Library Corner

What has read this month

A Reluctant Spy (David Goodman, 2025)

A wonderfully wry, gently smart spy thriller. Glaswegian misfit Jamie Tulloch is recruited out of Cambridge into SIS’s ‘Legends’ programme, in which real-life people lead real-life lives in order to establish cast-iron ‘legends’ that can be handed over to real spies when the situation demands it. When Tulloch’s handover goes to pot, he decides to just go with it, stepping into a field agent role with no training, no briefing and no clue what he’s doing.

Two things I really enjoyed about this: the first was the invocation of Zanzibar, which sounds absolutely delightful. An odd side-effect of reading thrillers is that you are introduced to parts of the world you’ll almost certainly never see; over the past year or so I’ve vicariously visited Tehran, Damascus, Moscow and the Florida Everglades. Something about the dictates of the genre – describing the location of a dead drop, narrating the experience of cleaning your tail – incentivises wonderfully evocative descriptions. But they’re always in the service of a plot, which stops them from becoming tedious drones about landscapes.

And the second highly enjoyable thing was Goodman’s quietly intelligent refusal to impose stereotypes on his characters. Tulloch feels like a real person, as does his unwilling field colleague. Sure, there are a few Russian goons and one or two Deeply Nasty Super-Spies, but most of the characters – up to and including the slightly bewildered public school boys at SIS headquarters – are just ordinary, flawed people who are trying their best. If you’re getting a bit bored with the thudding cynicism of all the British Slow Horses impersonators – endless books in which every single senior intelligence officer has the brain of a spaniel and the morals of a Roman consul – it’s a lovely little palate-cleanser.

The Anglo-Saxons (Marc Morris, 2021)/Millennium (Tom Holland, 2008)

The Anglo-Saxons was on a 99p deal on Kindle last month (sorry if this info comes too late to be of any use) so I took a punt, and was very glad I did. Morris has a wonderfully conversational style; thoughtful and interesting but utterly clear and comprehensible for the beginner.

He opens with a brilliant anecdote about a Suffolk farmer called Peter Whatling who lost his hammer in a field in 1992 and, in the course of searching for it, made a discovery ‘so startling that he immediately contacted both the police and the local authorities’; a hoard of Roman treasure, ‘one of the most spectacular ever unearthed in Britain’, that is now known as the Hoxne Hoard and can be seen in the British Museum. The team from the Suffolk Archaeological Unit, Morris notes, ‘also found Mr Whatling’s hammer’.

This is a great way to start a book about the Dark Ages (as we’re now not supposed to call them); but opening with a good anecdote is a relatively easy trick. What grips you is where Morris goes next: why was this hoard buried in the first place? The answer, he says, lies in one of history’s iron laws. ‘There is one paramount factor that consistently prompted people in all periods to conceal their valuables in the ground: fear.’ Fear of what, in this instance? Well, you should read The Anglo-Saxons to find out.

The book ends with the Norman invasion of 1066, so after finishing it I went back to Tom Holland’s Millennium, a survey of Western Europe before and after the year 1000CE. Reading these two back to back helped me to finally understand why I really struggle with Millennium: its narrative relies far too much on the ‘Peter Whatling’s hammer’ trick, but Holland doesn’t go anywhere comprehensible with his evocative openings. Again and again he drops you very effectively into some epochal moment (he opens with the Road to Canossa), and then just gets distracted by a now-occult aspect of Medieval theology, warbling on about it in increasingly strained language. ‘Not everything is to do with god, Tom!’ you cry, desperately turning the pages trying to find the bit where he presses a cold flannel to his forehead and remembers that he’s writing a history book. How this for a sentence: ‘To those who had imagined that the convulsions of the age might spell the imminence of the end days, and who had laboured mightily in the expectation of their coming, the failure of the New Jerusalem to descend could hardly be regarded as a cause for unconfined rejoicing.’ I understand it, Holland, but I don’t have to like it.

I have a lot of time for Holland (the co-host of the all-conquering Rest is History podcast and an extremely well-regarded popular historian). In a popular culture that is terrified of intellect and formal academic accomplishment, his success is one of the bright spots. So I shouldn’t complain; I’ve really enjoyed some of his other books. But there’s something about the way he writes about Christianity that just jangles my nerves. He’s a bit like someone who’s just given up smoking and can’t talk about anything else. Perhaps it’s just no use attempting him on this subject if you’re a lifelong atheist.

Letterboxd Diary

What has enjoyed watching this month.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde is, of course, usually seen as marking the beginning of ‘the New Hollywood’, introducing Nouvelle Vague film-making techniques and a stylised grit to American cinema. At first glance it seems terribly of its time, but it remains remarkably relevant. With its meandering plot, stylised and stylish characters and frank violence and dialogue, it comes across as a ‘60s Quentin Tarantino film. Or, more accurately, the kind of ‘60s/‘70s film that Tarantino is constantly remaking. Its position now, as a work of more historical than artistic interest, is perhaps an indication of how Tarantino will be remembered, too.

As you would expect, I would also recommend watching it just to see the outfit C. W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) is wearing when he first meets Bonnie and Clyde. Absolute perfection.

Speed (1994)

Speaking of Tarantino, here’s a film – one that’s the antithesis of New Hollywood – that he was originally approached to direct. Apparently he also likes it, despite calling it a ‘situation’ movie: a film that’s all about one high concept and nothing else. But that concept is a banger, literally: a bus has been rigged with a bomb (built around a wristwatch) that will explode if the bus’s speed falls below 50mph. The set-up is full of metaphors for the film itself: relentless movement, a clockwork-driven Hollywood plot mechanism, an object engineered to deliver nothing but pyrotechnics. The casting of Dennis Hopper, the enfant terrible and prime mover of New Hollywood, as a cackling one-note villain, emphasises that this is very much not a New Hollywood movie. It is slick, propulsive, precision-made entertainment. The setting is entirely hermetic, all enclosed spaces (lifts, buses, trains) and enclosed situations (the passengers and the police); the plot is a thing happening entirely within a movie, containing no reality whatsoever.

And, for once, Tarantino is right: it’s one of the better examples of its kind, and a terrific ride.

Das Boot (1981) / Greyhound (2020)

Another episode in the ongoing ‘finding something to watch with Rowan’s Dad’ project: this month, we fought the Battle of the Atlantic from above and below (and from either side).

First of all, we managed to find the 1984 full-length German-language version of Das Boot, which meant hours trapped in the stifling confines of U-96 with Karleun Jurgen Prochnow and his sweaty, bearded crew. Das Boot was made at the height of the Cold War, when West Germany was a key ally for the West; as with many war films of the time, it portrays most German combatants as anti-Nazi, as suspicious of the party members in their midst as they are of the British. On the other hand, it is rigorous in showing the crew of the U-Boat as fiercely dedicated to blowing up Allied convoys and fighting Royal Navy destroyers. While it is anxious to show them aghast when they discover they have torpedoed a burning Allied transport with crew still aboard, it is also careful to mete out justice at the close, with [spoilers] most of the crew killed in an RAF raid on the submarine pens. By this point it has managed to make the crew and their tribulations convincing and sympathetic enough that the moment is heart-breaking, even as it is reassuring that the war will be won by democracy in the end.

Greyhound (2020), part of Tom Hanks’s apparent mission to document every theatre of the Second World War, quite understandably does not feel the need to humanise the enemy. The view from the bridge of an escort destroyer is that the U Boat Wolf Pack is an insidious and ruthless danger. What Greyhound does have in common with Das Boot, though, is that it is very good at the business of the battles. Both also convey an acute sense of desperation and panicked struggle; not just for the survival of the crews, but for the survival of a political and civilisational idea.

Sadly, though, being an American film about an American ship, Greyhound is unnecessarily snide about the British. Das Boot, on the other hand, is commendably respectful about being hunted down and depth charged by the Brits, even if they are on a ship called something like HMS Tiggywinkle and crewed by John Mills and Richard Attenborough.

The Fabelmans (2022)

Greyhound led, inevitably, to Saving Private Ryan (1998). Rowan is never happier than when watching Tom Hanks win the Second World War, but that wasn’t the only reason; we’d just watched The Fabelmans, and were on something of a Spielberg jag.

The Fabelmans is a lightly fictionalised autobiography of Spielberg’s childhood and teenage years, and is one of the best things he has done in years. It is an example of what he is best at: films about middle class suburbia. I do not mean to damn with faint praise, being a middle class suburbanite myself.

It is customary to see Spielberg as lacking the ‘grit’ of the other New Hollywood tyros, but this is only true if you define ‘grit’ as ‘tormented, inarticulate men being dysfunctional at each other with guns and swearwords’. There’s a sequence [spoiler] in which Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) watches footage of her extra-marital affair that her son has accidentally recorded; I defy anyone to watch it and then argue that Spielberg films don’t contain grit.

It is also a perfect example of just how good Spielberg is as a director. He doesn’t try anything fancy; he just rests the camera on Williams’s face and trusts the actor to do their job. Williams absolutely does, in spades: joy at the memory of a family holiday, pride in her son’s film, and then a mounting horror, shame, anger and fear.

Also, you get David Lynch (looking very like my old friend Ben Wallers in his military surplus jacket) as John Ford, delivering some of the best visual storytelling advice I’ve ever heard.

Playlist

: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

Nothing From Nothing - Billy Preston. The weather has turned cold again in the UK, but this is a joyous slice of ‘70s soul pop to cheer us all up.

Mystery - Boxed In. Very taken with the way the almost rave piano resolves into a lovely upbeat indie chorus here.

Golden Meadow - Ancient Infinity Orchestra. This is possibly a little too much of a sleepy, summery sort of jazz for the time of year, but it’s splendidly dreamy.

Every Beat That Passed - Lost Horizons feat. Kavi Kwai. Something about this track immediately made me sit up and take notice, and then I discovered a member of the Cocteau Twins was involved. I am nothing if not predictable.

Plate - Genevieve Artadi. Even more predictably, I just discovered that this lovely bit of wonky funk (possibly funky wonk) was featured on the soundtrack of The Bear.

Katachi - Shugo Tokumaru. This is a great bit of upbeat Japanese pop which I picked before I knew it also had an amazing video.

EXPRESS YOURSELF - Kahil El’Zabar. This is a delightful jazz reworking of the Charles Wright track, somehow managing to be both hot and cool at the same time.

Laid - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. I was never a James fan at the time, but being the age I am, this song is a powerful inducer of nostalgia, and I think I prefer this version to the original.

Happy Djong - Twelve Point Buck. Speaking of nostalgia, this has a splendid lo-fi fuzz to it that is deeply reminiscent of all the pre-grunge bands I listened to in the late ‘80s.

Echo Beach - Martha & The Muffins. It’s not nostalgia if you still listen to it regularly because it’s still great. I don’t know why this suddenly appeared in rotation this week, but it always makes me happy. Here’s the performance on Top of the Pops from 1980, introduced by the gruesome Dave Lee Travis, not (yet) an accused sex offender (rare among that generation of Radio 1 DJs) but I warn you to never look at his book of celebrity photographs.

The whole playlist is on Spotify as usual:

Speaking of Hanks, Spielberg and World War II:

Small Prophets (2026)

The BBC’s hit du jour, Small Prophets is a comedy drama that differentiates itself using comedy that’s actually funny and drama that isn’t grindingly predictable. As with his previous hit The Detectorists, it feels like Mackenzie Crook is trying to make up for being integral in Ricky Gervais’ rise to fame by making shows that are kind and human. (Crook recently told The Guardian that ‘after The Office, I wanted to write something that wasn’t cruel.’)

The closest the show gets to a villain is the protagonist’s next door neighbour Clive, an athleisure-wearing Millennial whose house is devoid of decoration or personality, and whose life is a stew of status anxiety and militant normality. He is the villain because the protagonist, Michael Sleep, is a slacker. (It’s right there in his name. He is a Sleep; dreaming through life.) Michael is a Gen X man in late middle age with an extravagant white beard and a vintage French artisan’s jacket; he spends his time on whimsical projects for his beloved, and he hoards ‘70s ephemera. I am in this picture, and I’m delighted by it.

The story is appropriately oneiric too, incorporating a little ancient Egyptian magic, rare books and a flock of folklore signifiers: birds and hares and the titular homonculi. In an even more laser-targeted Gen X feature, these supernatural beings are stop-motion animated, rolling in a little Ray Harryhausen to go with the Action Man helicopter and the Modest Mouse t-shirt.

Oh yes, the homonculi. At one level, the weird little creatures that <spoiler> prophesy truthfully </spoiler> act as a metaphor for contemporary technology: a magical Polymarket, a stop-motion AI. They are strange intrusions from imaginary worlds that threaten to completely upend the way we think about the real one.

Small Prophets tell us that magic is everywhere, even in the back alleys of an anonymous town; at one point an adult mugger mistakes Michael for Father Christmas. In a typically excellent piece on why fantasy is appealing, Frances Spufford inadvertently outlines most of the reasons why it works in Small Prophets. Most particularly, it insists that the world is full of small wonders. As Spufford puts it, fantasy is ‘a kind of necessary realism, arising in response to qualities of the contemporary world that we couldn’t properly attend to, couldn’t narrate, any other way.’

The whole thing has left me deeply torn about the prospects of Crook making a sequel. I’d love to see more of this quietly magical world; and yet I’d rather leave it as it is, a remarkable little jar of wonder. Just lovely.

Steal (Amazon Prime, 2026)

Top subscriber (we recommend his Substack if you like elegantly waspish missives about maths) requested our views on this one, and who are we to refuse to watch a big dumb thriller? Sophie Turner is Zara, a frustrated back-room staffer at a City hedge fund who has a terrifying day at work when armed robbers break into the office. There’s a twist at the end of the first episode that sets the narrative ticking, and then we’re off.

Turner is fabulous, but you probably already knew that. There should be a compound noun for ‘thinking you’ve discovered a promising actor, then finding out that they have been globally famous for a decade because they were on Game of Thrones.’ This has happened to us about five times now. (We are not watching Game of Thrones and you can’t make us.) What can we say? There’s a reason our strapline is ‘no hot takes’. Anyway: the downside of Turner being so convincing and understated is that you really notice when the actors around her aren’t. The romantic interest is flaccid, and one major character is so persistently whiny and helpless that it’s a surprise when he calls his own Uber. There are some great little turns though: Ellie James should have her own ‘tough London detective’ show, and Anastasia Hille is absolutely terrifying as Zara’s mother.

Professor Johnson (passim) said he thought Steal was good but was missing something, and that’s the TL;DR. As with Turner’s performance, it’s one of those shows where some things are done so well that the less successful aspects stand out all the more. It’s sharply written: the dialogue is cracking, and the exploration of Zara’s background is much more interesting and nuanced than you might expect. The police simply do their jobs, which is always a relief; investigative incompetence is overused as a plot-driver. As with The Diplomat, this is a show that actually understands London’s geography, and allows a realistic amount of time for a character to travel from the City to Hackney. It isn’t afraid to show finance jobs as mostly very boring, which is a departure for a financial thriller. And it’s pleasing to see these young, not that well paid support workers living in realistically nasty, poky London flats. (The realism has its limits, though; Zara’s one-bed in the Leopold Building on Columbia Road would be worth somewhere north of half a million.) All in all it feels like a show written by an intelligent, witty person who understands the world it’s set in.

But there’s an underdeveloped political angle that gets jammed in uncomfortably right at the end; and the actual plot, if you focus on it, is nuts. It felt like a show that’s 80% of the way there but needed a little bit longer to cook. Maybe there’s something about the financial imperatives of streaming that forces creatives to push things out the door before they’re quite ready. That said: we watched it all the way to the end.

Letterboxd Diary

What has enjoyed watching this month.

Predator: Badlands (2025)

A Predator (an alien species known in-universe as the Yautja) arrives on the galaxy’s deadliest planet to prove his prowess and finds himself up against the most dangerous prey of all: man. Well, man-made androids, which, as we’re all discovering, are worse than actual humans.

The Predator originated in 1987 monster flick that put one down in the Colombian jungle to hunt a special ops team headed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The idea is that these aliens are the ultimate killers, devoted solely to hunting and gathering trophies. The mythos has evolved a little since then, we’ve learned more about their simplistic language, culture and homeworld, but the core idea is pure and, equally, simple.

All of which makes me wonder: if they’re these vicious murder monsters with claws so long they can barely press their computer buttons, where did they get all their terrifying toys from? Their invisibility cloaks and absolutely-not-lightsabres and laser traps? There appear to be no scientist Yautja, or engineers or writers of instruction manuals. Who invented and designed and built those faster-than-light engines and anti-gravity generators?

I realise, of course, that I am taking this all too seriously. The point of the Predators is to be a brute force that highlights human ingenuity and intelligence, but that also makes them a metaphor for precisely those special ops types that Arnold played in the original film. The ‘tip of the spear’ that so conveniently forgets the long haft of science and culture and technology that supports them. All the people who know how to make big fucking guns and run supply routes for food and ammo and still remember that the proper name for the shaft of a spear is a ‘haft’.

On the other hand, there’s something there. Such stupid questions often open up new clever answers and more ideas for more story. The Predator franchise was reinvigorated by Dan Trachtenburg with the very enjoyable Prey (2022), which starred Amber Midthunder as a Comanche woman facing off against a Yautja in nineteenth century America, a film that made the colonial metaphor aptly monstrous. Badlands is not quite as enjoyable but Trachtenburg at least seems interested in trying to do interesting things with the concept.

What’s noticeable is how much more adaptable and pliable a silly movie like Predator is than a genuinely brilliant and artful film like Alien (1979). The two franchises are often yoked together as sci-fi movies full of homicidal monsters, but the original Alien film is simply too good to sustain good sequels (I know, I know, Aliens (1986) is jolly good fun, I grant you, but it can’t hold a flamethrower to the original). Start somewhere stupid and you have somewhere to go.

Late Shift (2015)

A single late shift in a Swiss hospital as nurse Floria (Leonie Benesch) is faced with mounting stress, panic and exhaustion.

The Metropolitan Editors have been Leonie Benesch fans since seeing her much put-upon naïf Greta in Babylon Berlin (2017—). She is an absolute master of wide-eyed distress and barely contained anxiety, and brings it all to Late Shift. Indeed, there’s a striking moment of relief in which Floria jokes with a colleague and I think that may be the first time I’ve ever seen Leonie Benesch laugh on screen.

The film ends with text highlighting the shortage of nurses in Switzerland, although I’m afraid that British viewers may greet that with a hollow laugh. Compared to some NHS hospitals, Floria’s seems remarkably well supplied, staffed and funded.

I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)

This is Mary Harron’s ‘90s biopic of Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor), the writer of the militant feminist S.C.U.M. [Society for Cutting Up Men] Manifesto and the woman who tried to murder Andy Warhol.

The film is remarkably even-handed. It details both the hideous and routine abuses that Solanas suffered at the hands of a misogynous patriarchy, and her mental health issues that – while socially exacerbated – may also explain the violence of her reaction. It also takes a long, curious but not cynical look at Warhol and the Factory movement. At its heart is a consideration of sexuality, gender and biology that takes in every angle and remains admirably inconclusive.

Two things stood out on this rewatch, having not seen the film in thirty years. One was how fascinated my friends and I used to be with the Warhol New York scene; how desperate we all were to be Factory workers. Not only were so many of the Warhol crowd so dissolutely, stupidly cool, but also they represented an alternative to the more legible ‘60s legends that Boomers couldn’t stop making films and albums about during their ‘80s midlife crises: Beatlemania, Woodstock, Chicago, Vietnam. A less mainstream alternative ‘60s ancestry runs from Warhol to the YBAs, from the Velvets to the indie charts, and from Solanas to Riot Grrl.

The other thing that stood out was that we had to watch this on YouTube, because it isn’t available for streaming. Which is a shame, because it’s good: thoughtful, spacious, affecting, political, insightful, compassionate, complex. Just as the Factory disappeared from the mainstream mythology of the ‘60s, so there was another, more interesting ‘80s and ‘90s that is missing from the retro recreations like Stranger Things (2016-25).

Michael Clayton (2007)

We have been catching up on the latter half of the second season of Poker Face (2023—25). The first half got bogged down in some complicated story arc business that caused us to give up for a bit, but after that was all wrapped up Poker Face gets back to the cases-of-the-week stuff that it does so well.

Anyway, in one episode characters kept going on about how much they loved Michael Clayton, and we realised that we could remember nothing about it. So we went and rewatched it and discovered why: it’s not in the least memorable.

You know, it’s fine. Everyone apart from Sidney Pollack overacts a bit, but only Tom Wilkinson goes too far. The plot is almost knotty, but is full of loose ends and not at all believable. It’s the sort of thing that the Coen Brothers would have played for dark laughs, and it might have worked better that way.

So why do I keep reading things by Americans who seem to think it’s an all-time classic? I recently read something comparing it, as a perfect Hollywood product, to Casablanca (1942), which is befuddling. For a start, it doesn’t have ‘Cuddles’ Sakall or a rousing rendition of ‘La Marseillaise’.

My theory is that the corporate thriller has more relevance and bite in the States than it can do here. The typical British corporation is a bunch of chinless wonders in drip-dry suits who play golf and musical chairs with board memberships. The typical American corporation is a quasi-nation state that destroys environments, runs politics and grinds up lives for no greater motive than making the line go up and to the right.

