Stuart Millard's Blog, page 35

My Top 20 Movies of 2012 – The List: Part 2

Top 20 Part 1 ** Preamble/Worst Films

2011 list: Part 1, Part 2 ** 2010 list ** 2009 list

A girl named Hushpuppy lived in the Bathtub with her father, Wink. Though this sounds like the opening line of a bedtime story read by an insane, magical hobo, in truth, that’s not an inaccurate representation of the feel of Beasts of the Southern Wild. Bathtub itself is a joyous Louisiana shantytown community, jerry-rigged with ropes and slats of corrugated iron, where loose animals roam free, and everybody waits for the flood that’s coming to drown the lands. These are an abandoned people, ghettoised from the rest of the world to their place on the south side of the levee, by the pussies who live on the dry side, who “only get one holiday a year” and keep their babies “stuck in cages.”

The decision to back the story with the stumbling narration of a child gives a Gilliam-esque sense of a place caught between reality and dream, as we experience life through Hushpuppy’s eyes, filtered through her vivid imagination. It’s the spellbinding naturalistic performance of the six-year-old protagonist that layers the film with its sense of wonder; a weight of reality to the storybook pages. And it’s impossible to overstate the quality of Quvenzhané Wallis. She truly gives one of the great child actor performances, if not the best, ever, and credit to the director for filling the cast with non-professionals who blow you out of your seat in every scene. For instance, the father, purveying that kind of towering, post-Katrina, I-shall-not-be-moved pride, where he might not have much, but it’s all he needs, gives one of the most powerful turns of the year; and it all comes from some dude who ran a bakery across the street from the production office, having never acted in his life.

Beasts of the Southern Wild‘s meandering narrative further fits the analogy of that magical hobo, making it up as he goes along while we warm our hands over the burning bin, but we’re not riding a fixed rail along the confines of the three act structure or the hero’s journey; this is a tale of that age-old human question of where we might possibly fit inside such a big universe, when we’re so small. Wink’s one rule was “no crying,” but if you watch Beasts… it’s a rule you’ll break throughout, particularly in the last ten minutes, with a triumphantly uplifting ending, where strong recognises strong.

I could have sworn that The Grey came out in 2011 (actually February this year), and it’s testament to how good it was that it held onto its spot in the Top 10, all the way through to the end of the year. On its release, many reviews and reactions were angrily focussing on the idea that this was a movie about faith, and had snuck into theatres under the pretext of a good old survivalist yarn, while pushing a religious agenda. Propaganda in actual wolf’s clothing, as it were. While they were right about the first part, they’re dead wrong on the second. The Grey is, like all good art, a mirror for the audience, and while some viewed this as “Liam Neeson’s atheist parable,” I also saw Christians who’d interpreted it the other way entirely. When Neeson screams at a silent God to finally do something and earn his faith, and on receiving no answer, “Fuck it, I’ll do it myself…” some saw this as man’s struggle in a Godless universe. But for others, Neeson’s refusal to lay down and die was God giving him the strength to carry on. Likewise, inside the film, there’s no more testing circumstance than being stranded after a violent plane crash, but as some survivors find the presence of God in their being spared, others find only his absence. I don’t want to get bogged down in theology, but it was amusing to watch people on the same side interpret the exact same material in completely different — and often, completely raging — ways, like the fable of the blind men and the elephant.

And while it is a movie about faith, and mankind’s introspection when death creeps at their heels, the survivalist yarn part is pretty fucking awesome too. Once Taken hit, and Liam Neeson made that switch from kindly priests and CG lions to double-hard bastards, like a photo of your dad with a banana up his arse, forget what he was, it’s what he is that can’t be unseen. There was no going back. The Grey trades on all of our deep desires to be cradled within Neeson’s lovely Irish arms as he stomps a man, or a wolf, to death with his bare feet. A haunted loner whose back story is only glimpsed, like those painful flashes of memory that never let us rest, he finds himself the self-appointed caretaker to an ever-dwindling cast of shell-shocked survivors reduced to the level of children. Only in this pitched battle for survival, stripped of everything but the impending footsteps of death, does he find a reason to keep on breathing. Amid the howls in the darkness, never letting the cast forget the fate that awaits them, Neeson’s there with a tender, no-nonsense humanity, where there’s no shame in fear, and the one thing that’s certain is that we must keep moving.

There’s a terrific recurring use of Jamin Winans’ beautiful score for his 2009 film Ink throughout, and a poetic ending, which comes right where it needs to. As far as the faith thing goes, while I’m pitching from the Godless, Hell-bound side, one thing I do know, is that when I die, I want to do so with Liam Neeson looking into my eyes and tenderly talking me into the black.

You only need to fire up Facebook or Twitter on a weekend to see those elite, cultural geniuses who delight in telling the world how super smart they are for not watching this week’s X-Factor or Big Brother, unlike the rest of the morons out there. While all those other dolts are chuckling through their buck teeth, these winners are presumably composing symphonies or reading to hospitalised children. The sneering nob-heads spend as much time bragging about not watching shitty television as the people who do watch shitty television spend watching shitty television. Either watch or don’t, but whatever your choice, there’s no need to be a dick about it.

That said, popular culture hasn’t exactly been on an upward trajectory of late, as Bobcat Goldthwait happened to notice. Goldthwait, still best remembered as the guy from Police Academy with the voice of Anne Widdecombe in the violent throes of a first, unexpected, late-life orgasm, has assembled a hauntingly familiar picture. Frank’s (Joel Murray) television shits out an endless stream of farting pig ringtones and tampon-throwing reality skanks, while there’s nothing on the news but paranoid, hateful, right wing propaganda spewed by homophobic nutcases, and stories that make you want to slide a warm gun between your teeth. Our world, basically. What comes next is a furious dissection of modern culture, which is knowingly heavy-handed and and unsubtle, but holds nothing back.

Pushed over the edge by a workplace crowding round monitors to watch the latest crazy being exploited on an American Idol-type show, and the warping of his weekend daughter into a shrieking ingrate, Frank does what people watching shows about vacuous fucks joke about; he kills somebody. Once he pairs up with Roxy, a schoolmate of the teenage reality star he shot in the head, we’ve got ourselves a daddy-daughter Mickey and Mallory, a pair of “platonic spree-killers” equally in disgust at, well, everything. Joel Murray’s quiet, melancholic rage mingles nicely with Roxy’s sweetly murderous, foul-mouthed blood-lust, bouncing off the walls as she reels off lists of the people who need to die — Twi-hards, anyone who talks about Funk Rock, and Diablo Cody, who gets it the worst. (“The only stripper who suffers from too much self-esteem…”) She’s a Hit Girl for people who aren’t wankers.

