All posts by Spank The Monkey

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About Spank The Monkey

Spank The Monkey has been talking nonsense about popular culture on the internet since 1998. He can be found doing that in long form on his blog, and in short form on BlueSky. He was a regular contributor to Mostly Film, where his specialist subjects were Asian cinema, cult movies and TV, and watching foreign films without the benefit of subtitles. He lives in London with somebody else.

Scalarama

Cult Movies, Directors, Film Festivals

Spank The Monkey hails a film festival with a twist.

scalarama_red

Remember cinemas? They used to be good, didn’t they? And now they’re not. Many people have offered their solutions to the problem, but the only thing we can agree on is that we should ignore anyone who uses the phrase ‘second screen experience’ without an accompanying ‘wanker’ hand gesture. So what can be done?

Maybe we should look at the example of one of the best cinemas. Between 1981 and 1993, the Scala was a London cinema club with a wildly eclectic approach to programming. Its twelve-year mission to introduce audiences to the most extraordinary films on the planet was celebrated in a 2011 festival called Scala Forever, which I reported on at the time. It was a great way to commemorate a long-gone icon, but it wasn’t quite a permanent monument. An upcoming festival called Scalarama, on the other hand, has much larger ambitions. Continue reading Scalarama →

Mostly MIFfed

Art, Directors, Places, Politics

Spank the Monkey waxes radical about the Manchester International Festival. Also does some dancing.

Macbeth
‘Is this a dagger which I see before me?’ ‘Spoilers!’

The fourth Manchester International Festival is currently in full swing, and before you ask, no, I didn’t get a ticket for Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth. Partly because that was the first show to sell out, but mostly because of its terrifyingly high price. If it wasn’t for the opportunity to use the above photo caption (© The Belated Birthday Girl 2013) I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it here at all. Instead, I’m going to catch at the pictures this weekend, like anyone else who doesn’t have sixty-five quid to burn.

When I last wrote about the Festival back in 2011, I focussed entirely on the performance events, and that’s going to be the case again this year. I tried to get to one gallery event this time round: do it 20 13, the latest incarnation of a long-running conceptual art show that concentrates more on the description of the concepts than on the finished pieces. The random arrangement of the exhibition throughout the regular displays at Manchester Art Gallery does it no favours, because you end up spending more time with those regular displays instead. (In my case, a lovely retrospective of local philanthropist Thomas Horsfall, documenting his efforts to educate the working classes by founding the original Manchester Art Museum.)

After the jump: reviews of the things I did see. Continue reading Mostly MIFfed →

Monoglot Movie Club: A Poor Second To Belgium

Comedy, Directors, Monoglot Movie Club, New Releases

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

pie

You’re so sadly neglected
And often ignored
A poor second to Belgium
When going abroad
Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I quite want to be

–       Monty Python, Finland

Quick! Name a famous Finnish film director. I’ll give you bonus points for lateral thinking if you said Renny Harlin, but arthouse cinema fans will probably have plumped for Aki Kaurismäki. Sadly, I didn’t get to see any of his movies on my recent visit to Helsinki, but it’s hard to avoid the man’s presence, particularly if you’re the sort of person that eats food. The Belated Birthday Girl and I kept ending up in restaurants that were either patronised by the director (the menu at Kosmos includes ‘Pike perch with Lobster Sauce and Crayfish Tails au Gratin à la Aki Kaurismäki’), or owned by him. Of the latter, Zetor is probably the best one to go for, with its tractor-heavy décor and its patriotic blueberry pie served in a tin mug, as seen above.

Still, you have to assume that Finnish cinema doesn’t begin and end with Kaurismäki. So I made it my mission, as ever, to track down a couple of the latest domestic releases, and attempt to watch them without the benefit of English subtitles. Good news for all you lovers of schadenfreude: one of these turned out to be Monoglot Movie Club’s first complete failure. Continue reading Monoglot Movie Club: A Poor Second To Belgium →

For Love’s Sake

Asian Cinema, Cult Movies, Directors, DVD, Music,

By Spank The Monkey

For Love's Sake

At the Cannes festival last month, you could see – and hear, thanks to some conspicuous booing – the breakdown of the love-in between Western critics and Japanese director Takashi Miike, as his latest thriller Shield Of Straw got very short shrift indeed. Does this mark the end of Miike’s career as the go-to director for Asian weirdness? I suppose it depends on whether you trust the judgment of the sort of wankers who think that yelling at projected images will improve them.

Perhaps it’s the end of the respectable phase of Miike’s career – after a couple of years of working on the sort of serious drama that attracts festival programmers, he’s going back to just doing whatever takes his fancy. That’s not to say the boo-ers are wrong, though: in a career that’s getting close to hitting the 100 feature mark, he’s made a couple of undeniable stinkers. But no single film in his canon gives you any idea what the ones either side of it will be like. We can go back in time just one year – to June 2012, and the Japanese theatrical release of For Love’s Sake, now available in the UK – for a good example of that.

Continue reading For Love’s Sake →

The Perfect American

Animation, Music, Theatre, ,

By Spank The Monkey

The Perfect American

I don’t go to many first nights at the opera. As I settled into my seat at the Coliseum for the UK premiere of Philip Glass’ The Perfect American, his new piece about the final days of Walt Disney’s life, I suddenly flashed back to a first night I attended twenty-five years ago. That was also at the Coliseum, and it was for another Philip Glass opera. The Making Of The Representative For Planet 8 was his adaptation of a Doris Lessing sci-fi novel, and I can remember precisely one thing about it.