The corporation driving the plot of Michael Clayton – a chemical manufacturer fighting a class action lawsuit over its toxic products – is all too believable. However, the subplot – in which Tilda Swinton’s in-house counsel hires some assassins to do away with troublesome lawyers – seems slightly too cartoonish from this side of the pond.

It is noticeable that writer/director Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars contribution Andor (2022–2025) was able to take a fundamentally silly sci-fi setting and use that to create a persuasive, chilling and gritty story of fighting oppression in a way that the apparently realist Michael Clayton doesn’t quite manage. Perhaps the ludicrousness of the sci-fi genre allows you to build thriller-level stakes without sacrificing the realism of the politics.

The Red Shoes (1948)

In The Mood For Love (2000)

Two tales of doomed love for Valentine’s Day. Well, not quite, but I’ve been meaning to watch Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love for years, and so was delighted to find it had appeared on streaming. And now I’m going to have to buy it on DVD because it is utterly magnificent.

The Red Shoes, on the other hand, is the great masterwork by my favourite film-makers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and I rewatched it solely because it was on iPlayer. It’s a good deal more histrionic than the achingly restrained In the Mood for Love, but the films have two things in common: they are not only very good but they are also extraordinarily beautiful. In the middle of a dull and rainy February I inadvertently created a little island of beauty, Wong Kar-wai’s cool greens and Michael Powell’s saturated red as an antidote to the endless grey of a British winter.

This might have to become a habit. Perhaps I might try the beautiful ‘half-asleep’ grainy midcentury colours of Ozu’s Late Autumn (1960) or Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958). Kubrick’s masterpiece of entrancing tableau Barry Lyndon (1975), or Wes Anderson’s sugar frosted dioramas of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Classic technicolour musicals, perhaps: the jewel colours of like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) or Cecil Beaton’s stunningly monochrome Ascot of My Fair Lady (1964). The magical scenery of Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service (so perfectly cosy for late winter), the luminous black and white of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946). All that visual delight and untrammelled beauty in which to luxuriate while outside it rains.

Playlist

: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

The Word The War - Liam Kazar

This is a nice chugging groove to bring us into March, just a hint of warm weather to come.

Taivshral - ENJI

This is a woozy piece of lyrical jazz pop, I think Enji - Erkhembayar Enkhjargal - is Mongolian by birth, although I’m not sure what language she’s singing in.

Dead - Komeda

I was quite a fan of Komeda in the ‘90s but somehow I’d never heard this track before.

Garden Botanum - These Trails

Here’s a delicate piece of ‘70s hippie folk to carry us into the new green of Spring.

Talk To Leslie - Katie Alice Greer

I’m rather fond of these lyrics where you can tell that there’s a story there, but what it actually might be is left carefully opaque.

Rabbit - Youth Lagoon

This is a beautiful, elegiac piece of music that has ear-wormed me for days.

so unique - Tikhet, Sepalot, Angela Aux

This has a nice lo-fi hip hop tone to it, with a touch of Motorik driving it along (appropriately for a German outfit).

Lights Out - Santigold

I’d somehow managed to forget all about Santigold and this track until Spotify reminded me, and it’s still great.

Be My Forever - Don’t Thank Me Spank Me!

There’s a band name guaranteed to make middle-aged Dad-adjacent listeners uncomfortable.

Mata Zyklek - Angine de Poitrine

My new favourite band. It’s ‘Tohogd’ on the Spotify playlist but there’s no video of them playing that live on YouTube and if you’ve never seen them before, it’s not to be missed. The Mighty Boosh plays Battles. They’re not just weirdo costumes though, it’s also incredible music. The perfect combination.

You can find the whole playlist on Spotify, as usual:

Here’s our piece on Andor, to make up for being mean about Michael Clayton:

Books to fall asleep to (non-pejorative)

: I finally wrestled Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell to the ground this month after a couple of false starts. Hilary Mantel and MacCulloch were researching Cromwell at the same time in the late noughties, and developed a close friendship while doing so. (This is ballast for my thesis that the pragmatic, adaptable and economically literate Cromwell was an appropriate hero for the anti-ideological age of Clinton, Blair and Obama.) Mantel published first with Wolf Hall in 2009, but MacCulloch managed to slip Thomas Cromwell (2018) in between Bring up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020), a run of events that transformed this eminent historian of Christianity into a best-selling non-fiction author.

Thomas Cromwell is catnip for the Wolf Hall devotee, albeit necessarily a little confrontational in places. Rationally, I knew that Cromwell got up to a lot of, er, crappy stuff (self-enrichment, torture, toadying, killing), but Mantel tends to let him off the hook (or perhaps shows us Cromwell letting himself off the hook - although I honestly think it’s more the former than the latter). MacCulloch, appropriately, is unsentimental and unsparing in the details.

Thomas Cromwell has gone straight into one of my favourite genres: books that I can read myself to sleep with. The boundaries of this category – which exists only in my head – are extremely well defined. The writing must be excellent; mangled sentences, repetition, stupidity and boring vocabulary keep me awake. The subject matter must be non-fiction (novels are too involving), and it must be something I’m genuinely interested in (I mean no shade here, but I personally do not care about gardening or the history of aviation). The narrative must be as un-pulsating as possible, for obvious sleepy reasons; I love Michael Lewis, but he’s for staying awake with, not going to sleep with. And the author must be a genuine subject expert, preferably an academic or someone who works in one of the less groovy think tanks. Journalists and professional writers tend to be far too good at telling a story, and that only makes me want to stay awake so that I can find out what happens next.

What I like is an extremely erudite, clever, informative-but-meandering drone delivered with real panache. My favourite book of this kind is Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom (an 800-page, 350-year history of Prussia), which includes sections on the Brandenburg education system that would send a caffeinated cocaine freak into a deep snooze. Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb is another absolute killer (hundreds of pages about electrons hitting foil sheets), as is Tony Judt’s Postwar (much, much more than you ever needed to know about the European Economic Community).

Thomas Cromwell contains multiple passages about Tudor ‘affinities’, the informal groupings of men-on-the-make who clustered around Court personalities. MacCulloch is, quite justifiably, keen to establish exactly who was in Cromwell’s affinity, and these passages – in which the movements of Mr (later Sir) Edward Squidlington are painstakingly traced over decades, from abbey to fishpond to New Year present to account book – are absolutely, perfectly boring.

Letterboxd Diary

What has enjoyed watching this month.

Bourne-ville

The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

I was actually looking for The Matrix (1999) for a little January comfort watch and then discovered that it wasn’t available to stream anywhere so I settled on that other Gen X action stalwart, Jason Bourne.

At the time Bourne was heralded as a Bond for a new generation, with none of the blatant sexism, xenophobia or quippy amorality that Gen X found so queasy. Bourne had a serious German girlfriend, a begrudging facility with the beautifully choreographed and crunchy fight scenes, and knew that the intelligence services he once worked for were sinister and unreliable.

It’s that last point that really stood out on this rewatch. The films are solely about Jason Bourne’s relationship with the CIA he once served, and this severely limits the sequels. They keep having to go further up the chain of command to find ever-more-evil CIA chiefs for Bourne to hit with a rolled up magazine. Each subsequent film is a retread of the previous one, but with Albert Finney instead of Brian Cox, David Strathairn instead of Chris Cooper. We avoid the ludicrous threat escalator of Marvel films (I’m going to destroy you! I’m going to destroy the USA! I’m going to destroy the galaxy! I’m going to destroy THE MULTIVERSE!) But it also means that the films are only ever about Bourne and his vengeance.

More realistic stakes are also less idealistic ones, apparently. This super-spy isn’t capable of dispensing justice, serving their country or saving the world; he can only look after himself. Perhaps it’s this really that made Bourne the perfect action hero for Generation X: he was socially liberal and yet deeply individualistic.

Le Samourai (1967)

In which Alain Delon’s loner hitman screws up a job and finds himself on the run from the cops, the mob that hired him and, ultimately, himself.

It’s no less ludicrous than Bourne films, really, and I’m not sure I buy the porcelain Delon as a killing machine any more than the pug-nosed Matt Damon. But by golly, it’s beautiful. The opening sequence alone is worth the price of admission: a static shot of Delon smoking in bed in a darkened room as the credits roll over the top. At first you think the film is in black and white, until he finally moves and you really it’s just that his whole world is grey: a grey room, grey clothes, grey cigarette smoke. He is the only discernable thing in his world. And so, right from the beginning, you know what this man is like and can probably guess that he’s doomed.

Santosh (2024)

A Bourne antidote: a British/Indian film with a perfect Hollywood set up. Santosh is a young Indian woman living in a drab town far from the bright lights. When her cop husband dies suddenly in the line of duty, she discovers that she is allowed to take his job in lieu of a widow’s pension, and finds herself investigating the death of a young girl while under the wing of a rare senior female detective.

The film then proceeds to do something very un-Hollywood with the concept. Instead of telling a story about a counter-intuitively brilliant detective team fighting engrained misogyny, the film exposes a vein of brutal police corruption that provokes unpredictable responses from Santosh herself. (The film, which also touches on the status of Dalits and the self-serving behaviour of rural elites, still hasn’t been officially screened in India.)

One of things that stood out to me is how the film seems to deliberately protect Santosh herself from the threat of physical violence, and instead subjects her to moral violence. She is in a three-way fight between her desire to do a good job as a police officer, her desire to be accepted by her mentor and her fellow officers, and her basic humanity. Shahana Goswami plays this absolutely perfectly, simultaneously naive, hard, nervous, stern and troubled. We should warn you, though, that it’s incredibly depressing.

Mountainhead (2025)

Part of the job of satire – altogether now – is to comfort the afflicted as well as afflict the comfortable. In fact you could argue that is most of the job. Rude impersonations and clinical piss-taking don’t tend to change anyone’s behaviour, but they reassure the rest of us that we are not alone in finding things awful, ridiculous or frightening. Satire tells us that there are fellow humans who feel the same way we do: people we can trust, people with whom we might huddle and even organise; people alongside whom we could even seize power, thus becoming the objects of satire ourselves.

Jesse Armstrong’s directorial debut is a satire about four tech moguls who go on a retreat and, confronted with each other’s awfulness, lose their minds. It’s not telling us anything we don’t know: we know these people are awful. (Two of the characters are assumed to be avatars for Peter Thiel and Elon Musk; Steve Carrell is extremely good in the former role.) Part of how awful they are is that they insist on thrusting their awfulnesses into our faces every day through their apps. We know they’re over-schooled and undereducated, asocial and amoral, unloved and uncontrolled.

What Mountainhead does is reassure us that we’re right: they are awful. It gives us a space to laugh, with a ghastly sort of terror, at the men who have taken one of the greatest human inventions and turned it into a machine for producing misery, madness and money. And there are some good laughs and splendid jokes in Mountainhead. But sadly they start to diminish as the plot moves into gear.

Armstrong likes a dark realism in his satires. Part of the success of Succession (2018–23) was that the Roy family were realistic characters. The satire was still there, but as you got to know them – and to understand why they were like that – you started to feel some grudging sympathy for them (if not actual empathy). The satire bit harder and comforted the viewer a little more precisely because these were people, not thinly-veiled caricatures.

Because it has to establish a narrative and deliver plenty of laughs within a two-hour window, Mountainhead does not quite have the time to develop the characters enough. And the movement of the plot from character-based comedy to murderous farce perhaps needed a little more absurdism in it to help it take off. There is a moment in the film, in the middle of a murder attempt, when a bevy of lawyers are summoned to negotiate between the aspiring killers and the terrified victim. Sadly, we never get to see the drafting of the resulting contract. I would have liked to see that film: a film about the cringing minions, not just the monsters they tend to and facilitate (another thing Succession pulled off brilliantly with the ghastly Gerri, Hugo, Karolina and Karl.)

The Ice Storm (1997)

A case study in how a film can seem terribly adult and subtle when you’re in your twenties, and somewhat blunt and hysterical thirty years later. A group of affluenza-afflicted suburbanites in the early ‘70s treat Cosmopolitan and Playboy like instruction manuals (wife-swapping, self-actualisation, Valium, shop-lifting) while causing untold misery to themselves and everyone around them, particularly their kids.

We got kinda irritated by it on this rewatch and ended up mostly paying attention to the sets. It’s interesting to compare its echt suburban ‘70s interiors with those of The Holdovers (2023), which is rapidly becoming a Christmas staple in this house. The Holdovers takes place in a ‘70s that is not only a little bit ‘60s, but a little bit ‘40s and ‘50s too, and even a little bit 1890s in some places. Given that most people don’t throw out their furniture every ten years, The Holdovers feels like a more recognisable ‘70s. I do, though, want an awful lot of the furniture from The Ice Storm. Apart from the water bed. And the bowl of keys, obviously.

Playlist

: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

Give Me The Simple Life - Annie Ross, Gerry Mulligan Quartet. Starting January with good intentions of leading the simple life after all the Christmas indulgence.

Keshukoran - Sister Irene O’Connor. Sister O’Connor is Catholic nun who writes her own devotional music, produced and engineered by a fellow nun, Sister Marimil Lobregat.

Deeper - Attica Blues. Somehow January feels like a trip-hop sort of month: a little bit blue, a little bit woozy, a little bit unnerving.

Kamukamo-Shikamo-Nidomokamo!! - MONO NO AWARE. But perhaps we need to stop moping about and perk up a bit. Or a lot.

100 Horses - Geese. I’m old, so I’ve heard a lot of hip New York bands. At the beginning I kept expecting someone to shout ‘Blues Explosion!’ Then I thought David Byrne might join in. And then I wondered if it was The Strokes. But then, I like all those bands too.

Big Balloon - Dutch Uncles. I’ve heard a lot of Manchester bands in my time, too. This is a good one, a lovely mixture of muscular rhythm and soaring tune.

The Late Great Cassiopia - The Essex Green. Speaking of New York bands, here’s a nice piece of psychedelia-inflected rock.

Kantori Ongaku - Devendra Banhart. Ah, the twenty-first century Donovan. Well, I have a soft spot for the twentieth century Donovan n’all, so I am happy to have another one.

Musician, Please Take Heed - Emily Browning. I’m afraid I’m a Belle and Sebastian fan (a middle-aged indie white man? Really?), but I’m willing to admit that Stuart Murdoch’s whine can be an acquired taste.

Beartown - Polar Bear. Finally a little blue, woozy, unnerving circus march to accompany us into the dregs of winter.

You can find the whole playlist on Spotify, as usual:

For visions of history that are guaranteed to keep you awake, there’s always the genre that has termed ‘macaron timeclash’:

Here we are again

It’s that time of year again: carols on the playlist, Christmas movies on the box, annual round-ups in the inbox.

The Metropolitan year seems to be taking a predictable shape. Everything generally ticks over: new pieces go out and new subscribers come in, both at a predictable rate. Then Rowan writes something that goes viral and a whole bunch of new readers show up en masse. This year it was her piece ‘I’m not watching ‘Anora’’ that earned a few hundred fresh subscriptions. Fortunately, most of you seem to have stuck around, despite most of our content not being hot takes about porn. We’re now closing in on 1500 subscribers, which is really something (this time last year we were kvetching about not reaching 1,000). We’re delighted to have you all here.

Back in the normal world, the two things that drive regular weekly subscriptions are recommendations and Notes. We get a lot of new subscriptions from other Substacks that recommend us; thanks in particular, this year, to Sandy and Conal. But the real driver is, slightly to our surprise, Notes.

I was slightly suspicious when Substack introduced Notes, because it felt opposed to the core offer.Substack was supposed to be newsletters in your inbox, not in yet another ‘walled garden’ app. However, it has proved to be a crucial part of the community. We already had a fairly rigorous self-imposed social media calendar, putting out posts every day on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook, so we just added posts on Notes to that regimen. The other platforms seem largely ineffectual, but the Notes posts seem to work. They seem to drive not just ‘follows’ but also subscriptions, bringing in a pleasantly steady stream of new readers.

Substack has something of a ‘reputation’, especially on platforms like BlueSky, but, frankly, we wouldn’t be getting new readers or finding our audience without their community tools and platform. Generally the advice on building a big audience for newsletters is ‘be famous somewhere else and bring your fans to Substack.’ We’re not famous (thank goodness) and have absolutely no audiences on any other platforms, so these kinds of features really help us reach new readers.

All of which is to say, please do share stuff on Notes if you use it — it really does make a difference for us.

Metropolitan Wrapped

The most popular stories this year were:

1. I’m not watching Anora

2. Are we… the baddies

3. Charlotte Raven

4. The Wire, but make it Keeley Hawes

5. Canon Fodder: Easy Rider

We only had one guest post this year, but it was, at least, a cracker, taking in gravitational waves, the sound of the Universe and sex:

The most popular playlist this year was June’s, which was a splendidly upbeat one.

In the interests of balance, the least popular piece this year was our piece on The Pink Panther, should you be looking for some viewing appropriate to a Bank Holiday in the next week:

Thank you

Thanks first of all to all of those readers who have liked and restacked and commented. It really does make a difference to hear from people who have enjoyed (or, in the case of ‘Easy Rider’, been enraged by) our pieces.

A by no means exhaustive list includes: Lou Tisley, Rosie Millard, Mapledurham, Oliver Johnson, Robert Machin, Kerstin Rodgers, L. E. Mullin, Richard Ashcroft, Victualis, Eliot Wilson, Whitney McKnight, Luke Honey, Dra, Chris Norris, Stroness, Hayley Dunlop, Promachos, and Sarah Ditum.

Then there’s the extended Metropolitan family: Annette Richardson, Chris Waywell, Finbar Hawkins, Lucy Thomas, Adam Goodfellow, Ross Sleight, Adam Frost, Kate Williams, Margaret Fiedler MacGinnis, Simon Stephens, Polly Heath and Emma Whitehead (apparently our most prolific recommender this year; thank you, your ladyship).

An extra special thank you to Herr Doktor Peter Wolf of the Paris Observatory for his splendid piece, but also for being an indefatiguable reader and commenter. Thanks, Pete.

And finally thank you to actual family, who read it all and say absolutely nothing: Morgan, Bella, Pippa, Jon and Caroline.

Happy New Year!

If you’re in need for something restfully seasonal to read/listen to now that all the fuss is over, can we suggest our sister Substack, Christmas Stories, and this year’s serial: The Wish List?

Christmas Stories

The Wish List - Item 1

‘The Wish List’ is the story of Alfie, who takes a seasonal job packing boxes at an e-commerce company, only to discover that the warehouse contain a good deal more than just presents…

Listen now

4 months ago · 1 like · Tobias Sturt

The BBC’s movie seasons in the Christmas holidays were our film school, introducing us to classic films we might never have seen otherwise. So now, each Advent, charges to curate a movie season based on a theme of her choosing.

This year:

Musicals!

There is one featured movie per day on the run-up to Christmas, plus a little extra if we have time. They’re roughly in chronological order until we get to Christmas and everything goes jingly. I’ll try and include a link to Just Watch for each film, where possible.

December 1^st

The Jazz Singer (1927)

The first sound film and, therefore, the first movie musical, so we ought to start with it really. Although it does contain technology, sentiment and opinions of its time, most noticeably a lot of black-face.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-jazz-singer

The Sound of Movie Musicals (2018)

The estimable Neil Brand’s history of the genre is the perfect introduction to the season and, more importantly, does not contain offensive minstrelsy.

December 2^nd

42nd Street (1933)

You can’t do the movie musical without some Busby Berkeley choreography and this is the original ‘the star has fallen sick and can’t go on, this is the understudy’s big break’.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/42nd-street

20 Feet from Stardom (2013)

A documentary about backing singers. The musicians whose sound you know, whose work is vital to making the stars and who are so often simply not seen.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/20-feet-from-stardom

December 3^rd

Top Hat (1935)

Fred and Ginger, inevitably. Astaire is an incredible dancer, obviously, and Rogers does it all ‘backwards and in heels’, but his gentle, tentative voice is charming and she was a terrific comic actor.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/top-hat

Band Wagon (1953)

A musical about musicals (because what else would those involved in musical theatre be interested in) and a later Astaire, paired with Cyd Charisse here and, most importantly, directed by Vincent Minnelli.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-band-wagon

December 4^th

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

The story of George M. Cohan, the songwriter, performer and ‘The Man Who Owned Broadway’, giving James Cagney a little break from playing psychotic gangsters.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/yankee-doodle-dandy

Broadway: the American Musical (2004)

A PBS documentary on the history of the Broadway musical over the twentieth century, telling the evolution of a quintessentially American art form.

December 5^th

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

The holotype of the Hollywood musical: a musical about Hollywood musicals, featuring great songs, great performances, romance, comedy, and inspiring a classical Morecambe and Wise sketch. Perfection.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/singin-in-the-rain

Brigadoon (1954)

More Gene Kelly, this time directed by Vincent Minnelli. Two hunters discover a hidden village in the Scottish Highlands that only appears once every century.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/brigadoon

December 6^th

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

One of the more remarkable things about Broadway is how songwriters could take something like the Roman myth of the Rape of the Sabine Women and make a musical out of it.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/seven-brides-for-seven-brothers

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Another possibly unlikely subject for a musical: Jewish life in an early 20th century Ukrainian shtetl, but perhaps not so unlikely, given that that was the origin story of so many Broadway songwriters.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/fiddler-on-the-roof

December 7^th

A Star is Born (1954)

Starring Judy Garland and James Mason, this was the second of four different adaptations of A Star is Born, which just emphasises how much Hollywood loves stories about Hollywood.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/a-star-is-born

A Star is Born (2018)

The one starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper just to show that we should be expecting another version some time around 2060.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/a-star-is-born-2018

December 8^th

Funny Face (1957)

Come for ‘Think Pink!’ and the title song, stay for the slightly squeamish May/December pairing of Hepburn and Astaire and the absolutely excruciating Existential party scene (pair with Tony Hancock’s The Rebel for maximum effect).

