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.
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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. TimeOutAbuDhabi, 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.
Mostly Film’s coverage of the 2011 Terracotta Far East Film Festival contained more than its fair share of drama. Aside from the concentrated dose of Asian cinema that Joey Leung and his programming team reliably deliver, there was also the element of jeopardy which came out of my watching 11 movies in 50 hours, immediately after a transatlantic long haul flight. Still, I stayed awake. Unless I didn’t and dreamed all those films I wrote about, of course.
No such issues for the 2012 festival: I’ve rearranged my work schedule so that I’m not going to miss any of the films this year. However, there’s a downside to that: I’m not going to miss any of the films this year. Between Thursday night and Sunday night, I’m now committed to sixteen movies, several masterclasses and a party. What the hell was I thinking? I’ll barely have time to finish this introduction before I
Part of an occasional series in which SPANK THE MONKEY goes to foreign countries, watches films in unfamiliar languages, and then complains about not understanding them
Cidade de Garoa: that’s the affectionate name Brazilians have for São Paulo. “City of Drizzle.” Fernando Meirelles would have had a much less violent film on his hands if he’d set City Of God here, mainly because most of it would have involved scenes of people sitting indoors waiting for it to stop pissing down.
On a business visit to São Paulo for a week, one of my non-work priorities – as ever – was to catch a couple of Brazilian films in situ, to get a feel for the side of their cinema that doesn’t normally make it out of the country. And it only seemed right and fitting that when I finally found a local movie at the very end of the week, in order to get there I had to walk for five minutes through one of the worst rainstorms I’ve seen in my life. But that was the least of my problems.
As far as I’m concerned, it was my pal The Belated Birthday Girl who spotted it first. In 2008 she spent three months in Japan studying the language, and while she was there she got in some additional practice by seeing a Japanese film at the cinema every week. (Yeah, it’s kind of a thing in our household.) When she looked back at the movies she’d seen, she noticed that almost every Japanese film on release was a remake, or an adaptation from another source, or a spinoff from a TV show. There were very few original stories out there that had been written specifically for the screen. Continue reading Whose Film Is It Anyway?→
Here’s a scenario that’s been played out in several locations over the last decade. I walk into a cinema in country X, and say to the box office attendant “I’d like a ticket for Y, please.” In that previous sentence, X is a non-English speaking country, Y is the title of a film made in that country, and the section in quotes is spoken (after hours of intense private rehearsal) in the native language of X – let’s call it Xish.
The stars and directors of Hong Kong cinema used to have a huge worldwide following, back in the day. But that day was probably prior to July 1st 1997. The return of the territory to Chinese control resulted in a cinematic brain drain, which would ultimately lead to Jet Li getting third billing and heaps of racist abuse in The Expendables. Meanwhile, those filmmakers who were left back in Hong Kong found themselves at a bit of a loss. Apart from the odd surprise like the Infernal Affairs series, very little of their work makes much of an impression outside Asia.
But in Spring 2011, a film came out whose performance was spectacular enough to make global headlines: a 3D production whose opening weekend effortlessly outgrossed that of Avatar. How did it do that? Well, a title like 3D Sex & Zen: Extreme Ecstasy definitely helps. The film had a reasonably solid theatrical run worldwide, including here in the UK, where it’s just been released on DVD in smudgy red/blue 3D. Western viewers may not realise, though, that this is merely the most recent entry in a Hong Kong movie franchise that’s been running for two decades now. In Asia, they’ve been wildly popular and successful: but here, the Sex & Zen movies are barely known outside of a small audience of grimly masturbating fanboys.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated TV series, South Park, first hit our screens in 1997, about the same time as domestic internet access was beginning to take off. It was the first TV show I can remember being widely, let’s say, distributed across the web, a factor that probably contributed towards its rapid worldwide success. (It certainly didn’t hurt that in those days of 28k modems, a South Park episode looked so rough already that it could be brutally squished into 30-odd Mb of Real Video without any visible degradation.)
