Spank's Edinburgh Diary, Postscript 2024
Edinburgh Festival 1989-2024: An Index

Simian Substitute Site for October 2024: The Monkey Bread Tree Film Awards

The Monkey Bread Tree Film AwardsMONTH 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.

  1. Two Hearts - catching up on the back catalogue of my favourite act at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.
  2. David & Romany Gilmour - the acceptable face of nepo babies.
  3. Kneecap - if you haven't seen their film by now, what are you seeing at the cinema?
  4. The The - he's still a miserable bugger, but it's good to have him back.
  5. Anna Erhard - we've now got a full album of her complaining about petty grievances. Hooray!
  6. The Cure - very much a throwback to Disintegration, i.e. 7 minutes long and Bob doesn't sing till 3.5 minutes in.
  7. Anthony Szmierek - he's got that The Streets thing of creating a whole short story out of microscopic details.
  8. OneDa - you don't get that many full-on Manc accents in rap, much less female ones.
  9. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - still recovering from hearing the album the day before release at Pitchblack Playback.
  10. 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.

In the meantime, your Simian Substitute Site for October 2024 is The Monkey Bread Tree Film Awards. Aside from its title being almost entirely made up of nouns, it's a slightly confusing page initially, as it appears to be largely the home of a movie podcast called Film Juxtaposed. But once you drill down a bit you'll see that it's based around a quite simple idea: "an awards body dedicated to differentiating micro budgets by ensuring entries are judged based on their resources, rather than their length." So, the awards categories are all based on how tiny the budget is - best feature film under $5,000, and so on. They've been going for eight years now, and are currently accepting submissions for their Autumn 2024 awards. ($120,000,000 fake Roman epics need not apply.) In case you were wondering, the festival director Ben Rider comes from Zimbabwe, and they have monkey bread trees there, hence the name.

Of course, film festivals and awards are very much on this site's mind at this time of year. Next week the London Film Festival kicks off once more, and inevitably we'll be reporting on it here day by day. After a fairly thin September on the site in terms of content, that should hopefully keep you busy for a bit. Let me know in the comments box below if you disagree.

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