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/funny-face

High Society (1956)

A slightly less yawning generation gap between Bing and Sinatra, but a massive one between both of them and 26 year old Grace Kelly, in this musical remake of The Philadelphia Story (1940).

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/high-society

December 9^th

West Side Story (1961)

Bernstein and Sondheim together, adapting Shakespeare for contemporary Broadway and directed by Robert Wise in one of the great late Hollywood musicals.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/west-side-story

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened (2016)

A documentary following the making of the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/best-worst-thing-that-ever-could-have-happened

December 10^th

The Music Man (1962)

You’ve got Trouble, my friends, right here in River City, with a capital ‘T’, that rhymes with ‘P, which stands for ‘pool’! How many trombones is it in the big parade, Professor Hill?

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-music-man

The Producers (1967)

More musical con men, and a film very much for our times, when a musical about Hitler would almost certainly do unnervingly well.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-producers-1967

December 11^th

My Fair Lady (1964)

The reason why, when the dog steals my shoes, I put on my best Rex Harrison voice to ask him “Eliza, where are my slippers?”

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/my-fair-lady

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)

Absolutely stunningly beautiful film from Jacques Demy, which is entirely sung throughout, with no spoken dialogue.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-umbrellas-of-cherbourg

December 12^th

Jailhouse Rock (1957)

The young Elvis at his most electric, capturing him at the height of his early, pre-Army fame, transforming popular culture forever.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/jailhouse-rock

Help! (1965)

Basically, much as I’d love to pair Hard Day’s Night (1964) with Jailhouse Rock, I’m not convinced it’s strictly a musical, but I reckon we can get away with Help!

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/help

December 13^th

Oliver! (1968)

A little break from Broadway, with Lionel Bart adapting Dickens, directed by Carol Reed for a thoroughly British musical.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/oliver

Bugsy Malone (1976)

A weird offshoot of the Disco Deco, ‘20s revival of the ‘70s - a musical set during prohibition performed solely by child actors.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/bugsy-malone

December 14^th

Cabaret (1972)

Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome. A film about, as Peter Cook put it, “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/cabaret-1972

All That Jazz (1979)

Completing our Bob Fosse double bill with a Bob Fosse film about Bob Fosse.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/all-that-jazz

December 15^th

Funny Girl (1968)

A musical biopic of comedienne Fanny Brice, that brought Barbra Streisand’s Broadway performance to film, giving her her debut and making her a star.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/funny-girl

Rocketman (2019)

Another biopic, this time of a musician: Elton John, with professional chameleon Taron Egerton in the lead and directed by Bugsy Malone star Dexter Fletcher.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/rocketman-2019

December 16^th

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

The original cult movie musical, possibly the ultimate cult movie, come to that, favourite of theatre kids and suburban weirdoes everywhere. Viewers must provide their own props and costumes.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-rocky-horror-picture-show

Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

A film adaptation of a musical adaptation of a film. More to the point, a cult film adaptation of a cult musical of a cult film. What a load of cults.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/little-shop-of-horrors

December 17^th

Grease (1978)

A ‘70s reimagining of ‘50s high school making for an unlikely hit musical in an age of punk and disco.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/grease

Fame (1980)

Fame costs. And here’s where you start paying. In sweat. For bonus points you can add some episodes of the TV show that we all obsessively watched as teenagers.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/fame

December 18^th

Pennies From Heaven (1981)

The Hollywood version of Dennis Potter’s TV series, with Steve Martin in the Bob Hoskins role. Just be glad that I didn’t include the adaptation of The Singing Detective with Robert Downey Jr.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/pennies-from-heaven-1981

Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

Woody Allen’s tribute to the golden age of Hollywood musicals, guaranteed to upset everyone who doesn’t like amateurish singing and dancing.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/everyone-says-i-love-you

December 19^th

Topsy-Turvy (1999)

A biopic of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan from Mike Leigh. There’s also the 1983 film of Pirates of Penzance, although without Tim Curry as the Pirate King, who was spectacular, of course.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/topsy-turvy

Original Cast Album: Company (1970)

A D. A. Pennebaker documentary about the production and recording of the cast album of the Sondheim musical Company.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/topsy-turvy

December 20^th

8 Femmes (2002)

Eight women come together to celebrate Christmas, only to discover that the family patriarch has been murdered and any one of them could have done it.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/8-women

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

Two showgirls set out to find husbands. Talk to me, Harry Winston, tell me all about it.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/gentlemen-prefer-blondes

December 21^st

La La Land (2016)

Damien Chazelle’s loving ode to the Hollywood musical, predictably enough a Hollywood musical about Hollywood which you might be beginning to notice is something of a trend.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/la-la-land

Hamilton’s America (2016)

A documentary about the hit musical, its production and the history behind it.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/la-la-land

December 22^nd

Meet Me In St Louis (1944)

The film that brought Vincent Minnelli and Judy Garland together, thus uniting several films in this list, including Cabaret, of course. Have yourself a merry little Christmas, Judy insists on it.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/meet-me-in-st-louis

Road to Utopia (1946)

It could have been any of the Hope/Crosby ‘Road’ movies, but this one has lots of snow and a cameo from Santa Claus, so here we are.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/road-to-utopia

December 23^rd

Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

What’s this!? Why, its a stop motion musical about the Halloween King trying to take over Christmas, of course.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-nightmare-before-christmas

Spirited (2002)

Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds in a modern comedy musical retelling of A Christmas Carol.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/spirited

Christmas Eve

White Christmas (1954)

You can’t have Christmas without Bing. The song actually first appears on screen in a different musical: Holiday Inn (1942), but it was such a hit they gave it its own film.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/white-christmas

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

Possibly the best adaptation of A Christmas Carol, probably the best Muppets film, almost certainly the best Michael Caine performance. You absolutely cannot have Christmas without The Muppet Christmas Carol.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movie/the-muppet-christmas-carol

If you’re still feeling festive, we’ve now gathered all our seasonal material into one place:

A Very Metropolitan Christmas

The Diplomat (2023—)

: For those of you who enjoy The West Wing, we recommend The Diplomat if you haven’t yet discovered it. Created by Debora Cahn, who began her writing career on The West Wing, The Diplomat is the story of a career American diplomat, Kate Wyler, who is appointed ambassador to Britain in the wake of a terrorist attack on a Royal Navy aircraft carrier in the Gulf.

The Diplomat is a good deal pulpier than The West Wing, and it’s more of a thriller than a political drama. Indeed, it contains a lot of elements that usually make me hate a show: the constant escalation of plots with increasingly bizarre developments, storylines that only ever involve the same five people we met in episode one, regular revelations of the kind usually associated with soap characters. But I loved it. We have binged it intemperately and now have nothing to watch.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I loved so much. To start with, many of the performances are great: Ali Ahn is splendidly dry as CIA station chief Eidra Park, and Rory Kinnear is having a whale of a time as an unhinged British PM, a sort of hideous Boris Johnson/David Cameron hybrid. We also get the onscreen reunion of Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford, and it’s a treat.

But what blows me away is the details. A beautiful degree of thought has gone into researching exactly the right class markers for high-ranking Americans living in London: in one scene, Eidra eats a Sainsbury’s ‘Taste the Difference’ takeaway salad while drinking from a Le Creuset mug. Almost uniquely, this is an American-made show that acknowledges there’s more to London than Westminster Bridge and the Brompton Road, and exterior shots are almost always geographically accurate. This sense of care extends through the whole production.

All three seasons so far have been driven by the spiralling fallout of a single inciting incident, the attack on the British carrier. Sure, that fallout becomes increasingly ludicrous; but each twist is taken seriously. The politics are developed believably; the intelligence and personalities of the characters are consistent. It also, I suspect, captures a fundamental truth of politics: that there is no ‘solution’, no right answer. Instead, there is just a constant scrabbling to keep everything together, like Gromit in The Wrong Trousers (1993) desperately laying down train tracks in the path of onrushing events, dear boy, events.

Strange New Worlds, Season 3 (2023)

: Quiff, the final front hair. Speaking of ludicrous but wonderful, Captain Pike and The Enterprise are back for some further boldly going. For the Star Trek-agnostic (barbarians), this is a prequel to the original series, although the Enterprise is increasingly full with classic characters. It’s had a young Spock, Uhura and Chapel since the beginning, but we’ve now picked up a young Scotty, and a young Kirk keeps popping in to practise his idiosyncratic empha… sis.

Each version of Star Trek is a reflection of its time. The original ‘60s series is full of Kennedy-era American gung-ho; the ‘90s Next Generation is endless committee meetings and corporate empathy. Strange New Worlds is… silly. Delightfully so, I should point out, and not without an accompanying darkness. Most of the characters are dealing with some kind of trauma from their pasts, and we already know from the original series that Pike himself is heading for a grisly end. But the show insists on dancing, sometimes literally, in the face of certain doom, which is rather like watching a fantastical sci-fi adventure in today’s political climate. Anyway, it is at least absolutely doing what I’m here for, upholding that central Star Trek tenet: that if we learn to work together, we might just make it through.

Letterboxd Diary

: I complained in the last Mixtape about how I’d seen all the classic Universal monster movies (often multiple times) and now had nothing to watch for Halloween. But then I remembered that people keep remaking those classics, including some of the most inventive film-makers currently working. And since that Mixtape came out well before Halloween, I was able to have a lovely seasonal mash with the monsters.

The Skull (1965)

A rather silly Amicus horror in which the skull of the Marquis de Sade is haunted and causes whoever owns it to become a murderer. It’s basically a ‘60s-set story about the seedy purveyors of esoteric artefacts and amateur occultist collectors (Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, what a delight!). It put me in mind of a Charles Williams novel: dark magic in a mid-century setting. The last half hour, as the skull drives Peter Cushing’s mild-mannered antiquary homicidally insane, is almost entirely without dialogue. It’s just pure visual storytelling, with the skull floating menacingly around and Cushing acting his little socks off, all beautifully photographed. After all, director Freddie Francis did also work as a cinematographer, on, for example, The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984).

Frankenstein (2025)

Speaking of silly but beautiful, here’s Guillermo del Toro’s version of Mary Shelley’s foundational gothic horror. Everyone always exclaims in wonder that it was written by a 19 year old, but by god you can tell. This is compounded by the fact that dialogue is not del Toro’s strong suit: at one point his brother even tells Frankenstein ‘You are the monster’. But while del Toro might be a little too faithful to Shelley’s dense early-nineteenth-century prose, he perfectly captures her hallucinatory gothic vision. It is a wonderfully designed and directed film. And wonderfully cast, too; finally, someone’s found a good use for Jacob Elordi.

Nosferatu (2025)

Very much not Dracula, legally speaking, because F. W. Murna — the director of the 1922 original — didn’t properly license Bram Stoker’s novel, and the film was supposed to be destroyed following legal action by Stoker’s widow. Fortunately not every copy was, which is how Robert Eggers has come to remake it. He captures that sense in the original of a vampire as a force of disease, of physical corruption, rather than the sexual and moral corruption of Dracula (1897) and of so many subsequent adaptations. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) would make a particularly lush and romantic comparison to this shadowy, skin-crawling film. I think I might even prefer it to Werner Herzog’s chilly 1979 remake.

The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025)

I was slightly worried that this was going to be an awkward and squirm-inducing comedy of embarrassment, but it’s not. It is awkward, but not unbearably, and it’s largely cosy and unthreatening. You do have to slightly recalibrate yourself when you realise that it’s not about the lost romance between the two musicians, but instead is about the burgeoning bromance between the musician and his slightly weird fan. But then, I’ve been a slightly weird fan of Tim Key and Tom Basden since their excellent late-00s sketch show Cowards, so that was fine with me.

Toni Erdmann (2016)

Speaking of something that should have been awkward and squirmy and absolutely wasn’t: I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard at a film in years. It also has a deep layer of sadness, and a jaundiced view of modern corporate life, EU expansion, and the cultural and economic gaps between different parts of the continent. (It’s a particularly European film, with its own idiosyncratic rhythms and interests; the rumoured remake starring Jack Nicholson and Kirsten Wiig sounds like the ravings of a madman, impossible and stupid.) Most of all, Toni Erdmann is about a relationship between a tightly wound, high achieving daughter and her lunatic father, played by the always extraordinary Sandra Hüller and the excellent Peter Simonischek. There are some quite stunning moments in which Hüller appears to do nothing, and yet you can watch an entire series of emotions cross her mind. It really is a masterclass in film acting, from both of them. A terrific, idiosyncratic and hysterical movie. Straight into the Letterboxd Favourites, this one.

The Irishman (2019)

: In an inversion of our usual form, I made Toby write about The Diplomat because I wanted to write about the Scorsese film.

It’s possible that, like us, you’ve been avoiding watching The Irishman because a) it’s three-and-a-half hours long (!!), b) it’s yet another gangster film, and c) it uses ‘de-ageing technology’ to allow Robert De Niro (76 when it was released), Joe Pesci (also 76) and Al Pacino (79) to play men in their 30s and 40s. Taken together, this was not — for me at least — an appetising proposition, but I was eventually drawn in by the premise; The Irishman is adapted from the memoir of a man who claimed to have killed notorious US union boss Jimmy Hoffa.

So, does it work? Well…

The ‘de-ageing technology’ is creepy as hell (everyone looks like Tom Hanks in The Polar Express), and is also a failure in its own terms, because the de-aged De Niro is not, at all, a plausible approximation of a 40-year-old. Even without the weird facial denaturing, he has the voice of a 76-year-old, the gait of a 76-year-old, the energy of a 76-year-old. Ageing is a whole-body process.

The film is also incredibly slow and plodding. At times it’s outright monotonous, so that you think ‘Marty, you could just have cut that entire scene.’ There are sequences that recall the famous tracking shot in the restaurant in Goodfellas, but they are less glamorous and overwhelming. There are scenes that riff on the ‘take the gun, leave the cannoli’ vaudeville from The Godfather, except that they’re not funny. The Irishman feels like something that has gone to seed: flabby and slack, pushing at the seams of its leather blouson jacket.

There are two possible explanations for a film with these flaws making it to the screen. The first is that Martin Scorsese has suddenly lost the use of his faculties and all his five senses. The second is that he’s doing this deliberately. And if he’s doing it deliberately — and I think you have to give him that much credit — the whole things becomes a cinematic portrait of Dorian Gray, a revelation of moral and literal corruption.

I think, in The Irishman, Scorsese is atoning for Goodfellas, a film that made the life of a mafia thug look so beautiful, so exciting and compelling and urgent and funny and narratively perfect. Don’t get me wrong: I love Goodfellas. But there’s no getting away from its moral glibness, the way it covers violence with a dusting of starlight and refuses to properly contextualise the depravity and narcissism. The way it makes shooting people in the head look real fuckin sexy, like Elliot Gould and Grover.

In The Irishman, Scorsese is saying: you know what? Not only are mafia hoods evil; they’re also boring. They wade slowly through life. They bump into furniture; they’re slow on the uptake; they look bad in their suits. Their much-vaunted social culture is thin and tedious. And the soundtrack consists of whatever happens to be playing on the radio at the time. I think Scorsese knows very well that nothing about the de-ageing technology works, but using these actors — so much less energetic and attractive than they were in their prime, and encumbered with an uncanny, awkward visual effect — is a stunningly effective way to dramatise the corruption of a culture these men once did so much to glamourise.

Playlist

: Traditionally, the November playlist is a Christmas one (by which I mean, it was last year and I intend to keep doing this indefinitely). I was going to make this a list of sad Christmas songs as a sop to those Scrooges who hate the season (or, more specifically, hate the genre), but then a narrative arc started developing and I couldn’t help myself. The playlists are all on Spotify.

Blue Christmas - Elvis Presley. We’ve already talked a lot about Elvis this month, so it seemed only right to kick off with him.

Santa, Bring My Baby Back (To Me) - Eleanor Friedberger. More Elvis but reinterpreted by Eleanor Friedberger sometime of The Fiery Furnaces.

Some Hearts at Christmas Time - Low. You’ve got to have Low at Christmas. We had the classic ‘Just Like Christmas’ last year so here’s an alternative.

Hard Candy Christmas - Dolly Parton. There’s a bright ache in Dolly’s voice that just perfectly sells this song of seasonal blues.

Just Me This Year - Rachael & Vilray. But then does the season need to be blue? It could be cheerfully jazzy instead.

Last Christmas - Lucy Dacus. Are you playing Whamageddon? Good news: you can stop worrying about that now, thanks to Lucy Dacus.

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve? - Nancy Wilson. There are certain genres that are perfectly suited to Christmas music: brass bands, obviously; amateur choirs; foot stomping Glam. But mid-century jazz might be the cosiest.

All I Want for Christmas Is You - Carla Thomas. Or maybe its mid-century soul.

I Don’t Intend to Spend Christmas Without You - Margo Guryan. We’re starting to get a little more hopeful now, thanks to this lovely little slice of ‘60s pop.

I’ll Be Home For Christmas (If Only In My Dreams) - Frank Sinatra. Maybe it’ll be alright, after all, thanks to Frank.

You can also find this playlist on Spotify:

If it’s almost December, it’s almost time for this year’s Christmas Story. Here’s a sneak preview from The Metropolitan’s seasonal sister Substack:

Christmas Stories

The Wish List: Sneak preview

‘The Wish List’ is the story of Alfie, who takes a seasonal job packing boxes at an e-commerce company, only to discover that the warehouse contain a good deal more than just presents…

Listen now

4 months ago · Tobias Sturt

Letterboxd Diary

: My traditional self-indulgent Halloween horror movie watching has been much curtailed this year by illness (mine and others’), travel (for work) and the fact that I’ve watched all the classic Universal Monster movies now and I’m not sure I can face Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

I have managed at least to squeeze in a viewing of Lost Hearts (1973), technically a ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’, but a story which takes place over Halloween, so I think its allowed. However, we’ll almost certainly cover M. R. James and the BBC’s ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ strand at some point, so we’ll save that for the moment

Meanwhile, here’s some films I did manage to watch (alongside all the Sherlock Holmes content I’ve been forcing my way through):

The White Reindeer (1952)

We’ve had The Wicker Man this month, so how about some Finnish folk horror? A tale of love magic gone awry among Sami reindeer herders in Lapland. A neat little bridge from Halloween to Christmas, symbolically. This won Best Fairy Tale film at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, from a jury led by Jean Cocteau, who knew whereof he spoke in that regard. It really is a strange and alluring thing, an immediately recognisable folk tale of broken hearts, curses and murder, but in a setting and cultural context that renders it new and extraordinary. All those snowfields lend themselves beautifully to black and white photography too.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Our enquiry into the causes, course and consequences of the American Civil War has finally brought us — as it previously did American culture — to Westerns. (Also, Ro’s Dad is happy to watch them.) In the ‘40s and ‘50s there were war films; the ‘60s and ‘70s had called in the cops and spies as possible alternatives; and then Star Wars (1977) came along and changed everything. By the time Gen X was born, the Western hadn’t been the default action genre for some time. But my grandmother would watch anything with a horse in (especially if the horse had John Wayne on top), so I saw a lot of them as a kid.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a classic: a John Ford movie starring both Wayne and Jimmy Stewart that, like most classic Westerns, is about the end of ‘the West’ and the myth of ‘the Western’. The story is that Jimmy Stewart’s Stoddard has become a US senator on the back of the popular belief that he faced down and shot a bandit, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). In fact, Liberty was shot by local gun man Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who conceals his heroism so that Stoddard can win power.

As a child I completely missed the significance of Liberty’s name, and the film’s peculiarly American idea of the compromises of civilization: in order for civilization to flourish, liberty must die. A society that has laws, and protects its citizens from fear and want and oppression, is a society that has given up a purer kind of liberty: the liberty to be a bully or a bandit, or a fine, upstanding-yet-bowlegged varmint like Tom Doniphon. The film seems to sum up a core American dichotomy: a pride in technological democracy that co-exists with a yearning for the lost anarchic Eden of the unsettled West.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Lee Marvin appears to have been the only Democrat on set.

Now Voyager (1942)

One of those classic films in which you finally discover where a bunch of tropes originate: the lighting of two cigarettes at once; brittle, allusive dialogue; the transformation of a thick-eyebrowed, frumpy maiden aunt into a glamour girl (Bette Davis). ‘Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.’ Inevitably, it is utterly unhinged; a story of repressed and self-sacrificing passion from a repressed and self-sacrificing age. The age of heroic psychiatry, in fact; Claude Rains plays the twinkliest, most heroic of psychiatrists.

Something we noticed about so many of those great stars of the golden age — the stars, particularly, of so-called ‘women’s pictures’ — were not classical beauties, but rose and shone on pure talent and charisma: Davis, Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn.