Roughly three-quarters of the way through Planet 8, there was a brief pause in between sections. Outside, there was a sudden commotion, and a police car could be heard roaring down St Martin’s Lane, its siren NEE-NAW-NEE-NAWing at full volume like they used to back in the eighties. The orchestra paused, waited for the noise to die down, and then launched into the next part of the opera. This being Philip Glass, it started with a simple repeated bass figure on the strings, just a pair of notes separated by a minor third. It went nee-naw-nee-naw. The audience laugh that followed was extraordinary – a sudden burst of guffawing, which was just as suddenly truncated as everyone remembered that the composer of both of those notes was sitting in the room with them.

Continue reading The Perfect American →

#TFEFF13

Cult Movies, Film Festivals, ,

By Spank The Monkey

tfeff

I love the work that Terracotta Distribution do to support Far Eastern movies in the UK. But they can’t write hashtags for toffee. Last year, I reported on their campaign to #keepasiancinemainukcinemas in the wake of indifference from exhibitors, media and audiences. A noble cause, but accompanied by a hard-to-remember Twitter hashtag. The same could be said about the one they’re currently trying to promote. It’s such an unwieldy combination of characters, it could almost be the title of a Richard Herring podcast. AIOTM! RHLSTP! TFEFF13!

It’s actually easier to remember the full-length version: because this is the hashtag for tweets relating to the Terracotta Far East Film Festival 2013, which runs in London from June 6th to 15th. It’s the fifth year of the event, and previously – in 2011 and 2012 – Mostly Film has provided you with exhaustive post-fest reviews. This year, for a change, I’m going to give you an advance preview of the programme, so you can plan that whole 26-films-in-ten-days experience for yourself.

Continue reading #TFEFF13 →

Friends, Romans, Juno’s Countrymen

Television,

Spank The Monkey comes to praise Spartacus, not to bury him

Crassus and Spartacus
Crassus and Spartacus

Do we need spoiler alerts for this one?

When I wrote about the Starz TV series Spartacus for Mostly Film last year, we were three seasons into what we knew by then was a four season run. I tried to keep spoilers to the absolute minimum, just telling the bare bones of the familiar story: the one about the Thracian slave who ended up leading an army of the oppressed against the might of Rome.

But now we have the final season to consider – Spartacus: War Of The Damned, recently shown on television and just released on home video. The story of Spartacus is familiar, and its ending is even more so. One particular version of it has become so ingrained in our culture, it’s become a metaphor for a certain type of heroic sacrifice. And that’s not even the true version. As Steven S. DeKnight and his writers approach the final chapters of their tale, their retelling of it has to battle against all the baggage the viewer brings along to it. It’s been pre-spoiled. Is that going to be a problem?

Continue reading Friends, Romans, Juno’s Countrymen →

Vulgaria

Asian Cinema, New Releases, , ,

By Spank The Monkey

VulgariaMules

You may be familiar with the cinema technology known as D-Box – a small number of screens in the UK have already been fitted with it. It’s one more way of reducing the film experience to a theme park ride: a cinema rigged with motion control seats that shake, tilt and vibrate in ways defined by the movement on screen. Generally, it’s used to add realism to action movies, wobbling the viewer as things crash and explode in front of them.

Later this year, a Hong Kong studio is set to release the first 3D pornographic film using the D-Box process. This should tell you everything you need to know about the territory’s attitude to sex on screen. Even more so when you discover that the film in question is 4D Sex & Zen, the latest entry in a franchise previously discussed in these pages. As I suggested back then, you get the feeling that erotic film in Hong Kong hasn’t really grown up yet. So when you discover that one of the biggest local hits of the past few years has been a bawdy comedy called Vulgaria (just released on home video in the UK), you begin to fear the worst. But you shouldn’t.  Continue reading Vulgaria →

A Tale of Two Maniacs

Classic Films, Cult Movies, Genre, New Releases, , , ,

by Spank The Monkey

maniacs

On the left, we have Maniac, directed by William Lustig in 1980. It’s a notorious horror movie, one which got caught up in the UK ‘video nasty’ moral panic of the time. It was banned by the BBFC until 2002, when it finally appeared on DVD with nearly a minute’s worth of cuts. It’s still not possible to buy the uncut version here.

On the right, we have Maniac, directed by Franck Khalfoun in 2012. It’s a remake co-written and produced by French horror director Alexandre Aja, who was also involved in the remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha. It has a bigger budget, a famous lead, and a clean bill of health from the British censor. It’s just disappearing from UK cinemas, after one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it releases that have become so fashionable nowadays – you might be able to catch it at the Prince Charles if you run.

What can we learn from watching both versions of Maniac back-to-back? Apart from ‘all women are evil and must be punished,’ obviously.

Continue reading A Tale of Two Maniacs →

Monoglot Movie Club: The Guldbagge Variations

Awards, Monoglot Movie Club, New Releases, ,

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

A Guldbagge Award, yesterday
A Guldbagge Award, yesterday


Sweden! Land of Bergman, Garbo and Abba The Movie. There are some countries where I struggle to find local films in the cinemas, but not here. Stockholm in January 2013 was packed full of ‘em: from the family-friendly fun of Sune i Grekland, to a theatrical outing for a Wallander that’ll probably be on BBC Four by 2014. All I needed was a way to filter out the good stuff from the bad.


By chance, I found that way on my first night in the country, as I turned on the telly to discover live coverage of the Guldbaggen, Sweden’s own film awards. (That golden bug thingy at the top of the page is the actual award itself.) Perfect! All I needed to do was grab the list of winners, pick the most interesting-looking ones, and get myself down to a cinema to see them. Unfortunately, everyone else in Stockholm appeared to be doing the same thing in the week after the Guldbaggen, with screenings of Swedish movies selling out all over the place. As a result, I couldn’t always see my first choice of film.

 Continue reading Monoglot Movie Club: The Guldbagge Variations →