fifth episode of our weekly movie review program. This was clearly a week in which our modest college town didn’t get very many new films, necessitating a trip to Madison to catch art film screenings there. I’d barely seen any Akira Kurosawa films by this point (probably only Ran, and I may not have even seen that yet), a highly inconvenient fact I tried to cover up in the writing process with only the most … Continue reading From the Archive: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams

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From the Archive: One Hundred and One Dalmatians

Dan Seeger

Though the release model was already suffering from the continuing explosion of the home video market, Disney was still slipping into their vaults for regular theatrical release of their animated classics. Not 3D version or even prints that were given anything but the most cursory clean-up, but instead they’d just drag one of the old favorites out confident that youthful moviegoers hadn’t had a chance to see it previously. One Hundred and One Dalmatians took its turn in the summer of 1991. As the mostly dutifully transcriptions below indicates, I had the official formatting of the title wrong. I’ve cleaned … Continue reading From the Archive: One Hundred and One Dalmatians

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From the Archive: Neu

Dan Seeger

This is one of the album reviews I wrote for The Independent, the weekly publication once presided over by the most indefatigable human being I know. Clearly, my later instinct when writing for Spectrum Culture to claim music that was outside my general comfort zone was in effect even back then. I’d like to say that all the cross-references that can be found in this short piece were indicative of the strong influence Mojo magazine had on my writing at the time, but I still do that. Polysics offer up a “Special Thanks to Devo” in the liner notes to … Continue reading From the Archive: Neu

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From the Archive: The Cutting Edge and Straight Talk

Dan Seeger

This might be a good place to acknowledge that I was dead wrong in my presumptive assessment of The Babe as one of the more interesting movies of the spring of 1992. The Player is great (that’s the film I was really pining for). Unfortunately, it took long enough to get to our town that it arrived on the same weekend as Batman Returns, which played to full houses while Robert Altman’s masterful film sold a couple tickets per showing. I don’t have much to add about the two films reviewed. Even in the capsules here, it’s clear I didn’t … Continue reading From the Archive: The Cutting Edge and Straight Talk

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From the Archive: Point Break

Dan Seeger

Much as I’ve admired Kathryn Bigelow’s recent and somewhat sudden escalation to the upper ranks of “important” modern filmmakers–the two films responsible for the shift are both formidable works–I still struggle with the cognitive dissonance of the director of Point Break as an exalted Oscar-winner. That’s how much I disliked that film, an ire that’s only grown over the years as plenty of people have cited it as a willfully dumb pleasure. Despite what it might seem like, I can get behind grandly, deliberately dopey summer popcorn fare, old or new, but I’ve never understood the affection for this particular … Continue reading From the Archive: Point Break

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From the Archive: A Perfect World

Dan Seeger

This review was written for the drops we created to slip into regular programming after the weekly radio show ended in 1993. I can tell from the script that it was written on the already-antiquated computer that resided on the desk of the closet-sized manager’s office in the movie theater where I worked. It’s one big block of all-capitalized text, making it brutally difficult to read during the recording process. I see I was pushing back against the critical instinct to overpraise the supposed deeper meanings of Eastwood’s directorial efforts even then. And I’m somewhat surprised that “Lazy charm” was … Continue reading From the Archive: A Perfect World