May | 2012 | MostlyFilm

Part of an occasional series in which Spank The Monkey travels to foreign countries, watches films in unfamiliar languages, and then complains about not understanding them

Some countries make this job easy. When I’m travelling, I usually have to rely on a combination of Google Movies and individual cinema websites to get a decent idea of what local films are playing. Time Out Abu Dhabi, however, does all the work for you: its film listings allow for filtering by cinema, genre and language. So all I need to do is ask the site to show me the places and times where Arabic language films are being shown, and I’m home and dry.

Unfortunately, that’s where they stop making this job easy.

Continue reading Monoglot Movie Club: LOLs of Arabia →

by Matthew Turner

Warning: This post contains SPOILERS for Marvel Avengers Assemble (or The Avengers, if you live anywhere other than Britain) and is intended to be read after you’ve seen the film.

With the recent release (and what already looks like phenomenal box office success) of Marvel’s The Avengers, it seems only fitting to mark the occasion with a final Comics To Screen post. This will examine how writer-director Joss Whedon, closely supervised by Marvel Studios, has blended the now established movie universe (referred to, annoyingly but conveniently, as the Marvel movie-verse) with the classic comics themselves. Arguably, with the enormous success of the three key movie franchises (Iron Man, Thor and Captain America), it’s no longer really that important to cater to old-school comics fans, but it’s nonetheless interesting to look at just how much of early Avengers history survives into the new movie and to see which elements have been drawn from elsewhere.

Continue reading Comics to screen: Marvel Avengers Assemble →