There’s disappointed anger at every turn, with even the simple question of “Do you think I’m pretty?” setting off an impassioned rant about the sexualisation of children that implores both R. Kelly and Woody Allen to go fuck themselves. A film like this could easily turn into a long list of the director’s hates, and while it kind of is, it’s always funny (“hit her in the defective tit!”) or thoughtful, and there’s more meat on the bones than pure empty bile. God Bless America is a modern, cubicle-farm escapist fantasy; a Taxi Driver for a world where every boob-headed Kardashian has their own clothing line, and where trash-culture is so ridiculous, you literally can’t parody it. Hence, this is not a subtle movie, but it’s not just the low-hanging fruit of trashy TV in Goldthwait’s sights. In one telling part, Frank laments how “everything is so cruel now,” and despite the constant stream of monologues and everyman fantasies — assassinating parkers who take up two spaces; mowing down ‘God Hates Fags’ funeral protesters — Frank’s inevitable Network moment still produces goosebumps.

In a film that’s dense packed with rage, the myriad of background detail is perfectly observed, including a brilliantly savage takedown of TMZ TV, while, like with previous effort, World’s Greatest Dad, Goldthwait’s soundtrack choices are a perfect melding of music and image. The one thing holding God Bless America back from a stone cold classic to merely a great movie, is a cheap, too-small looking finale that feels like a scene from another film with a tenth of the budget, along with a cliché that’s never really worked for me. But is it a great movie, and while there’s so much half-assed, impotent ranting against where we’re at as a people, God Bless America is the rallying cry against a culture where “the shallowest, meanest, dumbest and loudest are celebrated,” and a wish-fulfilment fable for any (or all) of us who, at one time, had to ask that question “What’s a Snooki?”

There’s a queasy feeling associated with the past. Everybody has a handful of things from their childhood, be it TV shows or adverts, or context-less scenes from movies, that continue to chase them from the shadows well into their adult lives. My own personal demons are the Tall, Thin Man from BBC schools program Look ‘n Read’s ‘Boy from Space‘, and an experience at an amusement park that stuck with me forever, as my first handshake with that kind of distilled, sense-robbing terror. Picture this. A room full of jangling, end of the pier amusements; plastic eggs with a toy inside; push-penny games; that thing where you roll a ball up into a hole — and a glass box, six feet high. Behind the glass, on a rocking chair, sits a life-sized old lady, dressed like a 1930′s washerwoman; blanket over the knees, bonnet on her head. My mum drops 10p into the slot, and the washerwoman lurches into life, rocking chair rattling against the floor as she cackles maniacally. One of my earliest, most vivid memories is that gut-punch of fear that led me shrieking out of the amusements and into the model village, where I was found sobbing beside a tiny church, like a pathetic Godzilla. This moment festered with me for years, until, in my teens, black and white footage of Old Mother Riley (a popular music hall drag-act) popped on a TV screen, and I instinctively fled for the nearest miniature cathedral. Even now, distorted by time, the thought of hard-faced, cackly washerwomen puts the proper shits up me and no mistake. “Where the fuck is this anecdote going? Tell us about the film, you helmet!” Well –

The experience of Beyond the Black Rainbow is a through-the-bannister glimpse of something your parents were watching when you should have been asleep, before creeping back to bed to lay awake all night with the sheet pulled up to your chin. It’s an eight-year-old’s sickly flu-hallucination about a marble that weighs as much as the Earth. Black Rainbow‘s Arboria Institute, a mysterious place of sterile surfaces and glowing hues, evokes nausea and wonder in equal parts. A hypnotically languid doctor receives a phonecall of sentient electronic sounds; a throbbing pyramid dulls the telekinetic powers of a captive teenage girl; Daft Punk robots with baby’s faces stalk the droning hallways, soaked in brain-melting reds and yellows. Even if the oft-thrown accusation by tedious dullards of “you’re just being weird to be weird” were true (it’s not), visually Black Rainbow is engaging, stimulating and highly original, more-so than anything else in 2012, or for many, many years. Above all, it’s deeply unsettling.

More than any film on this list, I’m loathe to offer specifics on plot or scenes that would be best enjoyed with as-yet undestroyed eyeballs, and brains that sit unmolested inside the skull in innocent, pre-mulch form. The entire film has a soporific rhythm that gives the sense of having been drugged. Coupled with the extraordinary visuals, the speech patterns are drowsy, the silences long and uneasy, and there’s an analog synth score which drones like an overhead light in a padded cell. The villain of the piece has such a rattlingly alien quality, there’s no way this guy is a regular human actor. I think he just appeared one day when the director was dicking around with a ouija board inside a mystical cave. It all harks back to an era viewed through well-worn VHS tapes, and this legitimately feels like an undiscovered film from 1983; a film that was redacted from history by sinister forces trying to protect our fragile minds. A lot will be made of the visuals — one sequence in particular is truly the most horrifying, beautiful sequence of primal horror — but it’s a fusion of sights, sounds, and performances that turns this twist on the most Lovecraftian of concepts, of man’s attempt to cope with sights his mortal brain can’t comprehend, into an act of audience participation.

As with Piggy, at first glance, Wild Bill seemed like something that could only result in my kicking over the TV like a furious mule. You’ll find it under the genre of ‘British crime drama’, and it’s set around a tower block; it’s even got that weasel-faced bloke in it. You know the one. Its writer/director, Dexter Fletcher, is someone I associate solely with ruining the third series of Gamesmaster by repeatedly gurning right up the lens while a schoolboy in global hypercolour thrashed Shadow from Gladiators on Ecco the Dolphin. Thankfully, I stopped being a judgemental cock for long enough to give it a shot.

The Wild Bill of the title is a man fresh out of prison; a man trying not to return to his past, as he attempts to (re)connect with his estranged kids. As with other films on the list, by no means is this fresh narrative ground, but the ideas are approached with a deft storyteller’s hand that elevates it far above clumsy ITV dramas with similar synopsis. Like Lawless, Wild Bill has a legend attached to his name, which the local nutters, nonce-bashers and gang boss Andy Serkis aren’t so quick to confine to the past. It’s refreshing just how subtly it’s played, bypassing that kind of relentlessly bleak kitchen-sink struggle for very real turmoil with a very real heart. The threat of violence simmers quietly in the background, and when it finally does come, it’s almost a relief, like finally being allowed to exhale.

In a year of strong performances from younger actors, Will Poulter as the older son — forced to become a dad-bro to his younger sibling when permanently left home alone — lives up to the promise he showed in the underrated Son of Rambow, but the acting’s pretty faultless from top to bottom. First time director, Dexter Fletcher (which sounds like homework from a speech therapist) depicts Bill’s struggle, as events conspire against him, in a way that purveys a sinking feeling of dread, and you just know that this is not a story that’ll end well. But once again, just as if you’d ignored this on the shelf at HMV because it was next to a film starring Tamer Hassan, you’d be wrong.

Bernie is the story of a good man who did a bad thing, which is kind of apt, because Jack Black, an extraordinary talent in the right role, has made some not so great career choices over the years (Gulliver, Year Zero). Bernie was a really smart choice, and establishes his quality forever.

