The last breath men

Murder by Contract, directed by Irving Lerner (1958) sits on the cusp of hard-boiled 1950s and 1960s counter-culture, spritzed with hepcat chat and a jazz-ish nouvelle vague score before losing control and crashing in the same emotional dead-end as, say, Medium Cool (1969) and Vanishing Point (1971). Movies don't let go of your hand like that any more – certainly not the uptight millennial child-minding service that cinema is today. The director's camera-on-sticks style and the minimal production play out on the backlots and scrub hills that help bring crime in under budget for weekly TV. Perhaps in keeping with its chivalric twist Contract is coy, even prudish with regard to sex but both men and women are strong in it and the violence is nasty and real. When Claude (Vince Edwards) visits a California gun store the shot is framed with a little stand of Nazi flags in center background: Lerner's little note re: where the real killers have come from.

Recently played

1. 'Range Life' – Pavement (Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, 1994)
2. 'Playing with Fire' – Nick Leng (single, 2016)
3. 'Mr Mistake' (Boards of Canada remix instrumental) – Nevermen (2017)
4. 'Safe Changes' – Talaboman (The Night Land, 2017)
5. 'Soft Landscape Made Out Of Feathers' – Chihei Hatakeyama (Void VIII, 2015)

Trouble waiting to happen

Is Bloodline better than Breaking Bad? Easily. Season three proves it and closes the deal on the last adult show with guts; real noir, in the real now, smart and clever and dark as all hell. I'm a David Lynch fan but Twin Peaks is the past. This is the future and you missed it. So did Netflix. Everyone did. That only makes it better.

Recently played

1. 'Bad Liar' – Selena Gomez (single, 2017)
2. 'Shadow (Acapella)' – Chromatics (single, 2017)
3. 'Rolling' – Roedelius (single, 2017)
4. 'Cascades' - Indian Wells (single, 2017)
5. 'Blood Type' – Turtle featuring Eliza Shaddad (single, 2017)

Soft machine

Prometheus was set at Christmas and Alien Covenant opens the presents a few years later although we have know what is in them since 1979. Forget that one; this is a Prometheus sequel by the sprezzatura merchant that managed Hannibal, Ridley Scott sawing and hammering until the fucking thing stays up, godammit – balancing improbabilities until they have weight; planing edges until they marry. It's a serial killer movie in space. The android David is the monster, the neurotic boy outsider, but Kubrick is the director's god: Scott never really moves past the uplit regency hotel room and the computer that goes crazy. And where Stanley kept quiet Covenant powers in with stark exposition and Trigan Empire scenarios that risk everything although there is a wonderful open-ground sequence which stands in clever contrast to the claustrophobia of the original – which you will have forgotten by now because Prometheus, remember? The word "duty" comes up a lot in the dialogue because the audience is bound to it as much as the crew: investigating that signal, going into that darkened room. Daniels erupts in every scene; Elizabeth Shaw has found peace. There is a nasty fuck-you-for-watching twist at the end that everyone except the victims will see coming. Now we can go back to sleep for another 14 months.

Recently played

1. 'Real High' - Nite Jewel (2017)
2. 'Sweep (16 bit Lolitas Vox)' - Blue Foundation (Sweep, 2006)
3. 'Best Love' - Yuna (Chapters, 2016)
4. 'Show You The Way' - Thundercat (Drunk, 2017)
5. 'So Far Away' – Lazerhawk (Visitors, 2012)     
6. 'Hallelujah California' - Luna Shadows (2016)
7. 'Love Somebody - Mr Carmack Remix' – Ta-Ku (2016)
8. 'Hope - Paleman Remix' - Clap! Clap! (2017)
9. 'In My Room' - New Jackson (2017)
10. 'T.O.R.' – Gaussian Curve (The Distance, 2017)

All those moments will be lost in time

When I've completed a project I clean my office, throw out my notes and delete the files on my laptop. Now we are in the cloud, logically the next step is to scrub that as well: Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive ... and hello, Twitter. Who cares what I tweeted at midnight on December 3, 2013 – and even if you did, and could remember, who would have time to scroll back that far? Fresh start: blank page.

