Simian Substitute Site For August 2018: Funky Monkey Pub Crawl

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR JULY 2018

Movies: This is an awkward month to be talking about. As you've probably noticed, there were only two posts here in July, but those two posts took a ridonkulous amount of work to complete. And there's another issue: as you'll hopefully find out soon, July has turned out to be one of those months where there's plenty of activity to write about in detail in the future, but not very much that I can throw away in a quick paragraph here. So, this is going to be even more of a mishmash than usual, starting with a quick run through the films I saw at the pictures during the month. Ocean's 8: it doesn't have the effortless quality of Soderbergh's variations on the theme, but it's entertaining enough, and the cast are all having fun without making you feel left out of it. Yellow Submarine: fascinating to realise that all the avant-garde animation I've been watching in festivals for the last thirty years has borrowed from this movie somewhere along the line. First time seeing this in a cinema for me, and the setting emphasises the weird dichotomy between the speedfreak overload of the fantasy sequences and the mogadon pacing of any scene with the Beatles in it. Vertigo: last time I saw it in a cinema it was 40 years old. Now it's 60, and still more perverted than any other picture from the period you can name. Hereditary: nah. For all the hype, there's a British horror movie from the last decade (no names mentioned) which takes a similar narrative trajectory to this one, but works because it knows exactly how to slowly crank up the story to a point of no return. Hereditary moves in ludicrous fits and starts, so the only sensible reaction is to laugh at how daft it gets.

Theatre: For some reason, the leading male role in The King And I is never given to an actor from Thailand. I don't know about you, but that's a Tony Jaa movie I would kill to see. In the meantime, at least these days they tend to cast actors of Asian extraction: last time I saw it in London the King was played by Korean Daniel Dae Kim from Angel and Lost, and the current production at the London Palladium (running till September 29th) stars Japanese Ken Watanabe from various Christopher Nolan films. To be honest, giving the role to someone whose first language isn't English may have been a mistake: Watanabe has the presence that the role demands, but his diction leaves a lot to be desired, as he's frequently quite hard to understand. He's the main weak link in Bartlett Shears' production, hot from New York and bearing awards by the ton. Kelli O'Hara is quite obviously Broadway royalty and is spectacular as Anna, and the look of the show is always sumptuous thanks to Michael Yeargan's sets and Donald Holder's rich lighting. But it doesn't quite take off the way it should - you want Shall We Dance? to be a moment of total ecstasy, but it never reaches the heights you want it to. It's still an entertaining night out, but it could have been even more so.

Music: Here's a question: has anyone ever noticed that the categories in Month End Processing are always in alphabetical order, or have I just been wasting my time for the last eight and a bit years? Don't answer that. I only mention that rule here because I'm about to break it, as there's a bit of Music that refers back to the Theatre production mentioned above. In the programme for The King And I, they mention that Ken Watanabe has had a musical career prior to appearing in the show, and has released a couple of albums. This seems like the sort of research task that a monthly subscription to Spotify was made for. Which made it all the more bizarre to discover that Ken Watanabe, when he isn't acting in movies or Broadway shows, has apparently made a couple of records of glitchy electronica. A furious evening of research revealed what you've probably already guessed: there's another Ken Watanabe. This one has studied music production at UAL, Middlesex and Goldsmiths (according to his LinkedIn profile), and has cheekily managed to bagsy the domain kenwatanabe.com for himself. From there, you're currently able to stream or purchase his current track My Wetland Dream: I suggest you do that, if only to confuse him about why there's a sudden surge of interest in his music.

In the meantime, your Simian Substitute Site Of The Month for August 2018 is Funky Monkey Pub Crawl. This is an organisation that runs regular bar crawls in the city of Lisbon. Why would that be relevant? Oh, go on, take a guess.

So, this month, expect a combination of the following: clearing up a backlog of BrewDogging posts (there are three bars I've visited that I haven't told you about yet, plus a fourth on the way), plus some new travel writing that may include some stuff about Portugal, you never know. Feel free to speculate in the comments box below.