The character of Bernie is — how shall I put this — kind of a dandy. He’s light in the loafers, he’s big in the am-dram; he’s a kindly, jaunty soul for which the (sadly) rarely used in 2012 phrase ‘confirmed bachelor’ could have been penned. It’s this charismatic likeability that puts you squarely on the side of the townsfolk who can’t get their heads around such a gentle soul committing such a horrible act. See, this is a true story. No, it really is. That whole ‘inspired by real events’ tag gets stuck on the front of anything these days, with so much artistic licence, I think they re-releasing Crank 2 with a true story disclaimer, because there’s a dog in the background of one shot, and dogs are a real thing.

So anyway, the true story. Bernie was your typical pillar of the small-town, God-fearing community; he was was everyone’s favourite, everyone’s friend; but especially, he was the friend and — caretaker — to a wealthy elderly widow, with whom he drove, cooked, went on cruises, oh, and murdered. Brutally murdered. Funnily, I didn’t realise the locals giving to-camera thoughts on what we see play out were real people, talking about the real Bernie killing the real Marjorie (a sour Shirley MacLaine) until the credits rolled. I don’t think that’s a spoiler, it just went over my head, and I assumed it was down to Christopher Guest-style naturalism. Never has a film so danced the line betwixt fiction and reality; shot in the place where it happened, with people who were actually there adding a wonderful local rhythm to the dialogue. The realisation of this was incredibly moving; ditto the images over the credits of the real Bernie and Marjorie, reminding you of the tragedy behind the laughs. And speaking of laughs, at one point, a hard cut to a gleeful (and superbly choreographed) “76 Trombones!” made me laugh just about as violently as is humanly possible.

Matthew McConaughey, loitering around movie screens this year like he owned the place, is back playing another dick, but make no mistake, this is unforgettably Jack Black’s film. We’ve already been over my rabid lust for hyperbole, but this is the standout male performance of the entire year. It’s charming, tender, and with a level of pathos worthy of 1970′s British sitcom, all of which adds to the audience’s empathy when the dirty deed gets done. It’s a thoroughly delightful turn, and unrecognisable from the familiar bug-eyed rocker persona. I’m so head over heels cuckoo for his Bernie, that if Jack Black doesn’t get an Oscar nomination, I feel like I’m going to react pretty badly. All I’m saying is, if you’re an elderly widow who’s been on cruises with me, watch yo’ back.

And speaking of the story behind a true story, I’d love to know the tale behind the thank you credit for one Dusty Rhodes. Shot in Texas; it has to be the Dream, right? Hey, the true story of Dusty Rhodes! There’s another role for JB. Take it to the paywindah, daddy!

I think a lot of people were wrong-footed by the familiar log-line. A pair of cops patrolling the gang-ridden, condom-strewn back alleys of South Central; whatever, man. There’s a found footage hook, but nobody’s getting suckered in by the text on the back of the DVD. Yet at the close of the year, this movie is lighting up Top 10 lists like Snoop Dogg with one of those funny smelling cigarettes that make my eyes burn.

Well-trodden ground as is it, what elevates End of Watch into truly exceptional quality is the sensational chemistry of its two leads. Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña’s relationship, with all its teasing, bantering, and obvious love that runs so deep, you know they’d gladly take bullets for each other, sells you from the opening scene. (Incidentally, any lazy twats who still describe interpersonal relationships between two friendly male characters as a ‘bromance’ like they’ve just discovered the world’s wittiest joke can go hang themselves.) By the time shit goes south, they’re so well developed that everything has huge stakes, and there are plenty of nice naturalistic touches, like Pena repeating an off the cuff remark (”Liberace’s AK”) to different people, as you might in real life when something gets a laugh.

The second part to End of Watch‘s success is the kinda-sorta found footage angle. The actual self-shot deal is used sparingly, and the general hand-held shooting style gives a devastating intimacy to proceedings — and a real urgency to action sequences. It’s as effective a use as there’s ever been, Blair Witch Project included. This is found footage, not as a pitchable, high-concept gimmick, but as a tool for drawing the audience deep into the bosom of the protagonist’s world. The structure plays like a series of day-in-the-life sequences over extended months, which is at turns, super-touching, but filled with a foreboding sense that something bad’s going to happen to the people you’ve grown to care about. The most important thing about telling a story is having your audience give a shit about the characters, or else everything that happens is just a series of sounds, lights and moving colours. While this is a story told many times before, it’s never been seen through eyes so close.

The Comedy should be taken as a warning. Tim Heidecker’s aging hipster is hollow, emotionally stunted, and completely unable to function. When we first meet him — after an slow-mo opening where he and his buddies spray each other with beer as they dance with their genitals tucked between their legs — he’s trolling his dying father’s nurse with endless questions about prolapsed anuses, without an ounce of joy.

Heidecker and friends speak only in straight-faced, ever-escalating improvisational riffs, having spent so long being ironic, like making a face when the wind changes, they’re all stuck. With no connection or purpose, any interaction with another human being is akin to a half-hearted prank phonecall, pushing and pushing, and wondering what it’s ever going to take to get a reaction; to have a feeling. It’s a brutal piece, racked with self-loathing and shooting for zero sympathy. He’s a man on the edge who took that final step and just kept on falling. The level of disaffectedness feels like that trollface style of humour taken to its natural end; when the “lulz” are over, what’s next? It’s Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, filtered through the eyes of an audience rushing to post funny memes about the latest school shooting to show everyone how hard they don’t care.

Yes, The Comedy is self indulgent, but it wouldn’t work any other way. Such an anti-comedy puts the question back onto the audience, asking how much more faux-sincerity we’re willing to tolerate, as Heidecker, eyes lidded with boredom, casually watches an acquaintance suffer a seizure. His hipster irony keeps the world at bay, but it’s clear that we’re dealing with a man who’s deeply, tragically unhappy. The Comedy‘s most masterful scene is when the numbness cracks, just for a moment, for a brief reversion to childlike delight; a connection found in the most unexpected place.

Tim Heidecker is the closest thing we have to an Andy Kaufman right now. Check out his anti-comedy stand-up sets on Youtube, filled with comments from clueless nobs who’re blissfully unaware of the sonic boom breaking over their heads. His Twitter feed likewise has a zero tolerance, suffer-no-fools disdain, and The Comedy is the distilled essence of that creative rage; simultaneously repugnant and poignant, mesmeric and difficult to watch. There are genuinely funny moments from the conversational improv, which goes into some super weird places, and he’s such a naturally gifted comedic performer that many scenes will have you laughing in spite of yourself. I imagine The Comedy will be this year’s movie that people will either love, or call me a cunt because I recommended it, but even if it doesn’t connect right away, you should sit on it for a while, because as an inverse to The Dark Knight Rises, The Comedy is a film that you’ll like more the more you think about it. But just as Tim and Eric’s regular work is incredibly polarising, The Comedy will alienate a huge chunk of the audience. But if they’re too dumb to get it, fuck ‘em.