In the early days of home computing we feared losing data forever. Now we dream of it.

Lost cities

I blog mostly about movies and music because when I'm writing I don't want to write about writing and pictures need no words. But what director James Gray says in this article by Kevin Lincoln applies to authors and musicians as much as it does filmmakers:

"You know, people assume that because I’m a director, I make tons of money. I am struggling financially,” Gray says. “Now, I’m very lucky I get to do what it is I want to do. I’ve made, good or bad, very uncompromising movies, the movies exactly that I wanted to make, and that’s a beautiful gift, so I’m not complaining about that. But I struggle. I have a hard time paying my bills. I’m 47 years old, I live in an apartment, I can’t buy a house. If I were coming of age in 1973, I would be in Bel Air. The whole reason for this is exactly what we were talking about, where the middle is gone. So now you have franchises, and you have, ‘I made a movie on my iPhone.’ This is the economic system in a nutshell, right? Five directors make Marvel, and then there’s the rest of us who are trying to scrounge around to find the money to make films. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: If the audience only gets to see Marvel, then they only want Marvel, and then if they only want Marvel, only Marvel is made. I don’t even have a problem with Marvel. The problem is not the specifics of each movie, the problem is it’s the only movie you can see now in a multiplex, and when it’s the only game in town, you’re looking at the beginning of the death throes of an art form.”

Read the full interview at New York Magazine.

Ce que j'ai fait, ce soir la

Frenzy (1972) is Alfred Hitchcock's second-to-last movie and Brian De Palma's first: the brightly-lit naturalism, the gaudy clothes, the saccharine score, the casual sexism / xenophobia, the misogyny, but most of all that tracking shot in which the camera stalks Rusk and Babs Milligan up the stairs and into his flat before becoming its own conscious entity and backing off and out into a spliced location filmed with the stiffness of Pinewood Studios. There are some Lynchian moments too – the quail on a plate is like Mr X's chicken in Eraserhead (1977), and the framing of Brenda Blaney's painted face before she is killed could be a still from Mulholland Drive (2001) – but it's the staircase camera move that throws to De Palma who grabbed it and kept running, well, forever.

Bourgeois enchantment

Have I seen Killer Elite (2011)? The story is inspired by true events (like all Jason Statham movies) and the director's unimaginative discipline would have benefited The Gunman (2015) but a scene in an Australian gum forest triggered deja vu: was it possible that I was watching Killer Elite for a second time? Why? Why was this happening again?

Go to sleep, everything is alright

Desktop

Confusing fucking world ain't it, man?

Robert Hooks is still amazing as the cool fixer in Trouble Man (1972): he's front-facing with a moral code, like Mike Hammer, and the plot is tight. The movie relies less on its soundtrack than writer / producer John DF Black's bookend Shaft (1971); director Ivan Dixon (he was Kinchloe on Hogan's Heroes) shoots in close-ups that keep the characters in your face while danger lurks in the real-life backgrounds. Watching it now – like Straight Time (1978) – the drama is heightened by these documentary details of nooks and crannies now erased from cities, or at least the fictionally-held versions of them. So it is a confusing fucking world, but the action cuts through it.

Recently played

1. 'If You Forget Me' – RAC featuring Liset Alea (EP, 2010)
2. 'Good Girls' – Lany (Lany, 2017)
3. 'Tune Down' – Chris Joss (Sticks, 2015)
4. 'California' – Grimes (Art Angels, 2015)
5. 'Myth' – Beach House (Bloom, 2012)
6. 'Journal of Ardency' – Class Actress (2010)
7. 'Komorebi / Mama's Wisdom' – Catching Flies (2016)
8. 'Higher Ground' – Roland Tings featuring Nylo (2017)
9. 'She's So Untouchable' – Garden City Movement (2017)
10. 'Deep Shelter' – Noveller (A Pink Sunset For No One, 2017)

The Dark Mirror

 

Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror (1946), Bette Davis in Dead Ringer (1964), Silvana Venturelli in The Lickerish Quartet (1970).