Late Autumn (1960)

No Kurosawa this month; Ozu instead. Late Autumn is the story of a widow and her single daughter who are living happily together while all their friends try to separate them so that they can be married off. In this it shares key plot points with Ozu’s earlier (1949) black-and-white Late Spring, but Late Autumn revisits these plot points in a more modern Japan, and in colour. And what colour! Ozu insisted on shooting on German AGFA colour stock, a film that he referred to as ‘half-asleep’. Its colours, muted but luminous, are beautifully suited to the material: turn-of-the-decade Tokyo, the soft teals and primroses of ‘50s interiors, the jumble of neons and signage of the alleyways. Among its many other charms, it is an absolutely beautiful film.

The Candidate (1972)

Rowan has already expressed her opinion of this Robert Redford political satire, but I wanted to add that one of the many things that I (and I alone, apparently) enjoyed about it was that, as you would expect from a Robert Redford movie, the clothes were astonishingly beautiful, and worn with style, inevitably. Also, I would like to live in the Candidate’s house, thank you very much: all white-washed brick and hanging house plants, the interiors of the magazines of my childhood.

What Have I Done? by Ben Elton (2025)

A hot take! I heard Ben Elton talking about his autobiography on a recent episode of ‘The Rest is Entertainment’, and had to download it immediately: I think this had something to do with the sheer velocity of his anecdotage (Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmonson, Dawn French, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Rowan Atkinson and John Lloyd were all mentioned within the first 180 seconds), combined with my own mild head cold. Definitely the kind of book you can gulp down in six hours while mainlining Strepsils.

I thoroughly recommend What Have I Done? if you’re of the age to remember the first transmissions of Blackadder, The Young Ones and Saturday Night Live. It’s a very satisfying (and non-ponderous) insider account of the meetings, the dreadful behaviour (Alexei Sayle comes off as a right wanker, as does Jonathan Ross), the lovely behaviour (absolutely everyone else), the parties, the script-writing and the studios; nerd heaven for anyone interested in the creative process. He talks a lot about the extraordinarily unpleasant ‘Oxbridge tutorial’ vibe in the Blackadder script table reads, and pretty much explicitly says this is the reason they will never make another one.

It also touches lightly on Elton’s personal story, without boring the reader rigid. I had never known that he was the nephew of the historian Sir Geoffrey Elton (the original Thomas Cromwell stan), or that he (Ben) suffered dreadfully from psoriasis throughout the years he was most prominently in the public eye.

Media coverage of the book so far has picked up on Elton’s very honest account of how much he was hurt by relentless criticism; not from the public (who happily consume whatever he is selling) but from actual, salaried critics and journalists, who have hunted Elton for sport throughout his career. I found his openness about this charming; relentless personally-inflected criticism must hurt a lot, and Elton has a puppyish eagerness to please that brings out the bully in a certain sort of writer. He considers briefly whether there might be some anti-Semitic animus here, although he doesn’t get too exercised about it. He concludes — and I think he’s right — that there’s a certain sort of cultural snob who cannot stand creatives who are both popular and successful. And Elton, for more than 40 years, has been both: sitcom writer, stand-up comedian, film writer, film director, librettist, musical director, novelist - he’s won awards for work in about ten separate fields. Must drive some people absolutely potty.

Most of all, the book reminded me of those mid-’80s evenings when I listened spellbound to Elton’s ‘little bit of politics’ monologues on Saturday Night Live. He’s not the best comedian of his generation, but those monologues were, I think, the very first time I heard a celebrity name and shame the absolutely endemic sexism of ordinary British culture. In the book he talks about being accused of ending Benny Hill’s career, because he had spoken on Wogan about how much he deplored Hill’s ‘comedic’ deployment of sexual harassment and voyeurism. As a 15-year-old girl whose relationship with her own body had been blighted by the mainstreaming of Hill’s predatory masturbatory fantasies, I remember wanting to stand up and applaud whenever Elton got onto the topic. No other famous ‘alternative’ comedian used their platform to highlight questions of women’s comfort and safety, with the always-excellent exception of Jo Brand. I really, really don’t ever want to see We Will Rock You, but I think Ben Elton is a bloody hero.

Playlist

What Tobias has enjoyed listening to this month. The playlists are all on Spotify.

‘Willow’s Song’ - Katy J Pearson. Proof, if proof be need be, that it’s not just middle-aged men who are fans of The Wicker Man. Although, to be fair, it is mostly middle-aged men.

‘Karins Kerma’ - Bobby Hughes Combination. Some splendidly smoky and slinky jazz from what turns out to be a Norwegian DJ.

‘Águas de Março (Joga Bossa)’ - Smoke City. I know we’re a long way from March right now, but this is one of my favourite songs and as a man of a certain age, I couldn’t resist a trip-hop cover of it.

‘Funk #1’ - Sababa 5. Some psychedelic Middle Eastern funk for you (which just a dash of hauntological synths to keep with this month’s folk horror theme).

‘Que Tumbao’ - QUITAPENAS. And now some psychedelic Latin American funk for a little change.

‘El Alacran’ - Pacho Zapata. Some fantastically unhinged organ.

‘Cujo Kiddies’ - Disq. ‘Cujo’ is an appropriately Halloween reference, right? (I have neither seen nor read it)

‘Butterfly Season’ - Family Time. There’s a love motorik style to this track, married to some lovely synth melodies. And the video features a PowerPoint presentation.

‘For Someone’ - Long Fling. Featuring Pip Blom, this is a nice piece of lo-fi indie.

‘The Green Country (New England Mood)’ - Jimmy Giuffre. It says ‘green’ in the title, but there’s something very (and appropriately) dark and autumnal going on here

You can also find this playlist on Spotify:

This month’s entry in our on-going series on Holmes Movies looks at two versions of Holmes from two greats of animation, Disney and Hayao Miyazaki:

The only funny thing Jimmy Kimmel ever did

Despite the fact that Everyone Is Talking About Jimmy Kimmel All Of The Time, I haven’t seen anyone mention this clip from 2007. I thought this might be another case of the memory-holing of core Gen X content, but when I talked to Tobias about it he had no idea what I was referring to, so maybe I’m the only person who ever saw it? It’s too good to keep to myself, so here you go. (NB: not safe for work/children.)

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x48p7b

The American Civil War

Question: where (if anywhere) have you heard this song before?

If you’re shouting ‘Ken Burns!’ then congratulations: ‘Ashokan Farewell’ (written by Jay Ungar, the guy on lead fiddle in the above clip) is the unforgettable theme tune to the 1990 PBS series ‘The American Civil War’, which propelled Burns to as much stardom as is possible for a man who makes documentaries.

We’ve been marinating in US Civil War content this month, prompted initially by The Rest is History’s series about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (7/10, assuming you like the Holland/Sandbrook senior-common-room schtick, which I do). This turned out to be a mild plug for the Apple TV series Mahhunt, which is about the aftermath of the assassination and the hunt for John Wilkes Booth, history’s most evil thespian, which is really saying something. Manhunt is quite silly; it goes large on a slightly crazed conspiracy angle. But it’s a useful introduction to the cast of characters who made up Lincoln’s immediate political circle, particularly his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who turns detective after his boss’s murder. (This seemed implausible to us, but is exactly what happened in real life.) Stanton is played by Tobias Menzies with his customary straight bat and clamped jaw, and Wilkes Booth is well done by the ubiquitous Anthony Boyle. Rating: 6/10 (would have been 7 without the confusing conspiracy stuff).

After this mild silliness, we turned to the masters. First up was Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), which focuses on the weeks before Lincoln’s assassination, as the war ends and Congress passes the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. Lincoln is basically a two-and-a-half-hour episode of The West Wing, in the best possible sense: densely plotted, literate, funny and tight. Many of the actors are spookily accurate physical doubles for their real-life counterparts, particularly Daniel Day-Lewis as Honest Abe, David Strathairn as Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward, and Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant. (Harris is apparently keen to star in an adaptation of Ron Chernow’s recent biography of Grant, which would be amazing.) There’s also a capering cameo by a delightfully gone-to-seed James Spader. 8/10, assuming you like The West Wing.

Next was Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (2006), the book that inspired both Spielberg’s film (Kearns Goodwin co-wrote the script) and Barack Obama when he was thinking about running for president. Team of Rivals – whose other famous fans include Sir Alex Ferguson – is an absolute banger, full of snappy character sketches and clear explanations of what the hell was going on. It also offers a pleasingly minimal treatment of the actual battles. 8/10 unless you like military history, in which case you will be disappointed.

(As a chaser, you could try Gore Vidal’s novel Lincoln (1984), which tells almost exactly the same story but in a thinly fictionalised form. After a lifetime of listening to Boomers wittering on about Vidal, this is the first book of his I have read, and on this basis I can’t quite see what the fuss is about; it’s a competent and enjoyable 7/10, but he ain’t no Hilary Mantel.)

And then there is Burns’s The American Civil War (1990, PBS, available on Now TV in the UK). It’s hard to describe now how much this shook up the documentary form when it was released: I remember my dad, who made historical documentaries for the BBC, watching it with wordless intensity when it was first broadcast. Burns’s slow panning across photographs was so visually successful that he gave his name to an iMovie effect, and his use of famous actors to read soldiers’ letters and politicians’ speeches kicks the whole thing up a level. Morgan Freeman, most notably, is unforgettable as Frederick Douglass, and Sam Waterston brings great comic timing to Lincoln’s many quips (my favourite of which concerned a superstar general who repeatedly refused to engage the enemy: ‘If General McClellan is not going to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a while.’) I have a theory, though, that it’s the music that really makes it, invoking a depth of emotional response not typically associated with documentaries. How can you hear ‘Ashokan Farewell’ or the a capella version of ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ and not be thoroughly hooked?

As with most of the films, programmes and books mentioned here (Manhunt, made after the Black Lives Matter movement, is an exception) The American Civil War is neither forensic nor thorough in its coverage of slavery and racism. Spielberg took heat for leaving Frederick Douglass out of Lincoln; Burns has been criticised for giving too much airtime to the writer Shelby Foote, whose position on the Confederacy is queasy at best. (Weird fact: Daniel Craig supposedly studied footage of Shelby Foote to develop Benoit Blanc’s accent for the Knives Out movies.)

The delighted smile that appears on Foote’s face every time he mentions Nathan Bedford Forrest – slave trader, Confederate general, and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan – is revolting. But then, this was filmed at a time when outright memorials to Bedford Forrest littered the southern states. As a Brit it’s tempting to think we would never tolerate such an active celebration of enslavers and racists, but then you remember the bust of Cecil Rhodes that still clings to the facade of Oriel College in Oxford. We’re really in no position to judge. Its political analysis is – as they say – of its time; but for its sheer power and artfulness, and its long-term impact on the form, you have to give The American Civil War a solid 9/10.

Letterboxd Diary

What has enjoyed watching this month.

I Live In Fear (1955)

My regular dose of Kurosawa. This is a fascinating film of post-War, Cold War Japan, about an elderly business man (Toshiro Mifune) who is so terrified of nuclear war that he is trying to sell everything he owns in order to move to Brazil, where he thinks he and his family will be safe. His family, however, don’t want to go, his workers don’t want him to close his foundry and the courts eventually find him insane. But as the doctor in the asylum points out, is it not insane to continue to act as if it’s normal to live in a world in perpetual threat of being destroyed? But then what can you do about it? Is it not also insane to rail uselessly against fate?

What’s fascinating to me is that the film seems to be trying to present the conundrum rather than take a definite position. Nakajima, the businessman, is perfectly justified in his terror, but increasingly hysterical and unreasonable in his actions. His family are selfish and stubborn but also entirely justified in resisting his bullying, just as he is trying to resist the horrors of the world.

The film opens with footage of busy streets. Are all these people insane for continuing to live with their fear? This is Japan, after all, the only country to be attacked with nuclear bombs during a war. But they were only attacked because of the cultural insanity fostered in the country by those in power, men like Nakajima himself. The only possible conclusion seems to be the one we all lived with even into the ‘80s: to continue to be insane and to live with the fear, because the alternative was a worse madness of despair.

It also features Mifune, who was in his mid-thirties, in a lot of old age makeup. There’s a story that George Lucas originally wanted him for the part of Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars (1977). Star Wars was heavily influenced by Kurosawa’s own Hidden Fortress (1958), in which Mifune stars as an undercover general helping an escaping princess with the help of two comedy servants. I was reminded of all of this because Mifune’s performance put me in mind of Alec Guinness who, of course, played Kenobi. Although their affect is different, the two actors are similar in that they have two modes: acting, or ACTING. With Mifune you’re either going to get the wild energy of I Live In Fear and Rashomon (1950), or the magnetic, contained force of Yojimbo (1962) and High And Low (1963). Likewise with Guinness, it’s either the funny hats and brilliant caricatures of Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955), or the extraordinary subtlety and power of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979).

Much as I would have liked to see Toshiro Mifune as a Jedi knight, I think I would have liked even more to see Guinness play Kenobi as a member of the D’Ascoyne family.

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

That last thought was partly prompted by finally watching this, which features Guinness in ‘fright wig and false teeth’ mode. He pulls it off expertly, as ever. Pretty much everyone is pretty good in Doctor Zhivago, although no one’s properly excellent, apart from maybe Geraldine Chaplin. I wasn’t entirely persuaded by Omar Sharif; but Zhivago himself is such a monumentally self-absorbed twerp that he barely notices the Russian Revolution, so perhaps Sharif’s dreamy vacuity was perfect.

The film itself — yet another ‘classic’ that I had avoided largely because it was ‘classic’ — turns out to be brilliant. It could have been a turgid, cast-of-thousands, walnut-veneered epic; but Robert Bolt’s script is great, Freddie Young’s photography is beautiful, and David Lean is, after all, one of the greats, and possibly the absolute best at this kind of thing.

A lot of the visual storytelling is somewhat on the nose — such as the petals falling from a sunflower as Lara leaves Zhivago in the hospital - but on such a canvas, it works. It also means we don’t have to endure any actual poetry, thank goodness. Bolt and Lean evidently decided that we’d more readily believe that Zhivago was a poetic genius if we didn’t have to hear any of his verse, which was very sensible of them. Instead, wolves howl; Lean pushes in on the delicate frost on a window; we see the low, crimson sun through the birches; Jarre whangs up the balalaikas in the mix; and lo! Deathless words have been plonked down on the page, and we can fade to the next scene without having to listen to any of them.

Anyway, after years of knowing nothing of it other than ‘Lara’s Theme’, I finally see what all the fuss was about.

Man With A Movie Camera (1929)

Speaking of the Revolution, here’s an extraordinary slice of life in Russia a mere decade later. Dziga Vertov takes a movie camera to the streets of Moscow, Kiev and Odessa and films everyday life there. It’s amazing to see these scenes from a century ago, but even more amazing is the editing and effects; through them Vertov creates an thrilling poem of motion, a celebration of cities, movement and cinema.

Its speed and inspired glee feel extraordinarily modern, as does the way he includes the camera in his footage, building a sense of a world now endlessly observed, in which life will never again be fully separated from performance, and in which film will become the all-purpose cultural metaphor.

Also, the version on the BFI Player has a fantastic score from Michael Nyman, which matches the hectic collage of industry and invention.

Playlist

What Tobias has enjoyed listening to this month. The playlists are all on Spotify.

‘Summer’s Gone’ - Aberfeldy. I know this is going to upset some of you, but summer really is over now.

‘I Used To Live In England’ - supermodel*. Having lived in England, this gentleman would know that autumn is absolutely the best season for it.

‘Next To Normal’ - Lucius. However, here’s some upbeat disco-adjacent groove for everyone mourning the shortening days.

‘Ayalqem Tèdèngo’ - Akalé Wubé. Followed by a cheery Ethiopian inflected instrumental. There’s sun somewhere, if you can find it.

‘The Willow’ - Magon. Here, though, the shadows are deepening under the trees and the evenings are getting chillier.

‘Never Go Away’ - John Andrews & The Yawns. Although autumn can be cosy if you really embrace it.

‘Throwing Bones’ - The Phantom Band. The Scots know how to deal with long, dark nights: stay inside and raise a ruckus.

‘Ces P’Tits Je T’aime’ - Daniel Forestal Et Sa Guitare. As far as I can tell, Daniel Forestal was from Guadeloupe, so perhaps this offers an escape to everyone who’s sorry to see summer go.

‘Vina Vina Malawi’ - Madalitso Band. Or Malawi? It certainly sounds cheerful.

‘Springtime’ - Allison Russell. But then, if autumn’s here, it means spring is coming. Eventually.

The whole playlist is one Spotify:

Our current season for paying subscribers is a study in screen Sherlocks and, this month, in screen Sigmund Freuds too:

The glums of August

There’s been a distinct air of slump in the Metropolitan household for the last couple of weeks. Summer is waning; the house is filthy; it’s dark at 8.45pm and counting; and the garden, which looked kinda nice in May, is now a stupid yellow dustbowl. So perhaps it’s just ennui, but we ain’t half struggling to find anything decent to watch on the telly. August has mostly been a process of saying ‘we could try this’, watching one episode, looking at each other silently, and going to bed early. For example:

1. The Assassin (2025, Amazon Prime). Our Lady Keeley of Hawes stars as a suddenly reactivated 50-something assassin who is also a mum. I’ll watch Hawes in the first episode of anything, but this is an effortful trudge up Cliché Mountain despite the delightful Greek locations. Speaking of which, I suspect this entire show came about because someone said ‘what if Killing Eve but also The Durrells’, which is an example of what we parents call an ‘inside’ thought. Having said that, I’d definitely watch a show in which a menopausal assassin keeps killing people because they ate the last Magnum.

2. Treme (2010, Now TV in the UK). David Simon’s follow-up to The Wire, about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in a down-at-heel area of New Orleans. Because Americans don’t use diacriticals, we’re going to do you a favour and tell you Treme is pronounced ‘truh-MAY’. The first episode centres around a character (Steve Zahn) who is so fucking annoying that we couldn’t go on. Also, it’s interesting how the Hurricane Katrina story doesn’t translate very well for a UK audience. Brits can instantly glom onto The Wire’s themes of corruption, underfunding, drug wars, bad government, intergenerational oppression and tragedy. But the Katrina story adds more US-specific factors – the long-term effects of slavery, the dynamics of federal versus state government, and the ferocious impacts of large weather systems – and doesn’t really feel the need to explain them. Which is kind of fair enough; The Wire didn’t explain very much either.

3. Homicide: Life on the Street (1993, also Now TV). A homicide team in the Baltimore police department solve (or do not solve) crimes, while getting drunk and bitching about management. If this reminds you of something, that’s because it was based on a book that David Simon wrote and that later informed The Wire. Homicide stinks of the 1990s: all caramel slacks, soft-focus video, and that distinctive ‘90s sub-Lynchian move in which mildly odd characters are implied to have supernatural powers. (Until the very end Tobias was expecting Ned Beatty’s character to be revealed to be a ghost, which is the kind of shit you could get away with in a workplace drama in the ‘90s.) If you watched this at the time you probably loved it, but coming to it fresh in 2025 is a little more difficult. On the upside Yaphet Kotto is in it, which will remind you that Midnight Run exists and enable you to say ‘Is this going to upset me?’ every time the team is assigned a new murder. Everyone says Homicide gets better, so we might try the second episode at some point.

4. The Line (also known as A French Village, 2009, ITVX). A drama set in, well, a French village during the Nazi occupation. This runs for seven series, holy hell, and has very good reviews, which made the poor-quality soapiness of the first episode quite bewildering: foreshadowing dialogue (‘the Germans are not going to advance 100km in one day!’), Acorn Antiques-style dynamic close-ups, and incredibly baggy scenes that hang around for a good five minutes after they’ve made their point. I couldn’t get past the scene in which a primary school class, stranded in a field after several children had been strafed by a German airplane, were arranged by their teacher into a sort of human pyramid from which every single pair of tiny eyes could focus unrelentingly on the bloodied bodies of their friends. I’m pretty sure they train you not to do this in the ‘surprise gunship attack’ module at teacher school.

We’re not even going to try King and Conqueror (2025, BBC), because although early Medieval British/French history has SO MUCH POTENTIAL for brilliant drama, all the reviews of this one make it clear that it’s brain-dribblingly stupid. I was particularly unhappy when I heard the star, James Norton, on Radio 4’s PM chirping about how 1066 is ‘the first bit of history’. I mean, I kind of know what he means, but for Pete’s sake. Once again, our hopes for a multi-season epic based around the life of William Marshal have been set back by idiots.

Basically: when is the new season of Slow Horses starting, because we can’t take much more of this.

Letterboxd Diary

A lot of spandex and secret identities this month, starting with the grand-daddy of them all:

Superman (2025)

‘Are you alright?’ asked the Everyman staff member as I was leaving. She could, no doubt, see the tracks of my tears, my red eyes and the sopping tissue clutched in my hand. I reassured her that I very much was, although I did not stop to explain that I am old, and I cry at everything; and that there was a very good dog; and that there was also the Big Blue Boy Scout, the original superhero.

I am not, by the sound of it, the only middle aged man to have cried during Superman. I mostly blame Krypto the super hound, who director James Gunn has very wisely depicted as behaving like a real and recognisable dog, thereby making him extremely lovable and tear-jerky. Not for nothing was the film preceded by an advert for pet adoption.

But I also blame Gunn’s equally wise depiction of Superman himself. Created in 1938, Superman was the very first true superhero, the character that gave his name to the genre and is the die from which every one has been struck since, one way or another. He’s also the first superhero for most children, given his primary coloured outfit and primary coloured sensibility.

