Tag: spectrum review

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

The first thing of mine that went up on Spectrum Culture this week was an attempt to write on a new music release that was outside of my normal wheelhouse. Punk music speaks to the inner part of me that still craves the opportunity to descend into a basement somewhere and turn the stereo playing the angriest music I can find with the volume turned up as loud as it will go. Another challenge: the whole EP is less than ten minutes long. Writing a full-length review about something like that is a challenge. I think I did all right. … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

One of the regular features at Spectrum Culture is called “Film Dunce,” in which a writer makes a point of viewing and considering a film they haven’t previously watched that they feel everyone else has seen. I’ve used my past entries to review significant works that I considered blind spots in my broader knowledge of hefty, important cinema. This time out, I was challenged to instead watch something more broadly popular that I hadn’t seen. The editor was pushing a particular comedy, but I have my limits. In general, I’m enough of a completist about these things that most widely … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, Spectrum Culture followed a shorter publishing week. While I’ve got a couple fairly significant things looming for the week ahead, my only contribution to the site last week was a couple essays for our PLAYLIST feature on R.E.M. The premise is fairly simple: the various music writers go through all of a band’s albums and select the best single track from each release, duking it out electronically until we come to a reasonable consensus. Logically, the songs I was assigned to write about were among those those for which my first pick represented the song … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

With my countdown of nineteen-eighties films approaching the end, I’ve been trying to both watch and rewatch important movies from the prior decade in preparation for the next naturally step backwards in my tops of the decade project. As for the latter endeavor, there are simply some movies that I haven’t seen in approaching thirty years (and perhaps never saw properly, given that my exposure to them was dictated by the way I watched the material on cable, not always the most ideal manner to take them in) and in order to figure out their placement on the pending list, … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

So this week was all about the Muppets and Miles. A better week of responsibilities could be constructed for me, but it’s hard to fathom how. I’ll cop to not loving the angle I took in writing about the new documentary about Kevin Clash, the Muppeteer who is the man behind Elmo. I feel like I’ve seen similar pronouncements about emotional steeliness in the face of emotional filmmaking as a precursor to confessing to prodigious tears. Still, it was absolutely the most honest way for me to write about the movie. Whatever flaws are in place, I can’t deny that … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

This was another fairly light week for me, in part because I’m still trying to catch up on music reviews I owe. One of those went up: an assessment of the new album from Crooked Fingers. This was one of the instances in which I was assigned the release instead of claimed it. It actually took me a really long time to figure out my angle on the review. As the numerical rating indicates, this is one of those albums that was clearly good, but didn’t stir me especially deeply. It’s not background music, but it’s one of those CDs … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

So I’ve been a pretty bad kid. I’ve just been sitting on a couple music reviews, which are now both overdue. It’s not just neglect–I have had a strangely busy week–but I’m still is desperate need of some concerted time with the releases in question. Between that and some difficulty is securing a specific screener copy of a movie, I had another fairly light week at Spectrum Culture. At least I feel good about my lone contribution. In general, I really like writing for our Oeuvre feature, and I had my third contribution to our ongoing survey of the films … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

This week, I reviewed a fairly abstract, experimental movie that, were I a little more ambitious, could have being the starting point for an assessment of the very nature of cinema that could have run thousands upon thousands of words. I may actually get around to that take on it someday, as the film raises more questions than it’s really interested in answering. It strikes me as one of those efforts I might want to specifically revisit someday. I mean, why wouldn’t I, since I’m clearly willing to do something crazy, like watch Kevin Costner’s The Postman multiple times. Once … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

After a long stretch in which it felt like my name was all over the site, I had a fairly light week at Spectrum Culture. The only thing I had go up was a review of a new western. This led to the sort of mini-treatise on the state of the modern western that’s almost inevitable, even if the same basic thesis on the current dynamics of the once-dominant film genre has been pertinent for about forty years now. I actually wish I’d had more room to stretch out (or, more accurately, more time to write it, which was my … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

So I spent a good portion of this week feeling pretty ill. That’s ill in a lying in bed moaning all day way rather than a nineties fresh beats rap way. I don’t know that my condition compromised my writing at all this week, but let’s just say it’s a little more difficult to write a review of a deliberately languid, existentially fraught Russian mood piece under those circumstances. My other piece of film writing was for the latest entry in our Oeuvre series on Samuel Fuller. After writing on one of his touchstone war pictures, I got a chance … Continue reading Spectrum Check