PJ Harvey had already infiltrated the mainstream by 1995, thanks to two of her early singles (“Sheela Na Gig” and “50ft Queenie”) earning medium rotation on radio stations. Her clanging punk-rock trio were just accessible enough to appease fans of Pearl Jam, but just weird enough to etch out a niche of their own. Harvey’s first two albums, Dry and Rid of Me, rock in a fairly traditional way — Rid of Me even features a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” as…
With a title sequence that references both Stan Brakhage and To Kill a Mockingbird, David Fincher’s Se7en announces itself as a decidedly progressive genre text. Throughout his career, but particularly in this early masterwork, Fincher’s consumed the fleeting styles of Hollywood and mainstream film — in this case, film noir — and…
“Let’s approach this like it’s our last album,” Billy Corgan claims to have said to his bandmates, in so many words, before work began on their supersized third record, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It wasn’t the last gasp of the Smashing Pumpkins, or even of…
The life-changing instance of reason defeating desire has been at the center of such great melodramatic moments as the airport climax of Casablancaand the railway station farewell of Brief Encounter, but for this viewer its most powerful incarnation comes towards the end of The Bridges of Madison…
One is tempted to think of Heat as a culmination, a kind of halfway point in the career of its director, Michael Mann. This isn’t entirely accurate, since the crime genre has been a vested interest of Mann’s both before and after Heat; one could just as easily place…
#10: The Bad Idea Podcast Holiday Special: A Very Belated Renny Harlin Christmas Download episode here. Episode Description: This time on Bad Idea Podcast, Simon & Steve tackle Finnish enigma Renny Harlin. The idea: figure out what makes him tick—why some of his films are exemplary, incomparably…
Abbas Kiarostami has mostly stayed away from love stories—he tends to find it impossible in his films to recreate situations that even remotely hint at intimacy, his art being so closely monitored by authorities whose conservative religious values disallow any such representation. Through the…