Created on the eve of the Second World War by two Jewish Americans, the sons of immigrants who had fled European antisemitism, Superman was himself an immigrant (albeit from outer space) who stood for the everyman against the wilful and corrupt use of power. In his first appearance in #1 of Action Comics in 1938, he rescues a woman from her abusive husband, overturns a wrongful conviction and unmasks a corrupt politician.

Gunn’s Superman is very much this character, but he also feels influenced by Grant Morrison’s depiction in his stand out All-Star Superman (2005). Frank Quitely’s cover to that comic depicts Superman sitting on a cloud above Metropolis, turning to smile at the reader over his shoulder. This is a direct reference to an encounter that Morrison had at a comic convention. They ran across someone in a Superman costume, perched happily on a bollard, answering questions from kids perfectly in character.

This, Morrison realised, was what an all powerful being would be like. Perfectly at ease, unafraid of anything, open to all. And this is David Corenswet’s Superman in Gunn’s movie. An alien with superhuman abilities who, nonetheless, will stop in the middle of a battle with a giant monster to save a squirrel. Possessed of the biggest stick of all, he speaks the most softly.

And this, of course, is the real reason for the tears: that I got to spend a couple of hours in a world where ultimate power was wielded not to bully and bluster but to defend and support. Escapist fantasy, of course, but there’s a lot from which to escape these days.

Not that it is a good film, strictly speaking. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wasn’t already a comics fan likely to squeal excitedly at appearances from Rex Mason, Cat Grant and Guy Gardner. Speaking of which:

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

Another not-strictly-good film that made me cry with joy. And also laugh at a time dilation joke as Sue Storm gives birth on a space ship orbiting a black hole, which was not a reference I was expecting in a Marvel movie.

My friend Zhenia, who is a Russian artist who dresses in black the better to match his sardonic worldview, once asked me why I watch these ‘terrible films’. The best answer I could give is that it was somewhat analogous to a mid-century suburban American Christian going to see The Robe (1953): a mixture of delight at seeing these stories in which you had steeped as a child, five feet high and luminous; and a quasi-religious experience, a ritual observance, a pilgrimage to a site of wonder.

I don’t mean this entirely literally, although there is a decent argument (Grant Morrison again) that superheroes are the modern equivalent of the pantheons of the ancient world. But it is at least equivalent to wandering through a museum full of sculptures of classical gods and heroes; symbolism, metaphor and story cast into human form.

This is also a clue to why these aren’t ‘good’ films. Like the legends of mythological heroes, they do not work as standalone narratives, because they are not standalone. They are parts of a complex and ever evolving cosmology. These films are not coherent and fully thought through works of art; like comic book issues, they are single chapters in much larger, interleaving, constantly developing narratives. Fantastic Four: First Steps is a good example of this.

‘First Steps’ initially seems like a ludicrous title. It is the fourth film of the Fantastic Four, the thirty seventh Marvel film and, even, the second appearance of Mister Fantastic in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Added to that, the film opens in media res, with the eponymous team already world famous, having taken their ‘first steps’ a long time ago, and finishes before Franklin Richards, the child born during the film, takes his ‘first steps’. It’s not, for once, an origin story, indeed, I don’t remember any explanation of the team’s powers. You’re supposed to know already.

But any Marvel film-going nerd will understand what that subtitle means. The Fantastic Four was the first superhero team created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and was the foundation stone of the Marvel universe. This is where this whole fantastical foofaraw started.

Which is presumably why Marvel actually tried to make this more of a standalone film, set in a sci-fi ‘60s with ostensibly no reference to any of the other Marvel films. This is confusing at this stage, given that we now expect a degree of interconnectedness. Paradoxically, this means it is not independent of the rest of the MCU, because it depends on us remembering all those parallel universes from Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (2022) and the Loki TV show (2021). Another thing that is second nature to anyone steeped in comic book lore.

Those ‘First Steps’, we finally understand, are meta-fictional. This is the introduction of a fresh narrative thread to the increasingly frayed rag rug of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And yes, there are the Fantastic Four, in the post credit sequence of:

Thunderbolts* (2025)

Also not ‘good’, although enlivened by the ever dependable Florence Pugh (and David Harbour as yet another loveably dysfunctional dad). No crying this time, either, despite the fact that it is a movie about mental illness, featuring, as it does, a Superman analogue who is crippled by depression.

This is, perhaps, a hopeful sign that the Marvel films will become more like comics. Like all pulp genres, superhero stories are capable of being mashed up with any other kind of genre and being bent to tell any kind of story. The two-dimensional characters and the fantastical settings usually mean that they are highly pliable. They don’t have to be about men who don’t know what order in which to put on their pants saving the universe again. They can be sci-fi or comedies, bildungroman or thrillers, explorations of morality or politics. They can be about mental health and reckoning with your past and families, found and otherwise. And they can end not with a punch-up, but – like Thunderbolts* – with a hug. Writers like Grant Morrison have long ago realised that you can do all kinds of things with superhero stories and, indeed, you should.

Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)

I wish I’d watched this when I was writing my piece on Easy Rider (1969) because it feels very much like a European mirror image, being set in Switzerland, France and Germany, featuring a central female character, and concentrating largely on sex rather than politics.

Like Easy Rider, it uses the motorcycle as an all-purpose metaphor for the ‘60s youth rebellion: a symbol of financial liberation, an alternative to the suburban family station wagon, a vehicle of escape from convention and regulation, of endless flight with no purpose other than the journey. An object of liberation, but also the dangerous thrill of flying beyond control, Eros and Thanatos harnessed together and chromed over in one throbbing, phallic machine.

Like Easy Rider it is also very male. Marianne Faithful’s Rebecca, the girl of the title, is depicted as a gurning idiot with nothing on her mind other than sex; nominally the protagonist, she is little more than an object to be passed about and examined by the men around her. The American title for the film, Naked Under Leather, is a big clue to what the film is really about.

Directed by Jack Cardiff (cinematographer for Powell and Pressburger on three of their films) it is, at least, frequently a beautiful film (apart from all the dull psychedelic bits) and is stuffed with some lovely footage of late ‘60s Northern Europe. Also, all of Alain Delon’s outfits are beautiful.

Speaking of motorcycles, lovely outfits and beautiful views of Northern Europe:

Diva (1981)

Luke Honey covered this recently for his Weekend Flicks, which prompted my rewatch. I loved it at the time, and then, thanks to a friend, read all the Delacorta Gorodish and Alba books. It is a prime example of the ‘80s French cinéma du look and is full of stylised, striking images: Serge Gorodish’s empty blue apartment, early ‘80s Paris at dawn, a perfectly framed and lonely lighthouse. Even the plot is largely a miscellany of outlandish elements: a bootleg of an opera performance, a motorcycle chase through the Métro, a corrupt policeman killed by a car bomb in a classic Citroën.

It is, perhaps, a little too stylised, even for the cinéma du look and I think Luc Besson’s Subway (1985) just pips it for me.

Mickey 17 (2025)

A sci-fi black comedy from Bong Joon Ho, set on a billionaire’s mission to another planet fleeing a climate change ravaged Earth, during which Robert Pattinson’s Mickey is repeatedly killed doing dangerous jobs and then repeatedly cloned in order to get him back to work. It is very obviously a satire of contemporary cultural and political inequalities and the gig economy, but manages to do it all reasonably entertainingly.

Most specifically, though, Mark Ruffalo’s performance as the preening billionaire, in which he is very clearly riffing on Donald Trump, makes me wonder at how many older films I’ve watched where an actor is lampooning a popular figure in their performance but at this cultural remove I’d just never know.

Far From Heaven (2002)

Now this is a genuinely good film, without any need of apostrophes. Todd Haynes’ version of a Douglas Sirk ‘50s ‘woman’s picture’ updates the portrayal of the period to a much more realistic milieu of racism, homophobia and misogyny. It's a splendid movie, with beautiful, period accurate cinematography (and some rear projection for driving scenes, huzzah!) and terrific performances, especially from the leads.

What’s interesting, though, is that in depicting the true, underlying cultural hysteria of the period and accurately capturing the deep, repressed emotions, it then loses the febrile narrative hysteria of so many Sirk films, which had to sublimate the character’s sexual and emotional fervour into frequently over-the-top, camp dramatic elements, which I kind of missed.

Tracklisting

Ten tracks I’ve had on repeat this month. The playlists are all on Spotify.

‘Libre’ - Y La Bamba. Something sunny and jangly to start with, as summer is starting to slacken and we can all go outside once again.

‘How Strange It Is’ - Xenia Rubinos. This has a splendidly off kilter momentum to it.

‘Beth’s Farm’ - Jerskin Fendrix. I was not expecting Emma Stone to show up in the video for this, but then I found out that he’s done soundtracks for Yorgos Lanthimos (and also for a performance of Ubu Roi, of which I thoroughly approve).

‘Major’ - Mulatu Astatke and Hoodna Orchestra. Some cheerful Ethio-jazz, just to pick things up a bit.

‘Eye Know’ - De La Soul. I don’t why Spotify decided to play De La Soul this month, but I’m very glad for it. I’ve had a lot of work on and this has definitely helped me get through it.

‘Hittin’ On Nothing’ - The Detroit Cobras. Reading the band bio on Spotify was a hell of a way to discover that lead singer Rachel Nagy died in 2022. I don’t like live music much but I do have fond memories of watching her, beer bottle in one hand, whiskey bottle in the other, somehow also holding a cigarette and a microphone, belting out RnB tracks exactly as they should be: loud and dirty.

‘Bul Bul Bul’ - Kit Sebastian. A Turkish French band from London and as groovy and splendid as that pedigree would suggest.

‘This Is Where We Come In’ - The James Hunter Six. The kind of record that could have been made at any time in the last six decades and which I’m curiously reluctant to know more about.

‘Harbor Me’ - Ziemba. Band founder René Kladzyk is apparently also a perfumer and investigative reporter. In other words, in their twenties.

‘Don’t Beat The Girl Out Of My Boy’ - Anna Calvi. A marvellously histrionic finish with some lovely big, Cure-ish drums.

The whole playlist is on Spotify here:

The Wire (2002—08)

We have been re-watching The Wire this month, for no better reason than one of the bona fide young people in the house started a re-watch over the summer holidays and we immediately decided to copy him.

One of the things that stuck out this time around was how traditional it is. The first season, for example, is really just a ‘getting the team together’ show, like any number of police procedurals, thrillers, superhero flicks, and movies about everything from a capella girl groups to the Second World War. (The second season, therefore, is a ‘getting the team back together’ show.) A group of misfits are pulled together and gradually discover how their individual talents can mesh together into a team. (Except for McNulty.) It’s basically The Seven Samurai in a Baltimore basement.

You mostly don’t spot this clichéd approach on first watch because of the general excellence. It’s also obscured by the writers’ decision to run it in parallel with another cliché: Shakespeare’s history plays, but make them gangster. That too has been done a thousand times, but when woven in with the McBain procedural and Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the police story, it becomes something new.

The medium wins out in the end, though. Season One is extraordinary, Season Two has its charms, and Season Three is a soupy, soapy mess. This is the season where the show starts huffing its own fumes and tries to become an inquiry into contemporary American institutions, which mostly means characters keep stopping to deliver pompous monologues about the THEMES while having vigorous affairs featuring HBO levels of nudity. (Our resident second-wave feminist remains deeply unimpressed by the unreflective, glassy-eyed directorial gaze used in the strip club scenes.)

Still, we still have the last stretch — Season Four — to go, and we’re looking forward to that because it’s the achingly sad one about education. (Thank goodness they didn’t go on to make a self-indulgent and largely unbearable final season about the media.)

Damascus Station (2021), Moscow X (2023) and The Seventh Floor (2024), all by David McCloskey

Another bit of self-indulgent summer nonsense: I’ve been re-reading this trilogy of spy novels by David McCloskey, an ex-CIA analyst and now co-host of the podcast The Rest is Classified. If this is the kind of thing you like, I thoroughly recommend them. This time around I found them even more compulsive than I did the first time around, and I thought they were pretty good then.

Like any good spy thrillers, they require you to do a little bit of cognitive work, but not too much. They also feature a satisfying amount of real-world political commentary and information, which is probably why this genre tends to be popular with journalists and politicians. I finished Damascus Station feeling that I had learned something about how the Syrian professional classes interacted with and coped with the Assad regime, which was not a perspective I’d considered before. The descriptions of life in Damascus — a place that, let’s face it, I am absolutely never going to visit, because I prefer to remain alive — were vivid without feeling patronising.

McCloskey is one of any number of spy thriller writers who have had the misfortune to be called ‘the new le Carré’. The thoroughly enjoyable Seventh Floor is even a flat-out homage to Tinker Tailor; but what I like about McCloskey is that he clearly knows any serious comparison is ridiculous, a knowledge that he communicates through the medium of scatological humour.

I have wasted so much money on dreadful spy novels whose promotional blurb featured the words ‘the new le Carré’ or ‘deserves le Carré’s crown’ that any sight of this claim makes me instantly suspicious. It’s nothing more than dreary, dishonest hyperbole. Presumably it helps to sell books (although it doesn’t stop readers feeling hoodwinked and resentful afterwards), so I suppose it’s hopeless to ask publishers to stop putting this bollocks on the cover. But if you are a book reviewer about to write that a perfectly workaday spy novelist is ‘the new le Carré’, I really wish you would stop to consider whether what you really mean is that:

• they write sentences that include subjects, verbs and objects in an unobjectionable order;

• their narrative implies that Western governments are fallible; that some civil servants, politicians and spies are bad people; and that the practice of espionage and counter-espionage twists the old brain-box a bit; and

• their fictional spies are commitment-avoidant and have substance dependency issues.

Because, you know, those things are not why le Carré was good.

Like Hilary Mantel, he was a one-off. Both took a genre form — in le Carré’s case, a genre form he’d been plodding away at unremarkably for quite some time — and suffused it with wisdom and humanity until it splintered into genius. I’m not saying we’ll never get another spy novel as good as Tinker Tailor or another historical fiction novel as good as Wolf Hall. I’m just saying that if we do, we’ll bloody well know them when we see them. We won’t need to be told.

In the meantime, though, McCloskey is much, much better than the average.

Letterboxd Diary

Jaws (1975)

Fifty years on and I still can’t swim. Anyway, it's the anniversary and I was watching the John Williams documentary where he describes playing the theme to Stephen Spielberg for the first time and I realised I hadn’t seen it in a while.

The second half is what you remember. I preferred the first half this time round, although it's perhaps something of a Metropolitan cliché that I was more interested in the battles of small town bureaucracy than the bro-off on the briny deep. The town meeting that Quint interrupts is a fantastic little scene, like something out of Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) or Ikiru (1952): every frame packed with faces. And what faces. Gold star for the casting director.

Good Morning (1959)

A great little Yasujirō Ozu movie about the changing mores of post-war Japan. The main point is in the comparison between the fatuity of the adults — all those ‘good mornings’ — and the flatulence of their children, whose greeting ritual involves farting on command. One of them always follows through, ruining his trousers, which Ozu seems to be comparing to the vicious gossip that underlies the outward politeness of their mothers.

The film appears to be saying that in ‘50s Japan — where no one has a job, and all children need English lessons to prepare for the new world — the old etiquette has no place. The children mount a strike to make their parents buy them a TV, a tactic that succeeds. On the other hand, the surface politeness does at least ensure that the gossip never erupts into outright antagonism, and everything can be smoothed over in the end. The English teacher gets the girl because of his good manners. Those meaningless pleasantries have a meaning after all.

In its depiction of post-war Japan it’s a great companion piece to those Kurosawa movies I mentioned earlier, and in beautiful colour, too.

Possibly the best recommendation is that Ro’s Dad wandered in as I was watching it and despite it being halfway through, in subtitled Japanese, and containing a good deal of amusingly dubbed farting, he stopped and watched, rapt, for the rest of the movie. At the end he said: ‘I couldn’t tell you why, but that was very watchable.’ Hard agree.

Barry Lyndon (1975)

I had the absolute pleasure of going to the big screen at the BFI with friend of The Metropolitan Adam Frost to see what I think is my favourite Kubrick film. What astonishing work of art it is. Trying to think of something to say about it is rather like being the proverbial blind man describing an elephant. It feels simply too big to approach in any meaningful way.

It did make me think about how images of the eighteenth century permeated my ‘70s childhood. Toile patterns and Doulton figurines, rainy afternoons spent traipsing past the Gainsboroughs in National Trust Houses, the covers of Georgette Heyer novels, holidays in Lorna Doone country and smuggler’s Cornwall.

The eighteenth century is, after all, the period in which the legend of a kind of Britishness is being constructed: John Bull and the chinless wonders, the ragged red square and the ruling of waves, the country vicar and the weary ploughman, the mutinous mob and the chiming of tea china in pale green sitting rooms. The rococo and neo-classical houses of the aristocracy, nabobs and nobles both, the rococo and neo-classical rules of etiquette, class structures and attitudes. All apparently studied and stultified, restrained and refined, and yet all paid for and powered by the nascent Empire, by violence and scandal, riot and rapine.

Although, unlike the later seasons of The Wire, Kubrick restrains from hitting us over the head with them, these themes are right there in the film: a film made after the fall of Empire, adapted from a book written at the Victorian height, set in its eighteenth century opening chapters. But so are those images: a grand house in the mist, a garden full of passing figures, a dog in a boat on a lake, card players and soldiers and lonely individuals in great rooms. Every frame an etching, every composition perfectly framed and lit but all splendidly, compulsively alive.

Tracklisting

Ten tracks I’ve had on repeat this month. The playlists are all on Spotify.

The Great Escape - Gemma Rogers. Oh yeah, summer is supposed to be holiday time, isn’t it. The Metropolitan isn’t going anywhere though (paid subscriptions are available, hint hint), but maybe we can travel through the magic of music.

Disko - Komeda. Sweden first. For some reason Spotify chose to remind me of the excellent Komeda this week, so here’s my favourite track of theirs.

Secret In The Dark - Monika. Greece with Monika Christodoulou, who, judging from her Tiny Desk Concert, is quite fearsomely, Hellenically extra.

House Of Cards - Irma. Of course Paris in Summer is empty. And also smelly. But still Paris, after all.

2468 - Horsegirl. I’ve only ever been to Chicago to change Greyhound buses. Maybe I ought to visit properly.

CPR - Wet Leg. But then does Chicago have an outsider theme park like Black Gang Chine? What could be a more appropriate British holiday than the Isle of Wight in the rain?

사시랭이소리 - Ssing Ssing. Mind you, all the kids want to go to South Korea, of course.

El Galatzó - Lucrecia Dalt. It's only 14° in Bogotá as I type this, which sounds extremely appealing.

Outta Space - Nightshift. Even Glasgow is hotter than Bogotá right now. Scotland isn’t supposed to be warm. It’s not right.

Omaemo - Yuma Abe. Japan is apparently experiencing something of a tourist overload at the moment, though, so perhaps it's best that we just stay home and listen to the music instead.

The whole playlist is on Spotify here:

In case you missed it, this month we published our first essay in our new season, Sherlock Holmes on film:

Before the Spotify playlist, there was the mixtape: a homemade selection of hand-picked songs. Each one fastened a moment in time: passions, passing enthusiasms, and shared anthems. So here’s some passing enthusiasms hand-picked for you.

Luxembourg

To Luxembourg, capital of Luxembourg, seat of the Grand Duke of Luxembourg. Hey, if you’ve got a name that good, why waste it? A tiny little European state, Luxembourg should long ago have been swallowed up by France, Germany, the Netherlands or even Belgium, all of whom have taken bits of it over the centuries. It owes its continued existence to the nineteenth-century attempt to create a balance of power in Europe, which went so well that everyone decided to celebrate by having a First World War.

The population of the city of Luxembourg (not the state of Luxembourg!) is now 60% non-Luxembourgeois; mostly other Europeans who staff the European government offices that run down the dual carriageway to the airport. (EU-related business was also why I was there, to be fair.) The city is mostly well off, mostly safe and mostly a little dull; but it is rather good looking. It took me a while to realise what it reminded me of. It’s a bit like the backgrounds of Tintin comics, all flat colours and belle epoque buildings; but eventually I realised that it is closer to the backgrounds of so many Studio Ghibli films, like Kiki’s Delivery Service, all those non-specific nineteenth-century Northern European cities, filled with cupolas and towers, terraces and shaded streets.

Luxembourg is built on a hill on a bend where the Alzette and Pétrusse rivers meet, and spreads across the valleys and hills around. Rather like Edinburgh, it is a city of many levels, forever surprising you with sudden vistas and lofty city walls. Should you ever find yourself there (presumably on EU-related business) I definitely recommend taking the outdoor elevator at Grund down from the old city into the valley, and then walking north along the river to the glass elevator back up at Pfaffenthal. I did this early in the morning and found myself in a summer wood beside a chattering river, with the glowing city above me at the top of the cliffs.

Also, all public transport is free, so you can ride the Pfaffenthal-Kirchberg funicular as often as you want and visit the tram stop ‘Coque’, just to listen to the little perky, whistling tune on the tannoy just before a very serious voice announces ‘Cock’.

Letterboxd diary

Aftersun (2022)

Let me begin with a confession and some spoilers. Spoilers because I need to include them to explain my confession and also because spoilers, to a certain extent, are what I want to talk about. The confession is that we were watching Aftersun on streaming and I was still looking at my phone as it started. I do feel the need to say that I didn’t pick it up during the rest of the film, which is a twenty-first tribute to how good it is, but that moment of distraction meant I missed something important.