Kicks

Haywire (2011) is a farewell reminder that Steven Soderbergh is the guy who made Sex, Lies And Videotape (fuck, 1989...): uneven, impulsive, contrary, but there's definitely something good going on. The experiment doesn't yield the expected results but experiments in art maybe shouldn't. Gina Carano was cast for her fight skills like Roddy Piper in John Carpenter's They Live (1988) and has charm enough to get by in the talking bits (she's a lot better than Channing Tatum). Her success in the role got her Fast & Furious 6 (2013), which cineastes will recall is the one with the tank. Haywire feels like a Bourne riposte but Soderbergh says it's his James Bond/Harry Palmer movie. Like The Ipcress File and Horse Under Water it's a find-who-it-is plot, more 'look out behind you' than a Le Carre. The story and accompanying performances are cool to the point of stasis – you wonder if the director was even interested – but because Carano really can fight she runs hot.

Recently played

1. 'August Twelve' – Khruangbin (The Universe Smiles Upon You, 2015)
2. 'Sad Sack' – Bo Diddley (Bo Diddley, 1962)
3. 'Africa Talks to You' – Sly and the Family Stone (There's a Riot Goin' On, 1971)
4. 'Make 'Em Move' – Sly & Robbie (Language Barrier, 1985)
5. 'Changing of the Seasons' – Two Door Cinema Club (Beacon, 2012)
6. 'Etre assis ou danser' – Liaisons Dangereuses (Liaisons Dangereuses, 1981)
7. 'The End' – PJ Harvey (Uh Huh Her, 2004)
8. 'Colour of Water' – Rose Elinor Dougall (Stellular, 2016)
9. 'Undertow' – Warpaint (The Fool, 2010)
10. 'Highway Patrol Stun Gun' – Youth Lagoon (Savage Hills Ballroom, 2015)
11. 'Line of Fire' – Junip (Junip, 2013)

Springtime for noir

8 Million Ways to Die (1986) directed by Hal Hartley from a script by Oliver Stone and R. Lance Hill, based on the book by Lawrence Block, with Jeff Bridges as Matthew Scudder. The real murderer was the studio but the movie is a beautiful corpse.

It was one of three noirs for The Dude alongside Taylor Hackford's Out of the Past remake Against All Odds (1984) and Sidney Lumet's The Morning After (1986). Lumet's did-she-do-it started out gripping and bloody (the wardrobe!) set in a realistic sunburned LA we hadn't seen before until the plot became melodramatic and the deadly Alex Sternbergen turned out to be Jane Fonda all along.

Hackford's upgrade of Jacques Tourneur's 1947 noir likewise ripples with smug potential. Bridges' Terry is a born victim and the sleaze casting is off the scale: James Woods and Richard Widmark alongside Saul Rubinek (get the way he says "fuck off") and the always disenfranchised Dorian Harewood. The new script recast Jane Greer's femme fatale as a spoiled girl which disempowered the character and robbed the story of its bitter center but Rachel Ward's replicant allure is a counterpoint to the sordidness: by end frame you want to go back and watch the movie again just in case things turn out better next time.

Also in 1986 was John Frankenheimer's 52 Pick-Up, the best Elmore Leonard dramatisation short of Get Shorty. Roy Scheider and Ann-Margret are the real thing, John Glover is a nasty piece of work and Clarence Williams III is the end of times. Grainy stock, fast cars and big guns, no CGI: it was an unhappier time.

Recently played

1. Texada – Blue (2016)
2. Electric Youth – Innerworld (Deluxe) (2014)
3. Lloyd Cole / Hans-Joachim Roedelius – Selected Studies, Vol. 1 (2013)
4. Jon Hassell – Aka / Darbari / Java: Magic Realism (1983)
5. Nite Jewel – Liquid Cool Remixes EP (2016)