Parker and Stone apparently appeared out of nowhere, but the technology of the web also gave fans like me a method of tracking down their earlier work. There were a couple of crude South Park prototypes, Jesus v Frosty and The Spirit Of Christmas: a curious in-house short for Universal called Your Studio And You: and further back than those was their first proper film, the unholy marriage of Rodgers and Hammerstein with Lucio Fulci that was Cannibal! The Musical.
Cannibal! was made in 1993, which means that Trey and Matt have been getting away with this shit for nearly two decades now. And their 2011 smash hit Broadway musical, The Book Of Mormon, is the perfect synthesis of everything they’ve done over those two decades. Continue reading MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – The Book of Mormon→
Some folk'll never murder kids, and then again some folk'll
Here’s a terrifying statistic for you. Last weekend – to be precise, the weekend starting Friday September 30th – eighteen films were released theatrically in the UK. They covered everything from Taylor Lautner’s first attempt at a leading role, via the new Lars von Trier, to a 3D documentary about cane toads. The weekly review pages were positively wheezing trying to fit that lot in. But how many of them are you likely to see at your local multiplex? Certainly not all 18.
So you end up with the scenario that I encountered just one week earlier. A horror comedy flick, Tucker and Dale vs Evil, was released to generally favourable reviews. The buzz piqued my interest, so I scanned the listings for it. Sadly, it looked like it would be close to impossible to see the film in my town.
My town, by the way, is called London. So what’s going on here?
Spank The Monkey visits an old cinema come back from the grave
Click for room spoilers
What happens to old cinemas when they die? I’ve lived in London for over a quarter of a century, and I’ve seen a few go in my time. As discussed on this very site recently, the Scala has been a music venue for twelve years now (which, terrifyingly, is the same length of time for which it used to be a cinema). The EMD Walthamstow is in a state of limbo, as a battle rages between local cineastes and a church that prefers half-arsed property speculation to something that the community might actually enjoy. And God knows what the Curzon Millbank is now: most people were barely aware it opened in February of this year, and the company which co-owned it went bust just four months later.
If two instances count as a trend, then we could suggest that the next big thing will be the conversion of cinemas into luxury hotels. You could argue that this is what’s happened in the case of the newly opened W in Leicester Square, which is technically on the site of the old Odeon Swiss Centre. Except in this case, “site” is a euphemism for the entire city block that was demolished to make room for the hotel. There’s another example in San Sebastián in Spain, but at least that one is a little more respectful of its origins.
For The Belated Birthday Girl and me, I suspect the rot set in upon the publication of the first Mr and Mrs Smith guidebook. Up until then, we’d had maybe one or two experiences in hotels that were a little more swanky than we deserved. What the Smiths taught us was that it was all right to make the niceness of your accommodation an integral part of your holiday. Inspired by their books, we spent the next few years spending a couple of nights apiece in miscellaneous glamour palaces – Straf in Milan, Blanch House in Brighton, Pousada de Sao Tiago in Macau. By the time it got to our tenth anniversary, we were at the supremely decadent stage where we were prepared to choose the hotel first, and let that decide where we went on holiday. And from an afternoon spent randomly trawling through the Smith site, we ended up finding out about Astoria7.
Spank The Monkey introduces the Scala Forever season by looking back at the history of one of London’s most-beloved fleapits
Trust me, this is one picture you really need to click on to enlarge
Screw Proust and his madeleines: that picture there takes me back a quarter of a century, and it doesn’t require a tea chaser in order to do it. Twenty-five years ago, I virtually lived at the Scala cinema in King’s Cross, and eagerly awaited the monthly arrival of a programme flyer very much like the one shown above.
The Scala was possibly the greatest of London’s repertory houses, back in the days when the capital had around a dozen of them. As the London-wide festival Scala Forever commemorates the opening of the cinema thirty years ago, I’ve been looking back fondly at the time I spent there watching all the underground greats. Russ Meyer. John Waters. Herschell Gordon Lewis. Jörg Buttgereit. Tsui Hark.
So it annoys me a little to be reminded that the first film I saw there was Garry Marshall’s The Flamingo Kid. Continue reading Scala Forever*→
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