Aftersun starts with the sound of a video tape loading into a VHS machine and then a shot of a TV screen and, in the brief moment before the video starts playing, you can see a reflection of a woman sitting down to watch. This is a crucial piece of context. You are watching the older Sophie watching a home video of a childhood holiday with her father. However, you don’t get told this again, miss that bit, as I did, and it may well take you, as it consequently did me, until the end of the film to fully understand the set up.

Much has been written, recently, on the necessity of television to work in a second screen world and how this results in constant indigestible boluses of exposition and long drawn out plots aimed at background noise rather than crafted storytelling. Aftersun is admirable for many things, and one of them is this insistence on close attention from the audience. However, if it hadn’t been for the second screen, I might never have fully understood it at all.

I eventually understood that Sophie’s father, Calum, had since committed suicide and that part of the story was her attempt to try and understand why he had chosen to abandon her in this way. But of course, what I didn’t realise was that I was supposed to be hunting for clues while watching it, to see Calum’s behaviour throughout the film as indicative of, as Wikipedia puts it, ‘depression, anxiety, and internal turmoil’.

What I in fact saw was behaviour that seemed largely typical of a certain kind of Dad on holiday: alternately larky and taciturn, emotionally inarticulate but nonetheless apparently devoted. I’m sure this says more about me and my generation than it does the film and I should think about that and probably check in on some of my friends. I was, however, struck by that second screen experience, how what I read about the film changed how I had seen it.

Much has also been written about ‘revision entertainment’, all, the various fictional universes and ‘Skip recap’ lore that we’re all required to know in order to watch the next episode or film or TV series spun off from a single sentence in one of Tolkien’s appendices. But this is a feature, not a bug.

Twenty five years ago, in the days when a ‘second screen’ was a beige box in a spare bedroom that had become ‘the computer room’, I had the great good fortune to be working in a wholly new medium, the Web, before anyone really knew what it could do or what it was for. In those days we produced several interactive entertainments, including what I think was Britain’s first ‘360’ TV show. A show, that is, that happened simultaneously on broadcast and online, sort of live, sort of interactive, sort of a mystery game, sort of a drama.

What we discovered in making and running it was that people actively enjoyed the second screen. They didn’t want to interact with the TV show, but they did want to interact with the world of the show, to interact with characters, explore background stories, chat to other viewers about what was going on. This way the fiction of the show leaked out into the real world, the borders between the real and the fantastical became porous and the audience were able to step through the (internet) portal into the story.

This should not have been surprising, of course. This being a wholly new medium we didn’t have any other examples of entertainment in this form to draw on, so we had to look elsewhere. We were inspired partly by a very strange product called ‘Crime dossiers’, the product of a brainwave between pulp writer Denis Wheatley and J G Links, ‘Venice for Pleasure’ fame. These were murder mysteries presented, not as books, but as files of evidence, through which the reader could sort, becoming detective and solving the crime. The other source of inspiration was similar: tabletop role playing games, the descendents of Dungeons & Dragons, particularly investigatory games like Call of Cthulhu, set in the world of the weird tales of H P Lovecraft.

Such games allowed the players to enter the fictional world, play in it, and make a corner of it their own - particularly useful in the case of Lovecraft, whose fictional world is fascinating, but whose personal, racist views were repugnant. These games of course went on to influence computer role playing games, which have now become open worlds, like one of the best selling games of all time: Breath of the Wild (2017). In these games players can roam where they like, exploring the fictional setting as they want, making the experience their own.

Just this week io9 have written about how the Star Wars series Andor was influenced by the Star Wars RPG from the ‘80s. This is perhaps the best way to understand such shows, not as discrete stories, but as modules in a widening fictional setting. This new genre of entertainment, which positively requires Wikipedia, IMDb and an encyclopaedic knowledge of ‘70s comics, is a native creation of the Internet age. We can’t see these productions as discrete, personal and artisanal works of art like Aftersun, we need to think of them as far more diffuse, far less individual, in which the audience is no longer just a reader and interpreter, reliant on the clues left by the artist, but a fellow creator, making their own clues, adding their own imagination to the fiction.

Straight Story (1999)

David Lynch’s straightforward telling of the story of Alvin Straight, an elderly man who drives straight across America on a sit-on lawnmower. The title is usually seen as an indication that this is the most ‘straight’ of Lynch’s films. It certainly feels like it’s supposed to be a celebration of American eccentricity, individuality and chutzpah, as aw-shucks earnest as only David Lynch can be. But this can make it seem even weirder than his more ‘surreal’ visions of America.

At one point Straight offers shelter to a hitch-hiker who, it turns out, has run away from home because she’s pregnant. Straight offers her a story about how a bundle of sticks is harder to break than a single branch, that likewise, families are stronger together. He wakes the next morning to find the girl has gone, leaving behind a bundle of sticks tied together with a ribbon. In other words: a fasces, the symbol of the Roman Republic, adopted by Mussolini and the origin of our word ‘fascism’.

It’s hard to unpick exactly what Lynch wants us to take from this image: are we supposed to be reading it uncritically, are we supposed to be questioning the advice of an old man to a pregnant ‘90s teenager, are we supposed to be aware of the history of the symbolism? Lynch did, after all, appear to praise Trump in the latter’s first term, even if he later walked that back.

Of course, one should always take whatever Lynch said with a critical eye, he was as much an artwork as his artwork. What remains though, is that it is still a fascinating and compelling film, even without Lynch’s customary approach, and perhaps something even more surreal, to an outsider, than his usual work.

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

I got to go to an actual cinema! It’s just a shame it was to see this.

That’s not fair, of course, it’s still amusing, peopled with terrific actors and visually highly pleasurable. But I’m a Wes Anderson fan, and possibly had my hopes set too high. What I’m curious about, though, is why Phoenician Scheme didn’t quite work for me. Why Anderson’s hermetic world suddenly felt airless, why his precious dioramas suddenly felt too artificial. That self-contained artifice is part of the appeal of his films, after all.

I wonder if it was, paradoxically, a lack of artifice. His last few live-action films have had elaborate structures. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) has multiple layers of flashback to get to its core story, The French Dispatch (2021) has its anthologised articles, all filmed in a different style, Asteroid City (2023) has its film within a play within a documentary. These boxes within boxes add layers of meta-narrative and distance to the stories, making their artificiality an intrinsic part of their telling.

The Phoenician Scheme has narrative devices galore: shoeboxes, postcards, infrastructure projects, but does not have a similar frame. Perhaps the lack of one reveals the artificiality too nakedly.

Or perhaps I’ll change my mind next time I watch it, because I will, of course.

Tracklisting

Ten tracks I’ve had on repeat this month. The playlists are all on Spotify.

‘Big City Life’ - Smerz. A Swedish duo whose name comes from the German for heartbreak, apparently: herzschmerz. This is an appropriately dark and claustrophobic track for the summer city.

‘Nimerudi’ - Goat feat. MC Yallah. A lot of Swedes in this week’s selection. Here’s masked psychedelic world music weirdos Goat with Kenyan/Ugandan rapper MC Yallah.

‘Gunslinger’ - Natalie Bergman. A lovely, slinky track that sounds like a lost Lee Hazlewood / Nancy Sinatra track.

‘El Nuevo Prometeo’ - Los Pirañas. Colombian psychedelica which, appropriately enough for something that appears to be titled after Frankenstein, sounds like several different songs stitched together and electrified into jerky life.

‘Balinese Fantasy’ - Zahir Hussain. Hypnotic jazz with an intricate, beautiful tabla backbone.

‘I Wanna Be There’ - Evangeline. More sixties inflected summery indie pop, appropriate to the season.

‘Bounce House’ - Gelli Haha. Also appropriate, summery electronic pop, the video for which comes across as a missing Might Boosh segment.

‘Robin’s Egg’ - Iron & Wine feat. I’m With Her. Now let’s all calm down and sit in the garden, listen to the birds and think about folk horror for a bit.

‘Fantasia Pt 1’ - Lloyd Miller & The Heliocentrics. Some grooving Persian flavoured jazz for the long summer evenings.

‘Bang’ - Melenas. I’ve put a remix on the Spotify playlist because that’s how I first heard it, but here’s the original version and it's just as utterly fantastic. I’m going to be playing this all summer, I can tell.

That last especially for friends of The Metropolitan, Sergio Fernandez Gallardo (who provided the music for our podcast) and Barbara Ana Gomez. And Pedro, of course.

The whole playlist is on Spotify, as usual:

We haven’t covered David Lynch much yet on The Metropolitan, apart from Twin Peaks:

Before the Spotify playlist, there was the mixtape: a homemade selection of hand-picked songs. Each one fastened a moment in time: passions, passing enthusiasms, and shared anthems. So here’s some passing enthusiasms hand-picked for you.

Letterboxd Diary

Calamity Jane (1953) - Look, it popped up on iPlayer, I was looking for something undemanding to watch and herself was in the bath, so there I was, thinking: this is undemanding… but also very camp… isn’t Doris Day annoying… this is very camp indeed… if Day does that ‘I’m about to sing’ stance one more time I shall start throwing things… wait, so these two women, one in trousers, one in a very frou-frou dress, are doing up a cabin together and singing about the pleasures of ‘A Woman’s Touch’? I feel this may be a tad more than camp. And then the extremely irksome Doris started belting out ‘Once I Had A Secret Love’. Wikipedia has an entry on this film’s page titled ‘Subtext’, but there’s not a great deal ‘sub’ about it. It’s not a great film - whipped together as a response to the success of Annie Get Your Gun (1950), with a flimsy plot and a soundtrack that knows the only really good song is ‘The Deadwood Stage’ - but it is a textbook example of how the mainstream cultural creations so often unwittingly contain their own alternatives.

Enemy (2013) - An uncanny and unsettling Denis Villeneuve movie with Jake Gyllenhaal as a history teacher who discovers he has a doppelgänger who is a mildly successful actor. A film that is determined to be unclear about what precisely is happening or what it means and is all the better for it. A lot of spiders, though. Not recommended for arachnophobes but a big plus for those who have wanted kaiju designed by Louise Bourgeois.

Rushmore (1998) - Somehow I had never seen this early Wes Anderson film, despite being a massive fan. It’s interesting to see all his themes in larval form as well as the promise embedded in Max Fischer’s loopy and ambitious theatrical productions of the intricate Wes Anderson stagings to come.

Perfect Days (2023) - the most recent film from Wim Wenders; the story of a man who cleans public lavatories in Tokyo. The lead character persistently takes photographs of ‘crown shyness’, the phenomenon which means that the canopies of different trees never quite intermingle. He is, like the trees, simultaneously detached and deep rooted; the constant images of the flickering shadows of leaves mimicking his apparently only lightly touching, passing relationships with the people around him. But as we discover, shadows overlaid effectively become one. Absolutely wonderful movie.

A Complete Unknown (2024) - The Bob Dylan Story with Timothée Chalamet as the constipated voiced folkster. I have a soft spot for this kind of biopic, with its need to establish the lore behind every crumb of legend and to have everyone say all the catchphrases at least once: see Bobby get his harmonica from Woody Guthrie, see Bobby think of the words for “It’s Alright Ma”, see the origin of the funny whistle from the start of “Highway 61 Revisited”. It’s all patently tosh, of course. Indeed, Dylan himself apparently contributed at least one entirely fictional scene. But Chalamet at least has some charisma, Edward Norton is charming as a gentle Pete Seeger and the depiction of folk hipster Greenwich Village is alluring. Made me want to watch Inside Llewyn Davis again, followed by A Mighty Wind.

Aniara (2018) - A cruise starship, on its way to Mars, loses power and drifts off course into the emptiness of space and gradually everyone on board goes insane. A very Ballardian Swedish sci-fi movie, which, being Swedish, is more interested in the Ballardian psychology than it is in the science fiction and also, being Swedish, features more full frontal nudity and erect penises than I or the dog were ready for on a Saturday afternoon.1 A potentially extremely depressing study of religion and society but admirably conceptual sci-fi, unlike…

Rogue One (2016) / Star Wars (1977) - I am inevitably utterly bereft now I’ve finished Season 2 of Andor. The last episode of which led directly into Rogue One, so naturally I immediately watched that. And that then ends with the beginning of Star Wars (alright, alright, A New Hope 🙄), so naturally I then watched that (and naturally I dug out my un-specialised version because fuck you, George).

This was, literally, stylistically and conceptually, a retreat into childhood. Back in 1977, the original Star Wars was the greatest kid’s film ever made (and possibly still is) and it fundamentally re-wired my 8 year old brain. It became my entire world. Having Andor, an adult take on that world, forty five years later was always going to be a treat, but having one that was so well done and at a moment when it couldn’t be more apposite? We didn’t deserve it. But we’ll take it.

Especially since the original also fundamentally re-wired Hollywood, leading to the Joseph Campbell inspired ‘story with 1000 faces’, in which every other film has exactly the same plot structures and the remainder are just sequels.

Part of the genius of the original Star Wars was the ‘lived in’ nature of its fictional universe. Not just the grubby spaceships and dead end port towns, but also its admirable restraint with exposition. References to the ‘Jedi’ and ‘moisture farms’ and ‘the Imperial Senate’ are made, but none of them is really explained, they’re all just more set dressing. All of this creates the sense of a wider world while allowing space for imagination.

And then, ever since, there have been sequels and every one of those sequels has closed up that imaginative space with a series of films that are little more than wikipedia articles full of lumpen ‘lore’ with the same hero’s journey plot structures, becoming ever more impenetrable and interminable with every iteration.

I am one of the few who are strongly of the opinion that there should never have been any Star Wars sequels at all (no, Empire Strikes Back isn’t actually a ‘good’ film, you were simply 11, get a grip)2. But then if that was the case, we’d never have had Andor.

More importantly, with the appearance of Tim Bentinck (12th Earl of Portland, Count Bentinck of Waldeck Limpurg and, most importantly, David Archer) in Andor and Felicity Jones in Rogue One (Jyn Erso and, previously, Emma Carter) we now have a Star Wars / Archers crossover universe. Here’s holding out for Ed Grundy, Jedi Knight. “But I was going into Felpersham for some power converters!” “If you strike me down, I shall only become voiced by a different actor.” (And for all the readers who have never heard what Wikipedia calls “the world's longest-running present-day drama”, BBC radio’s “everyday story of country folk”, we can only say: lucky you).

Actually, speaking of The Archers…3

Guns of Navarone (1961) / Ill Met By Moonlight (1957) - it was a Bank Holiday here, we had Ro’s Dad staying, and so an afternoon war film just spontaneously occurred in the shape of Guns of Navarone, a star stuffed extravaganza of day-for-night shooting, craggy character acting and machine gunning of Nazis. Navarone is entirely a work of fiction, based on a novel by Alistair McLean, so we then watched an adaptation of a true story of Greek resistance. Ill Met By Moonlight tells the story of the kidnapping of a German General in Crete, mastermined by Patrick Leigh-Fermor. Guns of Navarone was originally to have been directed by one of the greatest of all British film directors, Alexander Mackendrick, while Ill Met By Moonlight was directed by the actual greatest (fight me), Michael Powell. Mackendrick dropped out of Navarone - or was possibly fired, probably due to the traditional ‘creative difficulties’ - and while Powell dismissed Moonlight as a failure, the difference between the two movies highlights a change happening to the portrayal of the Second World War in popular culture. Moonlight is fitfully as whimsical and lyrical as you might expect from Powell and Pressburger, but it is still the product of inventive and creative individuals, and is based on a true story and is suspenseful but relatively low on action. Four years later, Navarone is an entirely fictional product of the Hollywood assembly line and features lots of action set pieces: blowing up boats, climbing cliffs, bringing down Nazi motorcyclists with washing lines. Twenty years on from the actual fighting, the War is becoming increasingly mythologised and fantastical.

And speaking of Nazis:

Zone of Interest (2023) - The lives of Rudolph Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, and his family. A film dedicated to a notion that has been said many times before and will always still bear repeating: the Nazis weren’t unique monsters, they were just people, doing their jobs and living their lives. Happily living next door to hell and doing jobs that involved doing unspeakable, unimaginable evil and yet so many of them apparently able to conceive of this as normality. Jonathan Glazer is a terrific director, and gives the film the look of washed out ‘40s home movies, emphasising the horror of the homeliness and the banality of the evil.

Playlist

What I’ve mostly been listening to this month is the new Tune-Yards album, which is terrific, but I playlisted them last week, so here’s ten other tracks I’ve had on repeat.

The playlists are all on Spotify.

‘Do It Baby’ - Susan Cadogan. It definitely felt like it was considering being summer in the UK for a couple of days there. It’s raining again now, though.

‘Jamaica Running’ - The Pool. As I said in my piece on taste, I’m a sucker for this kind of heavily rhythmic track with glittery, tuneful synths over the top. See also my piece on Japan.

‘summer ii’ - Felbm. Speaking of things I’m a sucker for, I adore Felbm, who matches precisely my ambient / library music tastes.

‘Do the Whirlwind’ - Architecture in Helsinki. This, on the other hand, fits my taste for funky ‘80s New Wave pretty neatly too.

‘The Order of Invisible Things’ - Domenique Dumont. Keeping with the ‘80s theme with this kind of Latvian City Pop.

‘S.O.T.H.’ - Sault. Having failed in my attempt to enjoy Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz this month, here’s some spiritual RnB to make up for it.

‘Return of the Return of the Fire Trick Star’ - Deerhoof. It occurred to me too late that the band I should have used as an example of music I had to work to get into in my taste piece was Deerhoof, as it was my friend Robert who introduced me to both them and Sonic Youth (and who had a John Coltrane poster on his wall at University). Anyway, I love them now and they have a new album out.

‘Addis Black Widow’ - Mulatu Astatke / The Heliocentrics. Some lovely, dark and stompy Ethiopian jazz funk.

‘Lecture 25’ - My New Band Believe. I didn’t know that the video was full of shots of London streets but now this is also making me very nostalgic.

‘170’ - Anna Erhard. From the streets of London to a model village of Berlin and an argument about how tall someone is. Relatable.

You can find the whole playlist here:

This month we also went to a lovely little exhibition of medieval calendars at Lambeth Palace Library:

I went largely in my real world identity as an information designer and I was not disappointed. The objects on display were mostly paper pocket calendars, complex documents of timelines and matrices that helped medieval people keep track of saints’ days, moveable feasts and sometimes just what day of the week it was.

As the title of the exhibition suggests, the books themselves were extraordinary objects, cleverly folded and pleated to tuck long timelines and almanacks into tiny books that would fit in a pocket. But their contents were even more extraordinary.

There was beautiful data visualisation, as in this table of months, showing the tasks suitable for each month, coupled with an infographic showing the hours of daylight: the red lines in each disc are day time, the black, hours of night. You’ll note that the proper activity for May is collecting flowers.

Then there was fantastic paper engineering, as in this volvelle:

A volvelle is circular layers of card stacked up on top of each other and pinned in the centre so that they can each rotate independently. The circles on top have holes or pointers cut into them so that as they rotate they reveal elements of the circle beneath.

I love volvelles. One of the highlights of my career so far is persuading Google to make one as a marketing exercise. How delightful to have a twenty-first century digital company indulging in medieval paper engineering.

This one was particularly splendid for having a hole which revealed phases of the moon. The moon, of course, as a grumpy little blue face, like a character from The Mighty Boosh.

Then there were extraordinary pieces of text art, like this matrix for determining the star sign for each month (and a lovely iconographic version next to it):

The exhibition was wonderful, but small, and I found myself still early for my meeting, so I wandered to it by way of Tate Britain, where I saw this, ‘The Arrival’ by Christopher Nevinson (c. 1913):

Having just come from the medieval calendars, this really made me stop and think.

Most of those medieval calendars were intended to be perpetual, not for one year but eternally useful. And they meant eternally. Right up to the end of the world, which was presumably, hopefully, imminent.

These calendars placed the present within an eternal pattern. Not just the reliable cycle of feast days and seasons, but within a divine history, frequently including timelines that went all the way back to the Biblical creation of the world:

And they also went forward, often featuring means of foretelling the future. Depending on the dominical letter of a year, the wine harvest will be good, the king will die, it’ll be a good time to treat eye diseases:

These calendars situated the user in a predictable, ordained mechanism of time, in which the past, present and future were all parts of a divine process.

The modernist painting, on the other hand, anatomises the moment. Nevinson was interested in ‘simultaneity’, the way that our experience of the world is made from multiple elements, the eye saccading, the brain piecing together a gestalt from the different senses.

On the other hand it could be seen as a vision of individual experience, the way a moment can be experienced in multiple different ways by different people. No moment is definitive but only exists in the eyes of the beholders.

The comparison between the two depictions of time really struck me, the intervening changes in technology, which increasingly mechanised our sense of time, of culture, in which labour, communication and connectedness demanded a new conception of the present, and the changes in the idea of the self in relation to society. How the medieval depiction of the now in the universal and eternal had become the infinite, individual present.

It also reminded me that I need to go to galleries more often.

The Metropolitan visits art galleries all too infrequently:

Ken Kiff: The National Gallery Project

: To The Hales Gallery in Shoreditch to have a look at the exhibition there of Ken Kiff’s The National Gallery Project (before nipping round the corner to look at boiler suits in Labour and Wait, naturally).

