Simian Substitute Site for December 2024: The Monkey Business
MONTH END PROCESSING FOR NOVEMBER 2024
[This is going to be an odd one. Usually, we go flat out over the twelve days of the London Film Festival in October, and then spend most of November taking it easy before the Christmas rush. Thanks to a huge logjam of interesting events taking place this particular November, we ended up not taking it easy in the slightest. As a result, expect a lot of very sketchy reviews rather than a few big ones...]
Movies: Quite a sizeable proportion of our moviegoing in November was down to the BFI's excellent season Art Of Action, a huge collection of classic action movies. Thanks to that, we rewatched old favourites like Red Cliff 1 & 2 (the full five hour two-part version, finally), Point Break (yay for the Prince Charles' 35mm print, boo for it being a print with all the old BBFC cuts in it) and The Stunt Man (pretty much carried by Peter O'Toole running at full throttle), as well as being introduced to Burt Lancaster going full antifa in The Train (plus a really good introduction to that introduction). As a bonus we also got The Art of Action Trailers, an illustrated lecture by Dick Fiddy on how action movies from Gunga Din to Ballerina have tried to lure people in to see them. Godzilla Minus One Minus Colour wasn't part of the season, but it would have fitted right in. The odd film out this month was Gift, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's reworking of Evil Does Not Exist into a silent movie as a showcase for Eiko Ishibashi's live score. But does that come under Movies or Music, particularly when quite a bit of the 'live' score is just copied and pasted in from the other film's soundtrack? After a while you stop worrying about that, because the overall experience is more important, and that's the key thing.
Music (live): The support act to the screening/performance of Gift definitely comes under the heading of music: Klara Lewis may have freaked out some of the audience with her box of filthy-sounding electronic tricks, but The BBG and I lapped it up. We also saw several more traditionally structured gigs, and a ridiculously diverse collection they were too, including a couple more excellent supports. Genesis tribute act The Watch making a decent fist of playing the whole of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway: Arooj Aftab generating the perfect late-night vibe even though she was playing at nine thirty in the evening (with support from Keeley Forsyth): Ed Harcourt climaxing a lovely set by standing in the middle of the audience and busking El Magnifico (with support from Tom Bright): and They Might Be Giants pumping out two hours of solid joy.
Music (recorded): But that's not all: our clubbing project for 2024 will get a full report later this year, but for now be aware that we managed to take in three in this month alone, all targeted in one way or another at the older dancer. 30 Years of Bugged Out (held at Drumsheds, the megavenue that used to be the Edmonton branch of Ikea) had an all star cast of DJs to celebrate three decades of the clubnight: the Chemical Brothers were the obvious highlight, although 2 Many DJs' almost parodic reliance on high-pass-filter-driven drops made The BBG wonder if they'd been taking lessons from Limmy. Annie Mac's Before Midnight was a genuinely all-ages affair, reminiscent of Dave Haslam at his crowd-pleasing best, despite the best efforts of the Brixton Academy staff to destroy any good vibes with a 45 minute long queue to get in and an almost equally long one for the cloakroom. I've never seen so many people before dancing in, or carrying, overcoats in one indoor venue. Finally, Jarvis Cocker & Alexis Taylor going B2B at Dingwalls was always going to be a slightly unusual affair. The pre-show music was Paddy Macaloon's I Trawl The Megahertz, and the main show started with twenty minutes of ambient noodling, but within a couple of hours it had ramped up to the level of Love Is In The Air. Jarvis opened the set by complaining about all the afternoon DJ sets that are happening at the moment, which makes it all the more ironic that we had to leave two hours before the end because it was a school night. Between those and the live gigs, we've probably got enough music to justify one of these.
Theatre: As The BBG herself pointed out, late November is perhaps a little too early to get the full benefit of a Christmas show. Still, there we were at A Christmas Carol (ish). Written by and starring Nick Mohammed as his Mr Swallow character, it's a retelling of Dickens with all the names changed to avoid having to pay royalties, meaning that it's become the story of Santa choosing to cancel Christmas and being shown the error of his ways by two, three or four ghosts, depending on how you count them. It's packed with daft jokes aimed at the sort of people who pretend they're too cool for panto, is energetically performed by the cast of four, and climaxes with what might be the most extraordinary thing you'll see in a theatre this year. (For the record, our performance was halted for ten minutes or so in the middle of act two because of technical difficulties: it turns out that it could have been much worse.) Meanwhile, up in Manchester, the Royal Exchange is celebrating the festive season with Spend Spend Spend, the revival of a 1990s musical about the life of spendthrift pools winner Viv Nicholson. It seems that modern audiences have to not only have Nicholson explained to them, but also the concept of the pools. Presented as a tribute to its late composer Steve Brown, the tunes aren't really things you come away humming, apart from the title song. But his melodies give the story an ingenious structure, as every song Viv sings on her way up to fame and fortune is mirrored by a sadder reprise of the same song on her way down. It's not what you'd necessarily think of as a Christmas show, but it does the job very nicely.
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