MONTH END PROCESSING FOR SEPTEMBER 2024
Movies: Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is an absolute mess, obviously. But because it's made by a director who was responsible for four of the greatest movies of all time in the 1970s, you find yourself sticking with it like an abusive partner, thinking "I could fix them". How? I'd probably start by not letting 45 years elapse between coming up with the original concept and starting shooting. The basic idea is fair enough - a modern day depiction of the fall of Rome, as an analogue for the fall of America - but Coppola appears to have taken every single idea he's had in those 45 years and crammed it into his script, with no thought for relevance or quality control. At one point about halfway through, when I was just about getting on with it visually - though there's nothing here that really justifies an IMAX screen - I found myself wondering if Coppola could have left all the dialogue in unsubtitled Latin, to stop it distracting us from the images. But the images get more overloaded and less subtle - oh look, someone's carrying a Make New Rome Great Again placard - to the point where the ancient Roman artifact it most resembles is the movie of Caligula, which also thought that throwing More Stuff at the screen is a good enough substitute for Good Stuff (I don't mean the More Stuff that you're thinking of, obviously). Worst of all, there are enough ellipses in the story to suggest that he could still give us an extended cut if he lasts that long.
Music: As foretold in prophecy last month, we saw two more Proms at the start of September, and the recordings of them should still be on BBC Sounds for a few more days if you're quick - A French Fantasy and Handel's Messiah (the latter features the audience joining in for the Hallelujah Chorus, so The BBG and I are both audible in there somewhere). Meanwhile, here's another playlist of records I've been listening to this month, with YouTube videos also available for the cheapskates.
- Two Hearts - catching up on the back catalogue of my favourite act at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.
- David & Romany Gilmour - the acceptable face of nepo babies.
- Kneecap - if you haven't seen their film by now, what are you seeing at the cinema?
- The The - he's still a miserable bugger, but it's good to have him back.
- Anna Erhard - we've now got a full album of her complaining about petty grievances. Hooray!
- The Cure - very much a throwback to Disintegration, i.e. 7 minutes long and Bob doesn't sing till 3.5 minutes in.
- Anthony Szmierek - he's got that The Streets thing of creating a whole short story out of microscopic details.
- OneDa - you don't get that many full-on Manc accents in rap, much less female ones.
- Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - still recovering from hearing the album the day before release at Pitchblack Playback.
- Kid Carpet - based on a true story, he says. And if you don't believe him, at least it's only 79 seconds long.
Television: I still don't understand how this works. Guy Montgomery has taken a ridiculously basic idea - get some comedians together in a room and challenge them to spell words - and has so far managed to create eighteen solid hours of light entertainment television from it. He started off doing the show in his native New Zealand, but here we're going to focus on the recently-aired Australian version of Guy Montgomery's Guy-Mont Spelling Bee. It's almost identical to the NZ version - same music, same set, same overall format - but it has a not-so-secret weapon in the form of Aaron Chen as Montgomery's assistant. He's a lot more disruptive than his Kiwi counterpart Sanjay Patel, getting several costume changes per episode and threatening to crash the whole thing with his low-energy roleplaying and terrible jokes. It's the closest thing to pure joy on television right now, and the main problem is that it's only on Australian television. There are official playlists of clips you can watch courtesy of ABC iView's YouTube channel, but unless you live there there's no way you can legally see whole episodes of the thing. Sorry.