This movie may have intersected with my life at the perfect time. I’ve found that the thirties are the decade for seething introspection, especially if you’re bitter about the loss of your entire twenties, and just figured you’d put all your eggs in the basket of being successful in the arts and somehow be okay. Partly, that’s why I connected so much with Safety Not Guaranteed, but that’s also down to it being an exceptional film.

On the surface, this is an “are they or aren’t they?” tale about somebody who claims they’re a time traveller — and look out for that motif once more — but as with Looper, it’s time travel as a means to explore other topics. Based off that funny personal ad by a guy looking to find a companion on a mission back to the past, it demonstrates the thing I love about writing, about how anything can be used as a jumping off point; although I can’t say I’m totally jazzed about the inevitable Grumpy Cat film. Aside from the main story of Aubrey Plaza’s training-cum-investigation of the possible time traveller/probable crazy person, there’s a subplot of her boss’s use of their trip as an opportunity to hook up with an old high-school girlfriend. This interweaves with the main story beautifully, with Jake Johnson — in a really layered performance — doing some time travelling of his own, trying to recapture a lost moment. This is where it gets into that whole introspection thing, and you’re suddenly wondering about those romanticised moments in your own life, when the rest of the world has rudely decided to move on.

Safety Not Guaranteed is a movie that appeals to the time traveller in us all, where a song can shoot you back to a specific moment in the past, leaving nothing in its wake but two flaming tire tracks. But while we sit weeping like twats in our Beats by Dr. Dre, we should probably be creating new moments, rather than obsessing over self-created folklore from way back when. While both plots summon up a big bowl of wistful regret for you to choke on, there’s more to be gained from watching than just a harrowing life-crisis, and it’s a charming movie. Plaza, as a girl named Darius, is less caustic than her Parks and Rec character, but anyone who watches that already knew she was great, while Mark Duplass, when removed from the utterly insipid Mumblecore movement, is capable of way better things. A premise like this is sold on the air of mystery — has he really built a time machine, or is Aubrey Plaza going to end up in a ditch? — and Duplass subtly nudges you this way and that, right up to to the reveal. Though relegated to the side-plot, Jake Johnson’s may be the strongest, most quietly devastating performance of the lot, while Karan Soni gives us the most revelatory nerd since McLovin, albeit far less of a comedy grotesque.

While this looks like the most quirky-indie flick of all time, be prepared to self-examine like a motherfucker, unless you’re one of those freaks that considers themselves happy. Are my best opportunities behind me? Did my dreams get away? And that big moment from your life that you shared with someone else — do they remember it the same way, if they remember it at all? None of us are getting any younger, and Safety Not Guaranteed examines the past like a piece of modern art; it’s worth reliant on the angle at which you’re looking from. Ultimately though, it’s a message about taking chances, and rather than looking back, moving forwards with a leap of faith.

“To go it alone, or to go with a partner?”

Sound of my Voice has you from the opening frame. We’re as much in the dark as Peter and Lorna, who under explicit instruction, strip, shower and scrub, before changing into plain white surgical gowns, and being driven, blindfolded and cuffed, to a secret location. It has the air of a voluntary abduction, and we’re immediately thrown off-balance. And then there’s a basement, a weirdly elaborate secret handshake, and suddenly we’re in. But in what? That’s when we meet Maggie.

At one point, a character says “It’s all about her. It’s all about Maggie.” This is true for both the story, and the film. Any cult — or film centring on such — lives or die by the magnetism of its leader, and this is where Sound of My Voice soars. Purportedly a traveller sent back from a broken future, Brit Marling turns in a searing performance; fragile, warm, intimidating, always in control, and never less than thoroughly beguiling. Newcomers are warned against sudden movements, as though preparing to meet a wild animal, but from the moment we first see her, shuffling and veiled in a sheet, and hooked to an oxygen tank, it truly is all about Maggie.

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“Maggie’s gonna get what she wants.”

Having spent the last few years of my life obsessively snared in a project about Charles Manson, the language of cults is familiar to me, and Sound of my Voice has a superbly researched (and performed) take on that kind of self help-cum-control. On the surface, Maggie’s little world is replete with harmless new age wisdoms about “listening from your heart”, where barefoot followers in the lotus position stare silently into each other’s eyes, and where the shackles of embarrassment are cut loose with the sort of unthinking free-dancing you’d expect see at Glastonbury from naked 40-somethings in neon body paint. But there’s a chilling, predatory undertone, always lurking just beneath the surface, at the back of the eyes, sneaking around behind the love. It’s this dichotomy that keeps the film on its even keel of maybe/maybe nots, and without it, the audience has no empathy with its leads. Even the chapter split of sorts, with arbitrary points in time segregated by white-on-black title card numbering, feels as though we’re advancing up the ladder of cult progression, like when Tom Cruise hits OT19, and he can ski across the sky on his farts.

Maggie brings John Titor-style tidings of civil war, from a generation “comfortable with death,” but paints a picture of a hippie utopia thriving amid the darkness, and those who have faith shall be led to salvation. But as the story unfolds, more elements drop into the mix; there’s firearms and a shooting range, a narcoleptic loner girl at substitute teacher Peter’s middle-school, and then, a mysterious government agent. When Maggie’s true nature — time traveller, con artist, or maybe worse — is forced into question, their faith gets tested, and it’s as disorienting for us as it is for them. Whoever wants to believe that all this has been for nothing? The duel protagonists, undercover techno-hipsters filming a secret expose, consider the other members “weak and looking for meaning… suckers,” but from the first meeting, it’s clear that Maggie’s under their skin, and as they get deeper, she looms over their lives like a ghost; an unspoken infatuation, or the first stirrings of spiritual awakening.

I’m trying super hard not to spoil any of the wonderful secrets of the film, but there’s a truly standout sequence that I simply have to gush all over, like an amateur housewife on a Sybian. One of Maggie’s many tests requires the literal expelling of shame and self-loathing; all over the pristine white carpet. Though grotesquely humorous at the start, it develops into the most intense, incredible scene of 2012. Maggie is at her most alluring, her most cruel, destroying to rebuild, or just because she can. Using that magnetism to psychologically devastating effect, it’s a truly mesmerizing performance. Likewise too, in a later sing-along scene, which exposes the first genuine crack of vulnerability, and distils the film’s perfectly balanced duality of belief and cynicism.

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“To see her is to believe her.”

A story this intricately constructed, with myriad threads, misdirections and possibilities, is a delicate balancing act, and pulling off a ending that doesn’t reduce it to a deflating, one-watch film is a huge ask. Brit Marling, co-writer of Sound of my Voice, also co-wrote 2011 pick Another Earth, which had the most breathlessly beautiful ending in recent memory. Once again, Marling, and her co-writer, pull out a conclusion that somehow fulfils that unimaginable hope we always have, that whatever’s behind the curtain will live up to the booming voice and the promises. There are answers, but as with every great story, as the credits roll, there are a dozen, intriguing new questions.

