Metropolitan Mixtape: June 2024
Guys with guns, good and otherwise
In
1. Band of Brothers (2001)
Our ongoing mission to find things we can watch with Ro’s Dad (still recovering from a knee replacement) scored a stunning victory by dropping into Normandy, seizing Carentan, running away from Arnhem, battling through Bastogne and finally taking The Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden. Yes, we rewatched Band of Brothers. Ro’s dad had seen it before; we’d all seen it before. But everyone was happy to watch it again, because it's brilliant.
You can read
’s piece about it here: https://www.themetropolitan.uk/p/band-of-brothers-and-saving-private?r=22vse&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=webWe then spent a happy few hours trying to work out what makes Band of Brothers better (in our opinion) than The Pacific (2010) and Masters of the Air (2024). The latter two were made by the same team, led by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Like Band of Brothers they use real-life characters and stories from the Second World War, had enormous budgets, and take themselves pretty seriously. But they don’t quite gel in the same way as Band of Brothers, and aren’t as enjoyable to re-watch. We think it’s a few things: one, the very tight timeframe in BoB (ten months from D-Day to VE Day), which gives the narrative real propulsion; two, the extraordinary dramatic luck (probably not the right word if you were actually there) of a single paratrooper company constantly popping up at some of the most totemic moments of the war in Western Europe; three, that the attrition rate for American paratroopers – while doubtlessly terrifying for the men themselves – was less than the death and injury rate for US bomber pilots or Marines in the Pacific, meaning that Band of Brothers can follow around 15 or 20 men throughout the entire series in the way the other two can’t; and that the writing and acting in Band of Brothers is just better. (Some of the writing in Masters of the Air in particular was just plain bad.) Yes, it’s all a bit what Tobias likes to call ‘walnut dash’; there’s nothing radical about it. It’s just hugely well done and extremely enjoyable.
2. Civil War (2024)
Alex Garland’s war journalism road trip has had a mixed reception generally, but it went down well in our house. Stephen Bush’s assessment that the politics are shallow but the film-making is splendid is pretty spot on. Probably best to see it as a film about war photography and how the news media treats conflicts in other countries, rather than anything insightful about American politics. If (like Rowan) you checked out of Garland’s career 30 years ago after being extremely bored by his novel The Beach, this would be a good time to check back in.
3. Godzilla Minus One (2023)
: Rowan was possibly in the bath when the dog and I watched this. I’m not sure it's quite her thing. The dog also wasn’t sure about all the atomic roaring, but I enjoyed it immensely. It’s particularly interesting in how it doubles down on the whole Godzilla as a big stomping metaphor about the Second World War, especially in how it mixes the cliches of a pulp adventure, complete with plucky underdogs called things like ‘Doc’ and ‘The Kid’, with realities of bombed out Tokyo and failed kamikaze pilots suffering PTSD. The destruction of Godzilla at the end begins to look less like a triumph over the legacy of the bomb and more like a burying of the realities of the war by reinventing Japan as a pop cultural behemoth.4. POPtical Illusion, John Cale (2024)
: As heralded by the single last month, John Cale’s new album is out and on first listen, it's a cracker. For all his use of contemporary sounds and instruments – as you would expect from an inveterate experimenter – what it's reminding me most of right now is his first solo album, Vintage Violence (1970), with its upbeat pop sensibilities. Let’s all hope we can all continue doing such good work into our 80s.Out
1. Hit Man (2024)
Slacker (1990) is perhaps the quintessential Gen X movie, and for that alone Richard Linklater will always be a revered figure in this house. But we rather bounced off Hit Man, even as everyone else raved about it. We didn’t get to the end. It felt, perhaps, neither laid back enough nor tense enough. It certainly wasn’t funny enough. Glen Powell is a charming actor but not quite a good enough screenwriter. Once we started imagining the Coen Brothers’ version of the story, probably starring George Clooney, the Linklater version couldn’t compete and we had to watch something else instead.