The project is a series of paintings, charcoals and drawings in which Kiff responds to works in The National Gallery. For instance this:

Is a version of Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape by (the workshop of) Joachim Patinir:

The exhibition, which is great (and frankly, the perfect size for an art exhibition, being only about a dozen works in total), prompted two thoughts.

One was about the canard – so often trotted out by AI enthusiasts – that LLMs, in ingesting huge amounts of material and then producing output based on those inputs, are learning in the same way as humans do. That they are behaving as human artists do, in learning from the historical corpus of art and deriving from it.

This is arrant nonsense, of course. A human artist, especially a professional, trained artist, is acutely aware of all the cultural and historical valances of the work they look at and the work they produce. And they do more than synthesise: they invent. In responding to that piece by Patinir, Kiff completely transforms it, not just in medium but in meaning, turning it from that strange Renaissance of devotional image, decorative landscape and artistic skill into a twentieth century image of uncertainty and mystery.

There is, moreover, the matter of taste; that Kiff chose this picture and chose to reproduce it at least in part, one suspects, for aesthetic reasons, for reasons that might be hard to articulate sensibly and which arise from a purely individual meld of personality and experience.

This, though, suggests another reason why that silly parallel should be eschewed. Because why would we want AIs to be remotely human? Why would we expect them to be? Surely the real promise of the technology is not in replicating what humans might do, but to produce works we never could. Alien art, that’s what we want, the tastes of non-human intelligence, the dreams of electric sheep.

The show also made me think about copyright. The AI techbros have a point, albeit a small one. Everything is, after all, a remix. Art is always in conversation with its culture. Indeed it is often not even the work of a single individual; witness that ‘workshop of’ Joachim Patinir in the attribution of the painting Ken Kiff reworked.

Our notion of copyright is founded on a canard of its own: that artistic work is sui generis, the work of a lone, Bohemian genius completely uninfluenced by his (always his) culture or the work of others. Moreover it is increasingly used by corporations and streaming platforms to restrict artistic work and protect their own profits.

But the original goal of copyright – to protect the work of artists so they could earn a damn living using their talents instead of driving buses and writing poetry in the evening (see Paterson, below) – is a good one, surely. A great deal of the fury that has met the wholesale LLM theft and appropriation of creative work is that it is being done by overpaid twerps in gilets who have created nothing apart from toxic workplaces and bad PowerPoints.

Sadly, the parable of the sower begins to look like it was about the advent of AI: “For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.” (Matthew, 13:12)

A month in the country

: After shock and bargaining comes – if not acceptance – a stage of reconstruction. (Yes, this is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s ‘seven stages of grief’ and yes, we know they have no intrinsic ordering.) When even Nate Silver — neither an avowed political progressive nor a noted hysteric – thinks Trump’s second term features ‘extremely aggressive’ abuses of executive power, those of us who can do sod all about it must simply find things to do with our hands. Which is how, this month, we’ve found ourselves watching a suite of modern European films.

This wasn’t, at first, a deliberate attempt to ignore the cultural hegemon across the Atlantic. It was just that I’d seen The Teacher’s Lounge (2023) recommended somewhere, and I’ve been a big fan of Leonie Benesch’s face since we watched the first season of Babylon Berlin, so we thought we’d give it a go. What’s the worst that can happen? You spend a fiver on a not-very-good German film? Girlfriend, we recently spent two hours watching The Town (2010) with Ben Affleck. We are used to coping with disappointment.

But the thing we both noticed is that The Teacher’s Lounge is ethically ambiguous in a way that feels intrinsically European. I’m talking about Europe Europe now, not the geographical Europe that includes the UK; the Europe of multilingualism and agonising over border controls, the Europe of far-right governments and open historical wounds. Benesch plays an idealistic young teacher in a self-consciously boho, majority-white German school that is thrown into chaos when a child with Turkish heritage is accused of stealing. You might think you know where this is going but you almost certainly don’t, which is one of the things that makes it so enjoyable. Suffice it to say that by the end, you don’t know who is in the wrong and who is in the right; or, more accurately, you suspect that everyone is a bit of both.

While the UK has capitulated fully to US culture over the last ten years, skipping along in its wake and trying to get its attention, Europeans have remained at a greater distance. My theory is that — at least in part — this is not because they’re better than us, but because of the hard mental pause attendant on translating ‘cuck’ or ‘BIPOC’ into Dutch. I reckon that pause gives an opportunity to ask an important question, which is: ‘Do we have to do this bullshit?’ I can’t say for sure, because if it wasn’t about Brexit I wasn’t paying attention, but perhaps Europeans have not spent the last ten years screaming flaccid in-group slogans at each other. Or, at least, not the same flaccid in-group slogans that have preoccupied the Anglosphere. And a change is as good as a rest.

Our next stop was Paris for The Goldman Case (2023), a claustrophobic legal drama. This makes it sound like an Aaron Sorkin film when it is anything but; sure, there’s a lot of talking, but the dialogue is about the experience of guilt and the meaning of culpability and the bounds of privacy and the fungibility of personal association. It is the Frenchest thing you have ever seen, enlivened by great performances and breathtaking hair, all of it on men. And this, of course, is not a legal system that we understand; not a single statement is objected to or overruled, the lawyers exchange playground insults, and the spectators amuse themselves by shouting and throwing things. The whole thing is a reconstruction of the real-life murder retrial of a French far-left activist, Pierre Goldman, whose case was a cause celebre in France in the ‘70s, and you’ve absolutely never heard of him, have you? Neither had we.

Now on a roll, we turned to Nr. 24, a biopic of Norwegian resistance hero Gunnar Sønsteby. You’ve (probably) never heard of him either (he wasn’t involved in the Telemark raid). But you know how resistance war hero movies go, right? 25% pluck, 25% tension, 25% torture and 25% Brad Pitt/Kirk Douglas/Keira Knightley giving it the eyes. Well, not in this case; at least, not entirely. Nr. 24 is, in a lot of ways, exactly what you’d expect, but the narrative structure – in which the aged Sønsteby is giving a talk to some high school students – introduces something entirely unexpected: a long meditation on whether or not it was justified for resistance heroes to kill Nazi collaborators. Tobias and I were so astonished at the great moral weight attached to this question that we kept having to pause the film and check with each other that we hadn’t misunderstood something. For Brits and Americans reared on triumphalist war stories, the moral righteousness of killing Nazi collaborators is, like, page 1 of the booklet. But then we realised: it’s not so easy to evince certainty about this stuff if your great-grandmother was shot in the head because she had a mediocre fuck with Fritz in a hedgerow in 1943.

And then we were off to Iceland for Godland (2022), in which a Danish priest travels to nineteenth century Iceland and is driven insane. This is a proper Art Film and has an awful lot of Photography in it. Thankfully there is also a fairly dynamic plot, again shot through with moral ambiguity. Acts of violence, so routinely used for catharsis in British and American films, are sudden and inexplicable and frightening. Nobody is really morally good apart from a fabulous young girl, Ida, and that’s only because she’s not yet old enough to be anything else. (The moral seriousness of children and young people was a running theme in all of these films.)

So there you have it: our interesting month with our European cousins. If you’re becoming increasingly irritable with the infinite scroll of insufferable sludge on the Amazon Prime home page, give it a go. After all, it’s when you’re in that ‘well YOU fucking pick something then’ state that you end up paying to watch The Town. Save yourself while you have the chance.

Also in this month’s viewing

Paterson (2016): Had to watch the very stupid Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker for the piece on Sapphire and Steel, so this was the antidote. A Jim Jarmusch movie about a bus-driving poet played by Dark Lord of the Sith Kylo Ren. Calm, charming and a preferable performance from Adam Driver in this one.

September 5 (2024): We fell down a Munich Olympics-shaped rabbit hole this month, which included Spielberg’s lacklustre Munich (2005). September 5, though, was very watchable. The ABC sports crew covering the 1972 Munich Olympics find they are suddenly covering a hostage crisis instead. Featuring Leonie Benesch (again) as a German translator shoehorned into the film so there was at least one woman with a speaking part.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948): Joan Fontaine as a woman who falls in love with a rakish musician (Louis Jourdan) and devotes her life to him, even though he never realises she even exists. Absolute banger of a classic Hollywood weepie, adapted from a Stefan Zweig story, with lots of lovely back-lot Austria and everyone doing a different accent.

Ford v Ferrari (2019): Car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and British driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) build the GT40 and win Le Mans. Been meaning to watch this after David Cairns was complimentary about it. As usual with Cairns, he was right. I am not usually that interested in grown-ass men making brrm-brrms go ZOOM! but this actually held my attention.

You can see Tobias’s Letterboxd profile here: https://boxd.it/2lT6f

Playlist

This month’s playlist: ten stand-out tracks that Tobias has enjoyed this month.

The playlists are all on Spotify.

Heartbreak - Tune-Yards. A new single from Tune-Yards, that’s always good news and this is a cracker.

Calling England Home - Anthony Joseph. This popped up unexpectedly when I was at the gym and absolutely did the job of distracting me from the misery of the exercise.

Up A Tree (Went This Heart I Have) - Cotton Jones. I thought this was Jim Morrison for a brief moment, but fortunately way less pompous.

Spike Island - Pulp. You didn’t really think I wouldn’t have been listening to the new Pulp single on repeat did you?

Emperor Tomato Ketchup - Stereolab. Well, if we’re flashing back to the ‘90s, we might as well add some Stereolab, surely?

The Penguin - Raymond Scott. I’ve been listening to my 1940’s playlist this month, so my Spotify recommendations have featuring a lot of period jazz.

Disseminated - Soul Coughing. Then I realised that ‘The Penguin’ was sampled by this Soul Coughing track. ‘90s flashback, remember?

Discover Tokyo - Shuta Hasunuma. Perhaps we could all do with calming down for a moment.

How Is The Weather In Paris? - Alain Romans. I was discussing Jacques Tati with friend of The Metropolitan Finbar Hawkins the other day and was reminded of a showing of M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953) at the BFI that turned out to be packed with half term grandparents and grandchildren, all of whom, 8 to 88, spent the next hour and a half in stitches. Joy.

Paranoid Android - Brad Mehldau. Radiohead seem to be one of those bands that I can only stomach in cover versions.

The whole playlist is on Spotify here:

This month we also went to watch some Brothers Quay films:

To the excellent Garden Cinema with friends of the Metropolitan to see a selection of films by the Brothers Quay, selected and introduced by the brothers themselves, as part of the Kinoteca Polish Film Festival1. Twins Stephen and Timothy Quay make, primarily, stop motion animated films, mostly using found and antique objects, that are strongly reminiscent of the work of the Czech animator Jan Švankmajer. The brothers are originally from Philadelphia but have been working in Europe (and mostly London) for the last half a century.

The films I saw made me realise two things. The first was that a sound cue in The Comb – a rising, anxious string tone followed by a plucked, perturbing plonk – has become my mental shorthand for the inexplicable and unnerving qualities of Eastern European-flavoured animation, in the way The Simpsons’ ‘Worker and Parasite’ has become shorthand for Soviet-era cartoons.

The second was a sudden recognition that the Brothers’ particular look – Victorian doll’s heads, scraps of lace, scissors for legs and the unsettling application of dentures, all within some kind of box or frame, edged about with broken mirrors and bits of plaster moulding – was the visual language of a certain section of the ‘80s underground. This cluttered, moth-eaten, Miss Havisham-esque aesthetic is influenced by the objet trouvé and collage of surrealist art. (Most obviously it recalls the boxes of artist Joseph Cornell, who assembled found objects into strange and bewitching dioramas.) It was on the covers – designed by Vaughan Oliver and 23 Envelope – of records by The Cocteau Twins and Pixies, both on the 4AD label. It was apparent in comics including The Sandman and Arkham Asylum with artwork by Dave McKean.

Quite why this might have been so fashionable is another story. The Quay aesthetic is all very goth, of course: all those bleached skulls and unsettling puppets. And there was a strain in the ‘80s of what Luke Honey terms ‘pickelhaube chic’, the cyclical rediscovery of late Victorian and Edwardian fashions; for those of us who were teenagers then, it consisted of a dark mutation of Blitz Club finery and curdled memories of growing up in the ruins of the last, late-’60s revival of all this nineteenth century jumble. It was also, I suppose, a revolt against the wipe-clean, black ash, relentlessly new and capitalist post-Big Bang ‘80s. All this dusty clutter, the dull-eyed taxidermy and rickety clockwork, stood in direct opposition to the sleek electronic present of chrome-effect executive toys and digital watches. William Gibson’s 1986 cyberpunk novel Count Zero nods to this trend, presenting it as a strange irruption into his science fictional world, in the form of an artwork apparently inspired by Cornell’s boxes:

But Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossible distances, of loss and yearning. It was sombre, gentle, and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuit boards, faced with mazes of gold A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, greyish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin – but the thing’s face was seared and blackened. The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.

The artwork, it turns out, has been made [spoiler] by an artificial intelligence, a non-human artist, which has taken the detritus of human culture and reassembled it into a fresh, alien visual language.

Maybe we’re due a comeback of this style pretty soon.

For slightly less unnerving animation, there’s always Studio Ghibli:

In

Run Lola Run (1998)

: Finally caught up with Tom Tykwer’s 1998 thriller of forking paths, which turned out to be extremely good fun. It is also extremely of its time, in its evocation of chaos theory and multiple universes, its use of ‘90s techno and its approach to filmmaking.

Maybe it's because I’ve been watching a lot of them recently for The Metropolitan, but I was struck by how much indie films of the late ‘90s were influenced by the films of the late ‘60s. Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996), for example, is a Britpop Hard Day’s Night (1964); considerably more dark and cynical, but driven by the same creative and technical energy. (It’s also aged a great deal better than most Britpop output.) Run Lola Run, with its jumpy editing, needle drops and split-screen tricksiness, is very Nouvelle Vague. It’s hyper-aware of its own medium and storytelling techniques.

This was, of course, the cinema of the young MTV generation. It was also more or less the last cinematic flourish before CGI, when generating that kind of manic creativity demanded playing outside the frame, with the form itself, rather than being able to create anything you liked within it.

Daredevil (2025)

: I realise not many Metropolitan readers share my taste for the long-underwear set, but I’m very glad to have ol’ horn head back on TV. (Mandatory Marvel comic backstory: as a child, Matt Murdock was blinded by radioactive waste that also heightened his other senses. He deploys his extraordinary abilities in his day-job as a crusading defence lawyer. He also dresses up in a skintight red suit to fight bad guys.)

Daredevil was one of my favourite superheroes as a kid and was one of the few superhero comics I carried on reading as an adult, specifically Ann Nocenti’s run as a writer in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. He’s what gets called a ‘street-level’ hero, as does Batman, meaning that he tends to deal with everyday villains rather than mad gods and alien conquerors. Also like Batman, his rogue’s gallery tends towards the goofy and colourful. Can’t wait till they have Stilt-Man on TV.

Part of the appeal of such characters is precisely that sense of the everyday made extraordinary. They do not soar above the Earth or spend their time in exotic super-villain lairs; the action takes place on rooftops and in back alleys, on the edges of the mundane. The grim and grotty city becomes an adventure playground, a place of wonder.

As Warren Ellis has pointed out, superhero stories do not not really constitute a discrete genre. They belong with ur-literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, the Journey to the West, the adventures of Heracles and Cuchulainn and Coyote: these are all, effectively, superhero stories. They derive their power from situating the fantastical in the mundane; the enchantment of the ordinary is a core part of their delight. Heracles might have journeyed to the Underworld and the Gardens of the Hesperides, but he also mucked out stables and went hunting with the lads. The power of these stories as ‘exempla’, tutelary metaphors for the daily heroism of adult life, lies as much in their everydayness as in their heroism.

Daredevil as a TV show pre-dates the Disney buy-out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It began as a Netflix show which revelled in its grittiness, turning its lower TV budget to its advantage with low-light-downs in dirty corridors.

The series is now on Disney, but they’ve kept the cast and – apparently as a result of the cast’s objections to the original script for the new show – the tone. Or at least, mostly. This is now, after all, a Disney show, part of the MCU four-quadrant-entertainment behemoth. It has to walk a delicate line between tween-pleasing spandex shenanigans and the self-conscious YA angst of the comics. But this is to its advantage. Too much grittiness tends to throw the underlying silliness of the genre into too stark a relief. Christopher Nolan’s Batman films strive for realism, and end up looking far dafter than Adam West’s campily straight version from the ‘60s TV series.

What the show has retained, however, is a struggle core to the character in the comics: the very idea of what it is to be a hero at all. Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) is explicitly Catholic, and thus burdened with both a strict moral compass and crippling guilt. The Disney version shows him having abandoned the mask and suit for the more conventional heroics of doing law real good. He is contrasted with The Punisher (John Bernthal), an antihero vigilante who began in the comics as much more of a villain, given his willingness to kill rather than trust to the workings of law and order. The character has had a troubled real-life resonance, with his skull logo adopted by American law enforcement and the military to symbolise a callous disregard for the judicial system, equality and human rights. The show picks away at these themes, setting Matt Murdock up against a group of corrupt cops who have adopted the Punisher’s logo. They are the antithesis of the traditional Marvel values of responsibility, friendship and self-sacrifice.

Also, it's worth watching the most recent episode simply for British-born Charlie Cox, who plays Daredevil, pronouncing ‘caramel’ in his best American accent over and over again. ‘Karrmul’. Delightful.

Adolescence (2025)

: There is a moment in the dizzying first episode of Adolescence when both the police (who have arrested a thirteen year old boy for murder) and the boy’s own defence lawyer take a beat to consider the boy’s father. They do this with the weary caution of professionals. Is the father trustworthy? Is he safe? Is he a good father? Is he a good man?

Everyone has written a great deal about Adolescence, including us. This is mostly because it is a tremendously well made piece of work about an all too pertinent topic, with some brilliant performances and some breathtaking execution. This, however, was the moment I kept returning to.

Because, as it turns out, the father (Stephen Graham) is a good dad. Or at least, he is trying to be. He has anger issues, but is careful not to unleash on his family. Throughout the whole process of the police raiding his house, arresting his son and then accusing the boy of an horrendous crime, he tries to remain responsible and grown up.

Indeed, Graham, who co-created the show, was determined that this should be an ordeal experienced by ordinary people, a ‘normal’ family. Almost all the characters are ordinary; most of the authority figures and civil servants are reasonable and conscientious even as they struggle with a terrible situation and inadequate resources.

This choice feels crucial to the effectiveness of the show. Each episode is filmed as one take, rooting us in the real time of events, pinning our attention to every moment. Similarly, rather than pile up dramatic twists and turns, and drown the story in soapy secrets and lies in the way of most ‘issues’ dramas, Graham and his co-creator Jack Thorne focus intently on its central point. And as all the attention on the show testifies, it works perfectly.

Tarot (Warburg Institute until 30 April)

: A lovely little exhibition on the evolution of the art of the Tarot. It starts with Renaissance decks to which were added ‘triumph’ cards depicting Humanist symbols, including the Muses, the Planets and various Classical gods. The depiction of these trump cards varied from pack to pack, gradually including contemporary figures such as jugglers and street magicians. Then in 1781, in true Enlightenment style, a French clergyman decided they were ancient Egyptian symbols, and everything went mad.

The exhibition focuses on the visual content of the cards, and features both Pamela Colman Smith’s Arts and Crafts illustrations for the Rider-Waite pack and some of the stunning original paintings of Lady Frieda Harris’s Vorticist Thoth Tarot, created with Aleister Crowley, with their extraordinary Hilma af Klimt-like palettes.

What it casts into relief, though, is how the mystic meanings applied to them are as much an imaginative and artistic response as the actual visuals. This can be seen directly in Austin Osman Spare’s deck, where he has annotated the hand-drawn cards with his own notes as to interpretation. You can see how the visuals and meanings change under the hand of each artist and interpreter. The way in which different generations have imbued these essentially abstract symbols with new meanings and significance is fascinating.

Out

Chernobyl (2019)

The continued quest to find things to watch with Ro’s Dad led us to a rewatch of 2019’s Chernobyl mini-series, which is an amazing piece of work: well written, splendidly cast and abso-fucking-lutely terrifying. Having said all that, we’re not sure we’d recommend watching it right now. It’s an alarming reminder that autocratic regimes actively mitigate against competence. It also demonstrates that health and safety ‘red tape’ protects not only lives, but also the reputations of bureaucrats and technicians. It does this by preventing the kind of unthinking incompetence that might lead you to, I don’t know, share military secrets on a compromised messaging system. To which you’ve invited a journalist.

It also brought to mind the fact that a Russian military drone recently punched a hole in the $2.7bn ‘New Safe Confinement Structure’ built to immure the damaged reactor at Chernobyl. And if the necessity for something called ‘the New Safe Confinement Structure’ doesn’t already fill you with happy confidence, the IAEA says radiation levels haven’t changed since it was damaged. Breathe regular!

Anyway, you should watch Chernobyl if you haven’t yet, but maybe not right now. Not if you want to sleep again.

A Real Pain (2024)

Jesse Eisenberg’s drama about two Jewish cousins on a pilgrimage to Polish Holocaust sites and pre-War family landmarks is now on AppleTV. Again, this one is in the ‘Out’ category not because it’s bad, but because of our viewing circumstances; it was impossible to ignore the creeping realisation that Ro’s Dad absolutely hated it. A Real Pain is really a series of gentle dramedy sketches and character studies; it requires viewers who are in a receptive, thoughtful state. Unfortunately, the meandering narrative and the constant fucking swearing had Roy crossing his arms silently within the first ten minutes, and it’s very hard to be receptive and pensive when you know someone in the room is having to physically prevent themselves from shouting at the screen. There should be a word for this.