My writer-brain was in awe, while also wondering how the fuck I’d ever be able to convey it when Top 20 time came around. While co-writer/director Zal Batmanglij, a man so awesome his very name actually has Batman in it, brings a close, intimate direction that helps ease this up to the number one pick, it’s hard to overlook the common link between the most uniquely moving, creative films of the past two years. Marling, having tired of the stereotypical roles on offer and deciding to just write her own, is the most exciting voice in cinema today, and in these two films, she’s established a style; high concept, yet deeply rooted in human emotions; and set the bar so high that Felix Baumgartner uses it to do chin-ups.

As Michael Bay preps another Transformers, and Peter Jackson spreads a 300 page children’s book over a dozen hours of film, it’s hard not come away from such original, entertaining, and affecting cinema believing you may have finally found the one who’ll lead us all out of the wastelands, and to artistic salvation.

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Alright, that’s it for another year. Let’s close again with Genrocks’ annual ode to the awesomeness of cinema.

My Top 20 Movies of 2012 – The List: Part 1

2011 list: Part 1, Part 2 ** 2010 list ** 2009 list

If you missed it, here’s the preamble, with stuff that didn’t make the cut, and the worst movies of the year. And now, onward to film!

You’ve seen Eastbound and Down, right? If not, then I’ve lost what little respect I had for you (almost none). Well, if you have, The Catechism Cataclysm could truthfully be titled The Adventures of Stevie Janowski the Priest. It’s an unashamed piece of typecasting and consequently plays like a weird spin-off, or alternative universe What If? But nobody does the repressed innocent like Steve Little, and here, he’s a spectacularly unworldly manbaby — wide-eyed and trapped in arrested development, having spent his hollow, adult life idolising the cool guy from his youth, who wrote stories, played in a rock band and briefly dated his sister. This is a man who’s positively seething with an unspoken desire to live. On meeting his idol for the first time in decades, it’s clear that life, outside of Steve’s memories, has moved on, and that older guy is now, effectively, the same age, and just a bemused trucker who’s only in it for the beer.

The set-up of a canoe trip gives a meandering pace to proceedings, and allows the two to (re)connect over a series of conversations, unfinished short stories (that we see played out), and revelations, as Little’s weird little bubble of reality gets prodded, if not completely pricked. The other lead — a gruff but likeable Robert Longstreet — stuck on a lofty pedestal of somebody’s warped perception, is trapped by both the camping trip, and the priest’s projections of who he was. There’s a realness in how the two disparate characters bounce off each other; perhaps uncomfortably so, for those who live more in the past than they do the present.

But then things take a turn. The strangest turn ever. Look, if you read my blog regularly, you’ll know I’m big on hyperbole. I’m over-excitable. Everything is the best; the worst, with not a grey area area to be seen, unless it’s the greyest area IN THE WORLD! “That’s the most awesome movie I’ve ever seen! I have the biggest penis of all time!” Trust me though, this movie goes into a really, really weird direction. You know that thing where you draw part of a picture, then fold the paper over and hand it to the next guy to doodle their bit? When you unfold it, there’s a cowboy’s head, with a huge pair of breasts, and a pair of duck legs at the bottom. Well, this is a film that got folded over with twenty minutes to go and passed across to a psychopath. But it works. It really works.

Any Dark Knight Rises review comes laden with baggage, and in writing this, I’m caught between two baying mobs. On my left, stand the Nolan fanboys, for whom anything but a perfect five-stars is grounds for tying me down and pumping sour farts straight into my veins with an IV line. To the right, those who’ve rubbed themselves sore at every tiny plot-hole, that proves to them the first group — their mortal enemies — are stupid and wrong. These were the ones gleefully yearning for Dark Knight Rises to be awful, so they could swan about with their waxed moustaches in the air, having not been fooled into being excited or enjoying themselves, sat sneering in $8 seats at the midnight opening. As it usually does, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

For the first hour, Bruce Wayne is a hobbling Howard Hughes recluse, with shelves of dated, urine-filled 7up bottles stinking out the Batcave, and it’s this intriguing notion of a broken Batman that reeled me in. But like most of the great things in this movie, it’s something that was tossed aside (twice), in a frustratingly off-hand manner. The real strength of TDKR is that it centres around something we’ve genuinely never seen in a superhero movie (or, barring oddities like Arlington Road, in few movies period), in a villain that feels like a genuine threat. As Nolan’s story headed towards its conclusion, with a crippled Batman out of the picture, there were moments where you felt like it truly could go anywhere; and Gotham’s reckoning made for a grand spectacle, riffing on things we’d seen in the news over recent years, from the Occupy movement and 1%er privilege, to Europe’s perpetual riots, where police clashed with civilians through a fog of tear gas, and there was a feeling that things might change, even though we knew they never really do. And when it got to the third act, they hadn’t.

Ultimately, this is a film which becomes messier and less impressive the more you think about it, and given another six weeks of pondering, it’d probably drop out of my top twenty altogether. For a series that prided itself on realism (as though that automatically elevates it above action movies that don’t take themselves quite so ponderously), some of the choices required such a suspension of disbelief, that a scene with a cannister of Bane Repellent being yanked out of the Bat-Belt would have slotted in just fine. That said, I was pleased to see the League of Gentlemen‘s mow-mow joke make a surprise appearance.

While it was close to a worthy end for the trilogy, many of the big moments were bungled. TDKR has the lamest, most anti-climactic bad-guy death ever — casually dispatched out of the blue by a supporting character, and dying offscreen while a zingy one-linergets delivered.This may seem like a pretty negative review for a movie that actually made it onto the list, and like I’m pandering by even having it in here, but I genuinely did enjoy it at the time. The Dark Knight Rises is deeply flawed, but due to the scale, scope and performances, one side of the catcalls just about outshouts the other, and it pushes itself into the Top 20. For now.

Iron Fists is RZA’s blood-soaked love letter to the Kung Fu movies that, I’m going to assume, he devoured on the Wu Tang tour bus, while Ol’ Dirty Bastard was having so much groupie sex on the back seat, he had to wrap his friction-burned penis in gauze like a little brown mummy. A blacksmith who makes crazy weapons for warring clans, RZA’s role is the most understated of a film, which — with a rich rapper as the director, co-writer and star — could have been a terrible vanity piece, but instead, is an intricately crafted homage, and worthy work in its own right.

There’s a huge theatricality to the brightly-coloured and joyously inventive world, and the hammy performances give the sense that the cast are having as much fun as the audience, stroking at scars and Shaw Brothers eyebrows as they speak only in threats or sparse nuggets of Eastern wisdom. In particular, Russell Crowe’s waddling, debauched Englishman is not so much chewing the scenery, as humping it like a dog that got into the shoebox of MDMA you keep under the bed. The cartoonish design has the feel of an old arcade game, with a rich set of characters replete with individual gimmicks and weapons, and a visual look — a lion clan with big manes of hair; killer prostitutes swooping silently from the ceiling like sexy crows — that trumps the laziness of bigger budget movies that don’t have to think so much.