2. Shardlake (2024)
: Tobias was at work when the dog and I watched the first half of the first episode of this. It’s an adaptation of the first of the ‘Shardlake’ novels, an extremely popular murder-detection series written by the recently deceased C J Sansom and set in the England of Henry VIII. The mystery in this first story is set around a murder in a monastery, but even the biggest Shardlake fans wouldn’t claim that this series is up there with The Name of the Rose. Nevertheless, if you have a high tolerance for Tudor guff, as I definitely do, the novels do a good job of evoking time and place and building character. The TV adaptation, however, seemed bad. I gave up around the time that Sean Bean (playing Thomas Cromwell) had to intone some unforgivably clunky exposition about the Reformation, but on my admittedly short acquaintance it looks as though some regrettable decisions had been taken all round. (This is the second time this week that we have been unkind about a programme starring the young British actor Anthony Boyle, so in fairness I want to say that he was the best thing in Masters of the Air by a country mile and looked to be the best thing about Shardlake too.) 3. The UEFA European Football Championship (2024, all channels, all the time)
Our North American friends can be grateful that they are not interested in Association Football, because it has to be said that this tournament has been extremely dull so far. This matters not a jot to Tobias, who hates all sport with a passion anyway. However, it has led us to the joyous realisation that literally any of these ties can be enlivened by shouting ‘GRUDGE MATCH!’ after the teams are announced. Even as we are writing this, we started watching The Netherlands versus Austria and… yep, there it is: the vaguely-Austrian Habsburg occupation of the Spanish Netherlands; grudge match! At the same time France is playing Poland which is… yep… a grudge match! A fun game for anyone with a passing familiarity with a thousand years of blood-soaked European history.
Shake it all about
: Here’s this month’s playlist. It's basically what I’ve been listening to for the last few weeks. The usual Top Ten, plus one extra special Metropolitan themed addition. The playlists will all be on Spotify.‘Nice’ by Kleenex (or possibly LiLiPUT, after they had to change their name because Kimberly-Clark are a bunch of squares). I knew this song from the cover by Habibi, so it was, ahem, nice to discover the original.
‘Brownout’ by Ghost Funk Orchestra. This is the perfect music for driving along with the window wound down, although right now it’s too hot for that, so this get’s listened to with the windows and the A/C up.
‘Sibathathu’ by the Malombo Jazz Makers. ‘60s South African jazz. I was particularly charmed by how the opening almost reminded me of the theme music to Bagpuss. Of which more next week (sort of).
‘Everyday’ by The Sea and Cake. Which is pretty much what it makes me think of. Sitting on a pier somewhere, the breeze salty off of the sea, eating cake. Mysteriously there are no seagulls in this vision.
‘Rock Your Baby’ by Emerson Kitamura (feat. mmm). Another quiet summer evening, the light fading and grainy under the trees. The sparrows bickering over bedtime in the laurels. Still no gulls.
‘Like I Say (I Runaway)’, by Nilüfer Yanya. I just found out that The New York Times put this on their playlist of the 40 Best Songs of 2024 (so far), so I feel pretty vindicated about my choices here.
‘Soft Serve’ by Soul Coughing. THEY’RE BACK TOGETHER! THEY’RE TOURING! but not in the UK. BASTARDS! Still, any old excuse to listen to the most ‘90s of ‘90s bands. There were whole years around the turn of the millennium when I was listening to little else.
‘Fiasco’ by Gus Viseur. Writing about Wes Anderson and ‘needledrops’ this month led me to rediscovering this gem. It reminds me of the time when I though Ro’s Dad was asleep on the sofa and took the opportunity to start watching The French Dispatch, only to be startled halfway through the Timothée Chalamet sequence by a loud Welsh voice exclaiming ‘What on earth is going on?’. A good question and one which I couldn’t coherently answer, either.
‘No Delay (Bullitt)’ by The Green Arrows. It’s summer, it’s time for some cheery ‘70s Zimbabwean guitar.
‘Different Drum’ by The Stone Poneys. Speaking of summer, here’s Linda Ronstadt with a belting piece of sunny, shimmery West Coast pop.
An extra eleventh track this month. We had John Cale on the playlist last month, but then the album came out and I discovered a track called ‘Davies and Wales’, and given that describes all the important bits of The Metropolitan, I couldn’t not include it. You understand.
There’s been a lot of music in The Metropolitan recently, and not just in our playlist, so this month’s podcast is reading her piece on 1976, pop music and the strange associations of childhood:
Godzilla lights up like a British Gas ad from the 80s. If you see Sid, tell him