Simian Substitute Site for February 2025: The Monkey
MONTH END PROCESSING FOR JANUARY 2025
Movies: Kung hei fat choi. There's a point in the life of every Hong Kong cinema fanboy when you learn about the existence of Chinese New Year films: the star-studded, intellectually light movies that are made specifically for Chinese audiences to see over the weekend of the lunar celebration. These days, digital distribution means that the whole world can see them at the same time, which is why we were able to spend last Thursday watching Detective Chinatown 1900 along with a sizeable proportion of the planet. It's part of an ongoing franchise in which two Chinese cops (played by Baoqiang Wang and Liu Haoran) visit a foreign location and investigate a crime that took place in the Chinatown district. So after movies set in Bangkok, New York and Tokyo, the fourth film goes to... San Francisco, 125 years in the past. The Chinatown there is currently under construction, with Chow Yun-fat being as excellent as ever as its boss: but the murder of a politician's daughter, apparently at the hands of a Chinese man, threatens to destroy everything he's built. (John Cusack is equally excellent as the politician, and happily avoids that stiffness you frequently get when English-speaking actors are working for non-English speaking directors.) The tone is all over the shop, swinging from corpse mutilation to jokes about eating poo: and somewhat predictably, it goes all Rah Rah Rah China Is Great in the closing minutes. But it's fine as a holiday entertainment, even if it isn't your holiday.
Music: It's time to analyse the results of the competition associated with You're Lucky I Don't Charge: Pick Of The Year 2024, and yes of course Dave's won it again. If it's any consolation to you, he found it a bit tricky this year, because he struggled to get iTunes to work properly, leading me to suspect I might be the only person in the world who still buys MP3s from them occasionally. Anyway, you'll recall that the competition question was 'how much would it cost you in total to buy all the individual tracks on You’re Lucky I Don’t Charge on iTunes?' There are 18 tracks in total on the CD, and most of them retail at 99p: however, three of them - the ones by Pete & Bas, Norman Pain and Anna Erhard - actually retail for 79p, for reasons I don't fully understand but may have something to do with them being on very small labels. That makes the total (15 x 0.99) + (3 x 0.79), or £17.22. Bargain! But because Dave couldn't do the calculation for real, he took a stab in the dark and assumed the price of £20.24 on the cover graphic was really the answer. And he still came closer than anyone else, so a CD of YLIDC will be on its way to him in the post shortly. Congratulations, yet again.
Music again: With that out of the way, we can get back into the regular grind of Spank's Audio Lair playlists, although only one of the ten songs here was released in 2025. So expect tracks from The Osmonds, 65daysofstatic, Doechii, Tiny Leaves, Sorry, Eiko Ishibashi, Timothee Chalamet, Laura Marling, Nils Frahm and James Acaster, with those links there providing backup YouTube versions for anyone who doesn't Spotify. We'll do this one without any sort of supporting context, only noting that it's probably one of the least coherent collections of music I've ever curated, and that the James Acaster track makes more sense in the video version than the audio version.
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