Keiran Culkin does his highly effective eerie man-child routine and Eisenberg is as skilled and charming as ever, but even without the scowling octogenarian, we suspect it would have felt a bit undercooked.

Shake it all about

This month’s playlist: ten stand-out tracks that Tobias has enjoyed this month.

The playlists are all on Spotify.

The Test - Billy Nomates. A new single from Billy Nomates is always a cause for celebration and this one is a cracker (as usual).

Midnight Legend - Special Interest. There seems to be much disagreement about what genre of music it is that Special Interest makes but whatever it is, it's great.

Brother Where Are You - Oscar Brown Jr (Matthew Herbert remix). Oscar Brown Jr’s biography is amazing and I’m delighted this remix led me to it.

African Sweets - Gene Harris and The Three Sounds. At first I assumed this was a cover of ‘Paint It Black’, but then it goes on getting better and better.

Stranger Still - Vetiver. Vetiver is one of those bands that Spotify keeps recommending to me and it’s usually right about that.

Lying In The Sunshine - Free. The sun’s out. It’s not warm enough to lie in yet, but I do have the doors open in the writing shed.

The Devil Is Loose - Asha Puthli. Probably the only disco song written about the note sent by Philip of France to Bad King John1 when Richard the Lionheart escaped from captivity: ‘Look to yourself. The Devil is loose’.

Fun For Everyone - Hachiku. The video for this is a delightful reminder of where I used to live in hideously hipster East London.

Ballerina - Daisy The Great. Another new single. See? Not entirely out of touch. Not yet. On the other hand…

El Manisero - Xavier Cugat. PEANUTS!

In case you missed it, this month’s Mixtape also included, inevitably, Donald Trump

A film exploring the relationship, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, between lawyer and right-wing fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and the young, inexperienced son of a shady property developer, played by Sebastian Stan: Donald J. Trump.

We’ve been suffering some existential angst here at Metropolitan HQ since Trump assumed office seven weeks ago. (Seven weeks, holy hell.) Writing a pop culture newsletter feels flaccid and ludicrous, like pushing marshmallows up your nose while a very serious doctor gives you a terminal diagnosis.

But then, nobody wants our geopolitical analysis. (Just FYI it consists of the letters ‘a’, ‘r’, ‘g’ and ‘h’.) For the avoidance of doubt, The Metropolitan believes that Trump and all his associates are worthless, godforsaken motherfuckers. Beyond that we don’t have much to contribute, unless you count general solidarity, some hand tools, and Tobias’s prodigious collection of tinned beans. If you want some political sustenance we recommend Ezra Klein’s podcast and Sam Freedman’s Substack. The determinedly ecumenical Not Another One podcast is coming into its own as well.

From us, in lieu of anything more insightful, here are some quick thoughts on The Apprentice. Just as a warning: it includes a scene of sexual violence that (to our eyes) is editorially justified and unprurient, and is extremely tough to watch.

The main concern of The Apprentice is to show the Trump origin story; like Endeavour, but a whole lot less wholesome and relaxing. Its thesis is that Trump was moulded by three things: his professional friendship with the virulently right-wing lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who gave him harsh lessons in the politics of power; the moral, financial and structural bankruptcy of ‘70s New York, which offered all kinds of shady opportunities; and his strained relationship with his father (Martin Donovan! One for the Hal Hartley fans.)

The first two factors come to the fore as the film places Trump firmly within the long-term trends of US right-wing politics. (In this, The Apprentice is a good companion piece to the wonderful 2020 series Mrs America.) Cohn is much given to extolling ‘democracy’, but for him ‘democracy’ is not a peaceful political system in which power is conferred through free and universal suffrage. Instead, its important characteristics are opposition to communism and the emphasis on individual freedom. As Cohn tells Trump: ‘This is a nation of men, not laws.’ The film makes great play of ‘Roy Cohn's three rules of winning’ as a template for Trump’s behaviour:

‘The first rule is the simplest. Attack, attack, attack! Rule two. Admit nothing, deny everything. Rule three. This is the most important rule of all. Okay? No matter what happens... no matter what they say about you, no matter how beaten you are: you claim victory and never admit defeat.’

These rules, you’ll notice, are not for success. Nor are they rules for happiness, or making friends and influencing people, or anything stupid and weak like that. They are rules for winning. And in order for you to win, someone has to lose. This is a zero-sum game. Pain – for someone else – is a requirement.

The Apprentice isn’t very subtle; it’s didactic and furious. But we’re all desperate for an explanation of how Trump came to be the hateful, gummy heap that he is, this monstrous election-winning titan, this garish snake-charmer of the American soul. How, for instance, did he come by his weirdly effective tactic of asserting that two plus two equals three, in the face of unimpeachable evidence to the contrary? Here, at least, is an explanation. Who knows whether it’s true?

Cohn is a man of the early Cold War, of the Bay of Pigs and the Tet Offensive; but Trump doesn’t have Cohn’s obsession with communism. (We’re never really told why he doesn’t.) He is instead a creature of the ‘80s, and the moral core of his ideology is acquisitiveness, plain and simple. This is the world in which ‘greed is good’, in the words of Gordon Gecko in Wall Street (1987); ‘good’ not just in the sense of ‘a useful tool’, but ‘good’ as opposed to ‘evil’, a moral good. Rich is right. ‘Nobody with a good car needs to be justified’, as the street preacher Hazel Motes insists in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952).

Together with Cohn’s Three Rules this coalesces into Trump’s brand of power politics, of having no cause beyond getting power and holding on to it; and his politics of dominance, the assertion and protection of the self. And if this is your credo, The Apprentice says, then you can justify almost anything: betraying your friends, hurting your loved ones, lying, cheating, stealing, and finally corrupting an entire country while withholding anti-HIV medication and other life-sustaining supplies from the world’s most vulnerable people.

As an explanation, it still lacks a certain something. The article of faith – in Trump’s case, greed – feels immaterial; we all have articles of faith. We all have causes or beliefs (or people) for which we are prepared to lie or cheat or steal, at a push. None of this explains the hallucinatory sociopathy of Trump’s behaviour, his unlimited appetite for pointless, malignant fuckery. It also doesn’t explain how a man who seems so fundamentally stupid has achieved such success. It’s impossible for most of us to watch Trump and not think that an essential part of his soul is somehow missing, and no amount of exposure to Roy Cohn can explain that. Although the film does posit that Trump ingested an awful lot of prescription drugs in the ‘80s and that this caused a catastrophic rupture in his personality, like Voldemort creating Horcruxes.

But these are philosophical questions – or, at least, they are questions to which nobody yet has neat answers. While you’re waiting for something more convincing, you could do a lot worse than watching The Apprentice, particularly if you actually remember the ‘80s; it’s intercut with archive footage – New York really was a wreck back then – and you can almost smell the hairspray. There’s a great use of ‘Blue Monday’ to introduce a doom-laden segment, as is traditional.

And the performances are great. There is very little upon which we agree with the virulently right-wing American political consultant Roger Stone, but he is right when he says that Jeremy Strong is extremely good as Stone’s friend Roy Cohn. For anyone interested in US politics and even mildly on the left Cohn is a hate-figure, but the character’s arc demands vulnerability and tragedy too. Strong hits all of the notes, clear as a bell. He’s an astonishing shape-shifter.

Cohn’s arc provides the movie with one of its two moral cores. The other is that of Ivana Trump (Ivanka’s mother), played by Maria Bakalova with a charming brittleness. It’s a horribly convincing portrait of a gutsy and fundamentally guileless young woman who thinks she’s in control.

Sebastian Stan is also great. Impersonating the world’s most famous and reviled individual must have seemed like a thankless task, but he pulls it off without veering into comedic territory. He perfectly adopts Trump’s strange, wandering cadence and his unsettlingly prissy moue without letting it overwhelm the performance.

He is particularly convincing in showing the young Trump’s vulnerability and nakedly amateur ambition. It is a raw, desperate thing, not yet braced in Cohn’s armour of age and success and advanced sociopathy. And the portraits of Trump’s parents, his monstrous father and his simmering mother (a small but electrifying performance by Catherine McNally) give you a sense of what a shitty childhood he had. For a few very brief moments, scattered throughout the film, you find yourself feeling a little bit sorry for Donald Trump.

And then you remember where you are.

For a slightly more reassuring vision of democracies, with fewer fascists and more people dressed as bins, there’s always the great British tradition of election night:

In

Civilization VII (2025)

: I’ve documented my addiction to Sid Meier’s Civilization games in The Metropolitan before, and here’s a new iteration, come to steal my time. When Civilization IV came out I bought it one afternoon and decided to have a quick game before supper to try it out. All of a sudden it was 5am and I was very hungry. I haven’t had that experience with Civilization VII yet, not least because I’m too old to stay up all night and these days I have to make supper for more people than just myself.

The game has some interesting new twists on the formula. You now play as several different civilizations through the course of history, passing from the Celts to the Anglo-Saxons to the British; and the tools for diplomacy have developed. Under the hood, though, it still has that ‘one more turn’ addictive mechanic. And the new diorama-inspired visuals are terrific.

Schindler’s List (1993)

: Yeah, I know - subscribe to The Metropolitan for all the hot new content. I’ve always avoided watching this precisely because I thought it was going to be incredibly upsetting, and it is, indeed, incredibly upsetting. But my dad was visiting and had just watched Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) *twice*. (Dementia doesn’t have many upsides, but at least you never run out of things to watch.) So we thought we’d move swiftly on to the next thing on the iPlayer — which turned out to be Schindler’s List — before we ended up watching it a third time.

I don’t have much new to say about Schindler’s List. It’s worth anyone’s time. Tobias said he had been worried it would be mawkish, but the acts of premeditated sadism and random violence are so sudden and persistent that there’s not much space for sentimentality. Most of what there is is in the relationship between Schindler and his Jewish worker Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley.

Ralph Fiennes (with a plump youthful face) is truly terrifying; Liam Neeson has the right amounts of charm, egotism and dissolution. The decision to shoot in black and white — because, Spielberg said, ‘The Holocaust was life without light’ — didn’t quite work for me, but equally it didn’t get in the way. (Getting in the way would have been quite welcome at some points, to be honest.)

What struck me is that Spielberg has, I think, very deliberately produced a corpus of documentary-style work about The Holocaust and, more broadly, about the Second World War in Western Europe. (He has done less about the other fronts in the War, although he did direct Empire of the Sun in 1987 and co-produced The Pacific for HBO; and of course, the most notorious death camps in the Holocaust were in Eastern Europe.)

The items in Spielberg’s War corpus aren’t documentaries: they’re fictionalised, quite heavily so at points. The young girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List probably didn’t exist in the form she’s shown in the film; at least, she isn’t based on any one person. There was a US Army mission to save one surviving brother from a family of brothers, but the family’s name wasn’t Ryan and the rescue didn’t happen in the way shown in Saving Private Ryan. Easy Company did help to liberate a concentration camp in Germany, but the story told in Band of Brothers is a composite of a few different experiences at a few different camps.

But the broad outlines of Spielberg’s War material are hellishly accurate. Many veterans attested that the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan was a very close representation of what happened on Omaha Beach in the early hours of D-Day; at several points in Band of Brothers you think ‘that can’t be true’ only to find out that it is. This cleaving to the essential facts is important; nobody can accuse Spielberg of making things up out of whole cloth. And when it comes to the Holocaust, we are sadly never short of people looking for an excuse to claim that it didn’t really happen.

Spielberg was born in 1946, 18 months after the War ended; for all of the adults he knew, it was foundational. And, of course, he is Jewish; his father lost around 20 family members in the Holocaust, and a Holocaust survivor taught him (Steven) how to read numbers using the tattoo on his arm. But Spielberg’s preoccupation with the War and with the Holocaust outstrips that of many other directors of a similar age and with similar backgrounds. This interest is personal to him (although he shares it with his frequent collaborator Tom Hanks), rather than speaking only to the circumstances of his youth.

I wonder whether he has made these films and programmes as a deliberate effort to fix the facts of the Holocaust vividly in the minds of his generation and the couple of generations that came after him. (Gen Z won’t watch these things, and will have to find out in their own way.) I wonder whether he decided that this is the best contribution that a talent like his can make to the memorialisation of the Holocaust and the insistence on the fact that it actually, truly happened. When it comes to cementing something firmly in the mainstream, you can’t beat a storyteller of genius working in the most widely accessed visual mediums.

The Colour of Pomegranates (1969)

: I wrote this month about the exquisite pleasure of being forced to ‘sit forward’ and pay attention while watching The Singing Detective (1986) and this feeling was compounded by watching the Armenian art film The Colour of Pomegranates via the BFI channel on Amazon Prime. More properly called Sayat-Nova, the film is a poetical biopic of the eighteenth century Armenian poet of that name. It is also entirely incomprehensible, especially if you are ignorant of eighteenth century Armenian poetry or, indeed, as in my case, Armenian anything.

However, it is also incredibly watchable. It is a series of stunning tableaux, full of oneiric symbols and alien ornamentation, beautiful colours and mysterious movements. Its challenge to comprehension was also a challenge to ‘second screening’; I didn’t look at my phone once, even as I was in turn exasperated, delighted and amused.

The argument for ‘casual viewing’, wallpaper TV, as outlined in this terrific piece by Will Tavlin, is that viewers will be inevitably distracted and so you must not interrupt their distraction. This ignores the obvious alternative: make something so good, so well made and compulsive, that it's impossible to be distracted from it, even when it’s as ludicrous and obscure as The Colour of Pomegranates.

Out

Severance (2022—present)

: Severance is the opposite of wallpaper TV; it actively requires a second screen on which you can do your homework and research all the details you missed in past episodes. It is a twisty thriller based on a high-concept premise; it’s extremely well directed, acted and made (which we’ve talked about before); and it delights in throwing curve balls at the audience.

This demand for revision is part of the appeal with some shows, often those — such as the Star Wars and MCU shows — set in fictional universes. I understand why people enjoy them; I’ve been boning up on comic book lore since I could read, and one suspects that many viewers of Amazon’s Rings of Power are watching not with their phone in one hand, but with a marked-up copy of the Silmarillion.

This homework ethic is now becoming increasingly common in less nerdy shows, and in the case of the new, second series of Severance it proved an exam question too far. The first episode made us realise we were going to have to watch the first season all over again if we were to have any hope of understanding what was going on. This was followed by an equally rapid realisation that — given the time and effort required — we weren’t going to, and so we moved on to other things. Which a lot of people have been doing with Marvel movies and Star Wars shows too.

Severance has distinct whiff of Lost, a show that was better at creating mysteries than it was at solving them. When you realise this it tends to make you reluctant to give it so much of your time. Severance is, though, extremely good looking and deliciously quirky; if the reviews for this season are good, I suspect I’ll end up doing all that revision eventually.

Shake it all about

This month’s playlist: ten stand-out tracks that Tobias has enjoyed this month.

The playlists are all on Spotify.

‘Tout doux tout doucement’ - Marcel Amont. Listened to this while writing this as the train was pulling out of Edinburgh Waverley, and let me tell you: this is the perfect soundtrack for a rail journey.

‘Hot Knife’ - Fiona Apple. The opening of this inevitably reminded me of The Monkees’ ‘Randy Scouse Git’, but the rest of it couldn’t be more different.

‘Soothing’ - Laura Marling. Wonderfully slinky, witchy track this, possibly slightly too spooky to be actually soothing.

‘I’m Shadowing You’ - Blossom Dearie. I have to admit I have a massive soft spot for Blossom Dearie, with her sharp, witty little stiletto lyrics hidden in the soft voice and chiming tunes. Particularly fond of these ‘70s recordings.

‘Cello Song’ - The Books feat. Jose Gonzales. A beautiful remix of a beautiful Nick Drake song. I can’t believe its taken me until my fifties to discover Nick Drake.

‘Peach, Plum, Pear’ - The McTague Twins. Another cover, this one a lovely sweet sour version of Joanna Newsome’s ‘Peach, Plum, Pear’.

‘Kaputt’ - Destroyer. This gets extra points for mentioning Sounds magazine alongside Smash Hits, Melody Maker and the NME.

‘The More I See You’ - Chris Montez. A splendid piece of ‘60s pop. The crocuses are starting to come out here, surely it's time for a swinging spring now?

‘Step Too Far’ - Pearl Charles. The new track from Pearl Charles. Who says we don’t bring you new music on The Metropolitan, even if it does sound like it was recorded 50 years ago.

‘Love Letters’ - Ketty Lester. Yep, still thinking about David Lynch.

This month’s mixtape has also included:

In this week’s piece on Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990), I mentioned how I saw the film while on a road trip across the States, and how I had been carrying a Super 8 camera on that trip.

This reminded me that I had two rolls of the film sitting in a container on my desk (goodness knows what might have happened to the rest over the last 35 years), so I dug them out, and sent them off to be digitised.

And here they are, lightly edited and with a little Kevin MacLeod background music1. Featuring a a couple of appearances from my friends Ben and Nancy, whose camera it actually was, if I remember correctly.

Just in case you hadn’t watched any footage of San Francisco junk yards or New Orleans aquaria recently.

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Here’s the piece on Slacker, if you haven’t seen it yet:

In search of something to watch while the rest of the Editorial Board was in the bath, most particularly something of bath length, I watched Ken Russell’s 1960 film for the BBC ‘A House in Bayswater’, as recommended by the ever reliable Luke Honey in his Weekend Flicks Substack.

‘A House in Bayswater’ is a batty little half hour, profiling the tenants of a single house London townhouse: artists and photographers, ageing ballerinas, retired lady’s companions and a landlady insistently determined to come across as a ‘character’.

The next bath night, I discovered a 1976 episode of the long running arts show Omnibus, ‘New York, New York’. For all our complaining about current BBC commissioning, we can at least revel in their past glories by using their contemporary glory: the iPlayer.

‘New York, New York’ is really two separate films, about two New Yorks appropriately enough. The first is a portrait of a single summer Saturday in Soho, New York, in 1976. It features enough annoying art twerps and self-involved hipsters to fill a Bethnal Green bar and feels astonishingly early ‘70s, all homespun and hippy hair.

It's hard to believe, as you watch some terrifying earnest singer songwriter singing a terrifyingly earnest song about being a good citizen, that somewhere only a few doors away, Talking Heads are quite possibly rehearsing ‘Psycho Killer’. That somewhere only a few blocks away someone is finalising the set list for that night’s illegal disco. That someone a couple of boroughs away is inventing hip-hop. That a whole new cultural revolution is about to start, but it ain’t starting from here.

I’m being slightly unfair, not least because it does feature a brief sequence of artist Chuck Close painting a giant photo-realistic head, but it is thrown into stark relief by the second half. This is a cracking portrait of the nascent graffiti culture, focussing particularly on the tagging of subway trains.

What ties all three of these documentary films together is that none of them have a narrator. There is no celebrity up front claiming they’ve always been fascinated by the Manhattan of the period and doing little pieces to camera in front of the graffiti of the Statue of Liberty in a sombrero on Thompson Street with some artfully placed trash around their feet. ‘I’ve always loved ‘70s movies like ‘The French Connection’ but now I’m going to make a connection of my own, not with France or heroin, but with ‘70s New York. So, yes, actually, a bit with heroin, I suppose.’

This is not to say that these shows don’t have a voice. In the case of Ken Russell’s film they have a very determined and idiosyncratic voice, in fact, but it’s a voice articulated through direction and editing, not through voiceover.

The first half of ‘New York, New York’ has almost no speech in it at all, apart from a choreographer berating her dancers and overheard snippets in passing. It’s mostly music and atmospherics as the camera cuts between musicians, artists and the summer streets outside. The second half is all vox pops from graffiti artists and members of the public, collaged with news reports and official pronouncements, all laid over footage of decaying ‘70s New York.

Not hosted, but definitely helmed, these are documentaries carefully collaged together to build their point from their material, without explicitly stating it. It’s a style which continued well into the ‘90s, you can see it in BBC shows from From A to B, but now is in danger of coming across as terribly arch and somewhat alienating and has hence largely disappeared.

Or has it? After all, what is Ken Russell’s film, other than ‘structured reality’? Or, actually, ‘scripted reality’, as he’s definitely set up several scenes deliberately in order to build his portrait of this loopy little bohemia. Films like these are distant ancestors of contemporary reality TV, the Neanderthals and Denisovans to the Homo Sapiens of ‘The Apprentice’ (not sure any Homo Sapiens are involved there, but you know what I mean). These are the individuals who broke the paths into new continents and who now only survive as strands of foundational DNA in the dominant species.

They certainly share the same interests: other people. But where reality TV mostly seems aimed at creating parasocial relationships with the featured characters, films like these are aiming to create a wider experience. They aim to capture a place, a scene, a gestalt image of a moment, in culture and history. Unlike the mediation of the hosted documentary, they attempt to give a visceral, aesthetic sense of being there, that for half an hour, you can feel some of the reality of ‘50s Bayswater or ‘70s Soho, even if you do have to put up with all the posers you find there.

Here’s our piece on the splendidly ‘90s documentary series about people and their cars: From A to B