The Kung Fu sequences themselves are as batshit as you’d hope, and bring to mind that Christopher Walken line in Man of Fire, about death as art, and painting a masterpiece. In a movie wall to wall with killing, each death is at once brutal and beautiful, with the mountain air thick with arcs of blood, severed limbs, and heads that have literally been kicked and punched straight off of the necks they once called home, all played out against a hip hop soundtrack that feels weirdly fitting and 1970s. I know Hollywood totally reads all this, so I’m going to end by throwing out a quote for the front of the DVD.

“Kung Fu? More like Kung Fun!” – Stuart Millard, hunky writer.

Incidentally, I was going to say something about Russell Crowe’s wavering “English” accent, but he’ll probably get all arsey again.

Oh, time travel, how I love thee. And not in a healthy way. I’m watching you sleep through a hidden webcam and turning all your friends against you so you’ll have to come to meeeee. Looper is the first of three time travel-fixated movies in this list, and like the other two, the high-concept stuff is mostly a nifty way of addressing some of the philosophical issues that we shitting, wanking sacks of meat and bone obsess over, as our cells deteriorate on the journey from vaginal opening to grave.

There was a point in Looper where I thought I was going to love it, rather than merely just like a lot. When JGL sits down with his older self, he reacts like we all would; with horror and contempt. It’s human nature to fear what you’ll become; the first wrinkle, the retreat of the hairline, the droop of the breast; few of us could meet that face to face across a table without turning away. Likewise, Bruce Willis, when confronted by his younger self, sees a dumb prick too stupid to appreciate his youth, with nothing in his immediate future but a bunch of mistakes. Put in the same position with the me from my teenage years, I’m sure I’d find myself reaching across, grabbing a handful of purple hair, and slapping myself right out of my Korn t-shirt. Having this existential crisis manifest itself physically was Looper‘s high point, and I’d have loved for a fucked up buddy movie, but things went in another direction.

As noted by its own director, Looper is not a film about piecing together the paradoxical rules of time travel, so unlike, say, a Primer, it won’t take a bunch of rewatches to unravel. It’s a thoughtful action movie, but it won’t give you a case of the brain-bleeds. The future design felt fresh, choosing airy, open spaces, rather than the done-to-death, rain-soaked Blade Runner nightscapes more tedious future-set films return to, and there were some fun sequences, in particular, a fantastically gruesome, realistic take on Marty McFly’s siblings vanishing from a photograph. The introduction of other sci-fi elements made it a little less interesting, but Looper was an entertaining ride that still raised some interesting points about consequences, and lives, careers and destinies that seem pre-ordained, as well as some laying-in-bed-at-4am mindfucks. For example, would we give up the great love of our past (or future), given the chance? Would we undo the experience and lose the pain, but give up the lessons and the parts of us that grew out of what happened? Given a real time machine, or just nature’s Delorean of moving up a generation, most will probably reach the same conclusion. We use the wisdom of experience to give others a chance not to make the same mistakes, and have a better life than what we did. If not, then maybe you’ll grow up to be Bruce Willis, so fuck it anyway.

My reasons for liking Piggy are the same things that make it a hard film to review. But let’s go back to the beginning. Firstly, I was hesitant to even give it a watch. British cinema and me don’t always get on, as it’s a medium that’s somehow been hijacked by thug-porn. Of course, this is a sweeping generalisation, and there’s some tremendous stuff coming out of the UK, as my end of year lists will attest, but the marketplace is crowded with potato-faced men being well ‘ard on football terraces, London skyrises or council estates. Clearly, these are movies made by people whose knowledge of cinema extends no further than the Scarface references on Grand Theft Auto IV, and are lapped up by easily-entertained, beer-breathed tossers. Lump those in with the directors intent on showing us how miserable everybody is, as with hilarious tosh like 2009′s thimble-deep Fishtank, or worst of all, the laughable Brit-garbage put out by that talentless cock, Noel Clarke, and it’s a pretty bleak picture.

The trendy thugs genre has a revolving cast of rent-a-gobs; perennially snarling and doing coke off the back of a broken brick, and when they pop up in the middle of a film, you treat these familiar faces like you would bumping into the guy from school who flushed your head down the toilet while you were still sitting on it. Piggy is a veritable parade of actors from the oeuvre of #1 example of shitty British films; Nick Love. Check out the highlights from one of his commentary tracks if you’re in any doubt as to what a fucking arse he is. And in Piggy, they’re all there, bold as brass. Look, there’s the tubby bloke from Football Factory. And Danny Dyer’s mate from The Business. And the not-Gary Oldman from the appalling remake of The Firm – a cast equivalent to opening your front door and finding every school bully from fifteen years ago splashing an early morning piss against your fence. One might have good cause to worry about Dyer himself putting in an appearance, tugging on his pearly trousers and threatening to stripe your bird with a stanley knife so nobody else will ever want her.

Well, more fool me and my preconceptions, because Piggy is one of the best British films in a long time. Essentially an urban revenge flick, there’s a grimy grittiness (and possibly the pig connection) that made me think of the PS2 game Manhunt; a down and dirty tale that sits on the brain like insomniac thoughts about hurting yourself. Paul Anderson, Piggy of the title, given some decent material for once, has an alluring quality, like those worldly older men who pull you under their spell when you’re on the cusp of adulthood, with wild, exotic tales of rucks and women, and with the vague sense they could turn nasty at the drop of a hat. The reason this makes for a hard review is that its central conceit hinges on a really brazen use of cinema’s most overplayed twist. I spent the final act mired in the fear that there may not be a deeper game at play, and that I was set to arrive at a tedious surprise party that I’d overheard being planned. Thankfully, the audience is credited with more intelligence, and it’s played very smartly throughout, and without an explicit “ta-da!” like the post-Saw, flashback-laden reveals of recent years, where relevant snippets of past dialogue are laid right out on the table. “Do you see?! Do you get it?!” Here, it’s not even a twist, just a plot device, and in two respects, though it deals with some unpleasant material, Piggy was a very pleasant surprise.

If you’re one of those shady digital pickpockets au fait with the release scene, rifling through BitTorrents and Rapidgator folders before they cart you away like Kim Dotcom, then you’ll be all too familiar with the rushed pirate film releases. Shot through a pinhole camera balanced on an asthmatics wobbling gut, these files are favoured by the kind of gurgling, artless dunces who’ve no quarrel watching a movie in a way that simulates how said film would look had they’d contracted glaucoma. Personally, just being at someone’s house while their TV’s got early Simpsons episodes stretched out to 16:9 is enough to send me screaming profanities while furiously pushing their personal effects up my bottom as means of protest. Anyway, I’m rambling. When the first seizure-o-vision copies of Indonesian-speaking The Raid came out, there were no subtitles. “It’s fine,” said comment-leavers, after about twenty of them had gotten in with “FIRST!”, “You don’t need subs. It’s easy to figure out what’s going on.” While that’s unfair on the story that is there, which is simple but well-told, The Raid: Redemption speaks the universal language.

