Metropolitan Mixtape: May 2025

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

Tobias Sturt

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

Tobias Sturt

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:

1. Well, me, certainly. I can’t speak for the dog, who, after all, is no stranger to getting his out unwontedly.

2. It is a good Star Wars film, I’ll give you that, but that’s very much grading on a curve, as the cousins say.

3. Also the name Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger used for their jointly made films