Blogs

Lou Reed at 70 arrives onstage at the Festival Hall to do his bit for Antony Hegarty’s Meltdown programme dressed like a stroppy teenager in a baggy black basketball vest, gold medallions around his neck and what looks like a pair of tracksuit bottoms. He looks frail these days, though tonight slightly less so than last year at the Hammersmith Apollo, and perhaps no wonder when you consider what he’s put his body through over the years before he embraced his current sobriety.

The shouts begin in earnest around the first encore – most of them are calls for specific songs, accompanied by a smattering of “We love you”s, but the one that raises the biggest cheer is simply: “Where have you been?”

“I find it faintly ridiculous that anyone would want to make a film about me,” says Luke Haines at the start of Niall McCann’s documentary, currently touring film festivals. Haines has spent much of his career as both a musician and, latterly, an author, raging splenetically and repeatedly against Britpop and those musicians he considers of lesser creative stature – which is most of them.

While I’ve been rather excitedly banging on this year about the return to active filmmaking of the class of 1990something – Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Whit Stillman, Todd Solondz – I should, in all fairness, spend a few moments on the new film by Rian Johnson, a veteran of the class of 2000something.

I don’t have any more information on the new Bob Dylan album, Tempest, following last week’s newsletter and blog on Friday confirming the track listing, so apologies to all the readers who have written in, hungry for further details about the record. The absence of anything further I can tell you at the moment about Tempest gives me, however, the opportunity to briefly sing the praises of Lawless, the new movie from director John Hillcoat and Nick Cave, who’s written the screenplay, as he did for The Proposition, Hillcoat’s savage outback Western.

There’s a feature in the new issue of Uncut by Andy Gill on the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, where he gets to see a couple of extended shows in Cleveland, and I can’t recall the last time I felt so jealous of one of our writers.

Don’t spread it about, but, yes, I’ve heard the new Dylan album. And four or five tracks in, what I was thinking was: how much better is this thing going to get?

One encouraging thread in movies this year has been the return of filmmakers of a Nineties vintage. Wes Anderson, Whit Stillman and Todd Solondz have all returned, successfully, from their various sabbaticals. Potentially topping them all, we now have sight of the imminent return of Paul Thomas Anderson, with his first film since 2007's There Will Be Blood, called The Master.

Coming into work on the bus this morning, it occurred to me that the Christopher Nolan film I most wanted to watch again was Insomnia. I remember it being the least tricksy of Nolan’s films; a sharp, intelligent thriller, heavy on style and atmosphere, which seemed less concerned with the kind of ingenious puzzles and narrative twists that the director deployed in Memento, The Prestige and Inception.

Last night [July 16], the BBC pulled a documentary about last summer’s riots just hours before transmission after a court ruling prevented it from being broadcast. It’s foolish, of course, to speculate who initiated proceedings and for what purpose - although at the risk of sounding paranoid, you suspect there’s plenty of people who’d rather not have such pesky reminders of the riots on our screens in the run up to the Olympics.