Some would have you believe the thing that transcends the barriers of language and culture is love. Those people are sappy milquetoasts, effetely prancing tippy-toed over piles of discarded cat hair, and spending their nights spooning with their partners and tee-heeing at Michael McIntyre routines about “Ooh, you know when you turn the kettle on, but then you forget to switch it on at the wall?” In truth, the universal language is that of people kicking each other really hard in the face. Or through a window. Or just over and over, with all blood coming out all over the place. The universal language is action. Seriously, if you want to woo a beautiful, exotic French girl, but can’t speak the lingo because your teacher drank, just stroll along the Champs-Élysées, find some random stranger, and stab them through the chin with a furled umbrella. She’ll gracefully swoon into your arms. Or, just show her this movie, because holy shit, The Raid is 100 minutes of the greatest action you’ve ever seen. It’s almost exhausting. I can think of no greater romantic gesture; streaming it over Skype to a coal-eyed beauty from foreign climes; dropping it into No-Man’s Land on Christmas Day, so the Nazis and the Brits can cheer the storming of a besieged tower block, and a ratty little hard-nut called Mad Dog who won’t stay down, no matter how many Muay Thai knees he takes to the bollocks. So let us unite the nations, hand in hand; religion, creed, and sexual preference be damned. Truly, in watching The Raid: Redemption, we will all be as one.

Except for those nob-ends who can stomach films in the wrong aspect ratio, or without the subtitles. They need a kick in the fucking neck.

Killer Joe sets its stall out early, as it opens with an eye-level shot of Gina Gershon’s lustrously coiffed vagina framed in a doorway (At the time of writing, if you put her name into Google, the third auto-suggestion is “gina gershon killer joe bush”), and from there, it’s one big ol’ slide down the insanity chute on a rug made from, I dunno, something crazy. A lot’s been made of Matthew McConaughey’s 2012 resurgence, as he shifts from leaning against women’s backs on the posters of cock-awful romcoms, to charismatic, edgier material; but as great as he is here, Killer Joe belongs to Juno Temple. Temple’s broken, baby-girl, trailerpark legal-Lolita, all bandy-legs and tattered storybook innocence is the dame at the centre of the white trash noir. Equal parts ingénue in need of rescuing from her damaged family, and alluring siren who doesn’t realise she’s enticing you onto the rocks, she’s the tempest round which everything swirls; a twister picking up bales of hay, flying cows, and women with bloody faces fellating chicken drumsticks.

I really can’t overemphasise how utterly brain-jigged a movie this is. It’s like a film entirely made up of characters deemed too fucked up to be in other films; the classroom down the hall filled with the weird kids that prick themselves with a compass and distract the other pupils. Thomas Hayden Church’s slumping sad sack; Gershon’s afro-crotched wicked stepmother; Emile Hirsch as the ‘sane’ one, to whom matricide is as viable a means to a quick buck as sticking an old guitar amp on eBay. And then there’s McConaughey’s titular Joe, unbalanced, but with a frighteningly cool restraint that reins him back like an invisible leash, he’s permanently coiled and ready to strike; a two legged version of those games with the twisting copper tube that buzzes when you touch it. And when he does go off, it results in a twenty-minute sequence that’ll have many self-proclaimed cult movie nerds yelling “Fuck this mental shit” and sprinting home to watch something sane, like Inland Empire. I like to imagine Nic Cage dunking the Killer Joe script into a lion’s mouth for being too out there, then firing his agent while rolling down a hill inside a giant tractor tyre.

But don’t mistake Killer Joe for a wacky midnight movie that’s best enjoyed with the Pink Flamingos and Buckaroo Banzais of cinema, with half an ironic eye and a bong shaped like a bong. It’s a coherent piece of film-making with a real heart, and though it’s not always comfortable viewing, it’s immensely entertaining, with superb performances all round. Also, for a story so wreathed in violent sleaze, it’s pretty fucking funny. One particular visual gag that came out of nowhere absolutely floored me. And not to be patronising to older folks, but it’s thrilling to see William Friedkin, at 77, still taking risks, and putting out stuff this good.

The other day, a total stranger accused me of being a hipster. I was so outraged, I almost crashed my Penny Farthing. Now, I’m not saying you need to be a hipster to enjoy Wes Anderson’s movies, but they are of a certain stylistic bent, and a genre unto themselves. Here; I’ve concocted this simple formula to help you decide whether or not you’re going to like Moonrise Kingdom. Print off this page and circle as appropriate.

Do you enjoy Wes Anderson movies? Yes. No.

If you scrawled around the No, then this movie likely won’t be for you. If, however, you enwrapped the word Yes within a dainty, looping circle (probably more of a heart shape, but let’s not quibble), then come on in, because Moonrise Kingdom is the most Wes Anderson film of all time. Handcrafted asthetics, autumnal colours, woolly hats and dysfunctional families; it’s another corduroy-clad stride through Anderson’s head, with an exquisitely chosen soundtrack, and every frame a visual masterpiece. The Wes Anderson repertory theatre are present and correct, reading their lines through the dead-eyed detachment we’ve come to love, along with a pair of child actor newcomers who’ll probably be reigning king and queen of indie in ten years time. In particular, Kara Hayward’s old-soul performance marks her out as someone to watch for. Moonrise is Anderson at his most epic, with a intimately sprawling story that almost feels like two separate films. A standout scene of many is a pillow-talk between Bill Murray and Frances McDormand that projected a hand-animated sequence into my mind, where my black, empty heart tore in two like soggy crepe paper.

But again, this is an auteur thing. Not that I wouldn’t love someone to take a chance on a film they wouldn’t usually watch, but you know where you’re likely to stand here. Like a Tyler Perry who’s actually creative and not a horribly offensive moral-dinosaur, you know what you’re going to get from Wes Anderson, and with Moonrise Kingdom, he delivers again — a five star movie.

So much of this Top 20 is racked with misery or drowning in standing-ovation-at-Sundance pretentiousness, that half of you will probably want to hang yourselves by the time you get to the Top 5. But hold on, re-buckle that belt, raise those pantaloons, and stick with me, because Lockout was a ton of fun. Remember that? When movies were fun? Back in the day before everyone got obsessed with close-combat shakycam and people doing parkour across rooftops?

The Expendables films tried, and mostly failed, to do the 21st century 1980′s movie thing, by stacking them with the faces and machismo of that era, whereas Lockout accomplished it handily, purely by being awesome. Cynics will say “Yeah, well you’ve been obsessed with Maggie Grace since Lost. You’d probably stick a biopic of 90′s Canadian rapper Snow on your Top 10, if she was in the background dancing around to Licky Boom Boom Down in a little pair of shorts.” While that is true, if you watch Lockout for yourself, you’ll see that I’m thinking with my cinema nerd brain, and not just with my prim English genitals.

