Ghost world

Personal Shopper is The End of The Affair: an acute study of relationships in modern times with a magical element that feels both sincere and tacked-on. Graham Greene's novel frustrated readers who enjoyed the bits in it about people; Olivier Assayas' movie should be equally annoying but his mystery-machine is more compassionate. Maureen's connection with the spirit world is a neat metaphor for an interloper who purchases transient fashion on behalf of a distant celebrity; when she steps into her client's clothes she becomes someone other than Kristen Stewart, a meta-special-effect in itself. We are in the Single White Female / Maitresse neighbourhood here, the transference and stalking by text more thrilling and scary than any CGI spook. Contemporary Paris and London are looking newly sexy lately – see also In the Shadow of Iris (Jalil Lespert, 2016).

Recently played

'Get Free' Lana Del Rey (Lust For Life, 2017)

Jesus but this album is well put together. Americana imagery and British wit: the craft smarts that were the first albums by Duffy and Macy Gray steered by someone with a (pop) personality and (pop) agenda. She's working with a songwriter / producer, in other words. Which is how everyone does it these days (and maybe always did, Ronnie) but still: with a sidestep Lana Del Rey moves from curio to hi-rotate. So many things to enjoy: the handclap chorus with insouciant girl singalongs, the 'Loser' riff that segues into one and then two superior refrains at precisely the moment Radiohead's lawyer is picking up the phone, the Chris Isaak twangs, the '60s happening harmonies ... it all fits.

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'Opera House' Cigarettes After Sex (Cigarettes After Sex, 2017)

You'll hear a song and it'll get different thoughts happening that are away from what's bothering you. You'll get into this feeling of the song and that will transform your thoughts. The serenity of whatever the song is projecting takes your thoughts and puts them in a different direction. That's pretty much the same as meditation where you're saying, "Okay, let's have a mantra that's repeated." I really believe in musical therapy and things like that, and I think there's something to the vibrations of it.

– Greg Gonzalez interviewed by Eloise Blondiau for Interview.

Recently played

1. 'Chemicals' – Oliver, feat. MNDR (2017)*
2. 'Coachella – Woodstock in My Mind' - Lana Del Rey (Lust for Life, 2017)**
3. 'Mirroir Mirroir' – Desire (2009)
4. 'It's only' – Odeza feat. Zyra (2017) 
5. 'Someone I Care About' – The Modern Lovers (The Modern Lovers, 1976)

* Great pop happens when an artist finds a new way to say what's been said a hundred times before. Amanda Warner keeps doing this.

** A singles act drops an album dead-on the zeitgeist, bursting with melodies and references for older listeners but anchored in a community's time and place and minted for repeat play: Lust for Life is Parklife for 2017.

Notable

Q: What are other consequences of fans knowing more about the musicians they love? And also of being able to communicate with them? 

A: Another problem is it's too easy to listen to the opinion of the anonymous basement-dweller, and that's bad for art. Criticism hurts. Hearing someone say that you're a piece of shit or that the song you're insecure about sucks is harmful. And I have a hard time unhearing that stuff, so I really had to learn not pay attention. When I did Pretty Hate Machine, I didn't think anybody was going to hear it. Then suddenly it was, "Hey, X amount of people bought your record and it's time to write a new one." And you're thinking, I wonder what they liked about that other record I made? What if I want to take a detour into free jazz? How is that going to go over? When you're not thinking about the audience, you can make more pure art.

– Trent Reznor interviewed by David Marchese for NYMag.

Nobody drives like me. Nobody

Thirty-seven when he starred in The Driver (1978), Ryan O'Neal is no baby. Bruce Dern – pissy, unpredictable – is no cop either. This raises the stakes considerably: you don't know which way Dern's Detective is going to snap and the Driver is a man for whom the threat of a 15-year sentence means something. Isabelle Adjani, beamed from planet France, is as otherworldly as any Marvel heroine, and Los Angeles, filmed mostly at night, is the sci-fi cityscape the space truckers in Alien (1979) might have blasted off from. The connection is writer / director Walter Hill who was leaving fingerprints on Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett's Alien script around this time but The Driver looks backwards, not forwards. It came after Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971) had already put new bursts of speed on screen which Vanishing Point (1971) took to its logical conclusion, and the plot is even older, from Melville's Le Samourai (1967), which was written by Jean-Pierre Melville and Georges Pellegrin and one of those movies you only have to see once to never look at stories the same way again.

The pervading sense of doom is suffused with artificial light, sheer concrete and metal reflections: dark gloss on the mayhem. The opening chase is genuinely harrowing with no comforting score or digital editing to aid the getaway in the tight spots and no wisecracks or memes to cushion things for the viewer – Hill is on an open road. The characters exist only because they act. Driver has no father issues or back story – his goal is to do what he does. Doomed but independent, he's an adult.

Hill's The Driver would go on to influence Tarantino (what hasn't? Although 2007's Death Proof is his most disciplined outing) and Nicolas Refn's Drive (2011) – if not James Sallis' novel Drive (Poisoned Pen Press, 2005) on which Refn's movie is based. Drive is diminished even more after you see The Driver but it was a breath of cold fresh air at the time. And finally, parked neatly (why should he pay?), Baby Driver, whose director Saint Edgar interviews Hill in a self-self-referential handover. Hill plays the old nice guy nowadays and has only good things to say.

They loved it overseas, but in those days, that didn’t matter that much. It made exactly zero dollars in the United States. I remember the studio had this huge sheaf of Xeroxed reviews they’d handed me – you could stop a fucking .45 slug with this stack, it was so thick. And of all the reviews in this six-inch thick pile, there was only one good one. And now, whenever they show retrospectives of my stuff, it’s usually the first thing they show. Sometimes you just have to wait it out.

Recently played

1. 'I've Been Daydreaming My Entire Life' – Washed Out (Mister Mellow, 2017)
2. 'Artangels' – Grimes (Artangels, 2015)
3. 'Gronlandic Edit' – Of Montreal (Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer, 2007)
4. 'Guilty Party' – The National (single, 2017)
5. 'I Wonder U' – Prince and The Revolution (Parade, 1986)
6. 'Best of My Love' – The Emotions (single, 1977)
7. 'Propagation' – Com Truise (Iteration, 2017)
8. 'Lady' – Chromatics (Kill For Love, 2012)
9. 'A Quiet Storm' – Slow Dancing Society (I. Lilac Lullabies EP, 2017)
10. 'Sullen Girl' – Fiona Apple (Tidal, 1996)

Recently played

1. 'Genesis' – Grimes (Visions, 2012)
2. 'Golden Dreams' – Deux (single, 2013)
3. 'The Grooveline' – Heatwave (Central Heating, 1977)
4. 'Questions' – Amanda Bergman (Docks, 2016)
5. 'Cochise' – Audioslave (Audioslave, 2002)

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

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