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 redirected them, turning them into something altogether different yet somehow recognizable, even classical, if only because they share the immaculate…
“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 original, pre-breakup iteration of the group, before Corgan slapped the retired brand on his glorified solo campaign. But the album certainly felt like a swan song — the endpoint these alt-rock heroes had been working…
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 County, Clint Eastwood’s 1995 tear-jerking classic, which somehow transcends Robert James Waller’s purplish novel. Notable for Eastwood’s unusually relaxed performance…
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 a demarcation point in his career later, in his transition from film to digital. But Heat still feels like a magnum opus, from its huge cast of characters to its generous length (170 minutes, the longest of Mann’s…
#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 enjoyable junk while others are just junk. After a smorgasbord of pirates, prisoners, puppeteers…
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 Olive Trees is the closest we get to lust and young love in Kiarostami’s oeuvre, but its erotic power is frequently overlooked by Western critics—it has to be subtle. The film immediately distinguishes itself as being something different from the…