The real meat of the action is in the antagonistic relationship between Maggie and Guy Pearce, which makes you wonder where all the buddy comedies went. Lockout harks back to the days of sarcastic, wise-cracking action heroes, swapping caustic burns with the mismatched partner they’d gotten stuck with, while gussets on both sides flooded from the unspoken sexual tension that cranked up a notch every time a goon got a bullet in the face. Pearce’s character is a classic dick, a loveable bastard playing hard to get with the entire world, but with that Han Solo sense that there’s a good guy underneath all that bravado. Probable-bias aside, Maggie Grace is tremendous, and it’s a neat execution and flip of the archetypal damsel role. Any time I see her with a gun, it further fuels my fantasy/actual goal that will definitely happen, of becoming super successful, buying the rights to Garth Ennis’s Preacher, and making it as an HBO series, with Maggie as my Tulip. And eventual wife.

Don’t get me wrong, Lockout isn’t a knockabout comedy — it has its moments of darkness — but unlike most of the stuff in this list, when the credits rolled, I was wearing a smile rather than a lap full of tears. Nor is it quite the film you think it’s going to be from the trailers (no rampaging gangs of a hundred rioting space-cons), but more of a stripped-down cat and mouse; a Die Hard in space. Read that back. Die Hard in space. With Shannon from Lost. Of course it’s one of the best of the year.

Neatly, and glibly, best described as Backwoods Boardwalk Empire, Lawless is another John Hillcoat/Nick Cave fable about family that makes you grateful smell-o-vision never took off, because you’d be boking onto your thighs. It’s a sweaty, countrified 1930′s, where everybody spits as much as they talk, and when they do speak, they do so in Karl Childers-like grunts, while quaffing back jam jars of moonshine so strong you could run your car on it.

As with The Proposition, Lawless centres around a trio of brothers; moonshine runners from the hills of Virginia; whose name itself is hillbilly folklore ’round them parts. It’s this legend, centred on the antics of the elder two, that drives the story, with the youngest, Shia LaBeouf, trying to outgrow his status as patronised runt of the litter, and stretch his fingers out from under their shadows, into the light. Tales of the Bondurant Boys’ toughness are worn like a suit of armour, and Tom Hardy, who’s made a fine year out of being threateningly incoherent, gives a wonderfully off-centre performance as the most feared and revered of the group. Eye-contact half a step to the side, he’s a pragmatic timebomb who blows when he has to, swiftly and brutally, never raising his heart-rate above a dozen beats a minute.

But this is LeBouf’s story, as he morphs into the dapper bootlegger about town — pow-wowing with serious gangsters; wooing a naive Mennonite girl from the tendrilous beard of her preacher father — while falling deeper into a dangerous lifestyle that requires one to actually be the kind of crazy folk-hero the family name would suggest. Lawless contains the kind of unflinching violence you’d expect from the writer/director duo of Hillcoat and Nick Cave, but you’ll find its most visceral moments emanating from the quiet presence of Guy Pearce. A loathsome Herr Flick/Slender Man hybrid, his clinically antiseptic, psycho-sexual villain is so creepily repellent, I had to dig out that Reddit link about the guy with the flaky old “cum box” just to mentally cleanse myself. I don’t know if his look was inspired by silent movies, or by mugshots of duvet-fucking Japanese sex offenders, but it’s almost unthinkable that the guy with a severe, inch-wide parting running down the centre of his skull like the Red Sea, could possibly be the same chap so fantastic as a smirking smartass in Lockout.

Essentially a story about folk who become — and believe in their own — legends, while it’s not quite up to Proposition standards, Lawless makes for a pretty feisty little brother all the same.

…

Coming Friday – the Top 10.

My Top 20 Movies of 2012 – The Preamble

2011: Preamble, Top 20 part 1, Top 20 part 2.

2010: Preamble, Top 10

2009: Top 10

Well, here we are again. I’d like to think of my yearly movie countdowns as part of those indelible cultural links we have with the Christmas season, up there with log fires, reruns of The Snowman, or Noel Edmonds giving a balloon ride to a father with a malignant tumour. When we’re old, you and I, in our dying, flooded, future world, we’ll look back to the Christmases of our youth, filled with nostalgia for grandma’s gravy, and that time I used accidentally cumming over Woody Allen as a metaphor for aesthetically pleasing cinematography. As is the custom, before we get down to the Top 20, here’s a breakdown of some things I saw this year, good and bad, that didn’t make the cut but are still worth discussing.

I can’t lie, this year’s Top 20 is heavy on the kind of weird indie flicks you’d expect from a preening, effete, yet somehow still masculine show-off like myself, but I caught most of the big Hollywood movies too. Expendables II was more fun than the first one, but I enjoyed it like you would the badly-told jokes of a beloved elderly relative on Boxing Day. I was smiling, but purely because of the comforting old faces, and if anyone else pulled that shit, I’d be out the door. It was a first draft screenplay all the way, with almost every line a place-holder for something better that never came. Regard, the worst dialogue exchange of the year, after our heroes get ambushed by some goons:

Statham “Did you order room service?”

Stallone “Not really.”

Amazing. And Arnie seemed to have forgotten what little acting he did know, stumbling around like someone roused from a deep sleep by a 3am phone call, and reciting his lines like they’d been written for him on a passing breeze. If you did an Expendables II drinking game, chugging one back at every male-bonding scene consisted of weakly-acted laughter at shitty jokes, you’d be long-dead from alcohol poisoning by the time the final unconvincing chuckle yacked out of Randy Couture’s mouth.

“Remember when I promised I could act? I LIED.”

While we’re talking disappointments, like a beautiful woman with as-yet-unvoiced right wing political views, Prometheus looked utterly gorgeous, and got off to a superb start, but once its inner-ugliness and outright stupidity became apparent, you couldn’t raise an erection without jamming a biro down there. There was some phenomenal stuff — Fassbender’s android, the first half-hour — but many of the storytelling choices saw me pull the exact face Louis Theroux made when the Westboro Bapitist Church told him that “Jews worship the rectum.”

John Carter got a rough deal, but not too rough, as the middle act was cricket-dull, but it didn’t deserve its status as a gleefully sniggered-at bomb; while Hunger Games was like watching a remake of Battle Royale bookended by footage from cosplay conventions filmed by a camera tripping dicks on LSD. Also, everyone had names like Horsepiss Jackaboob. Apparently, I watched Wrath of the Titans. As if awakening on a strange couch with a sore bottom and a headache, all that remains in my memory are 100 missing minutes, and flashes of Sam Worthington’s unemotive cinderblock of a face leering down at me. Surely, a lucky escape. Not so with Rock of Ages, to which I was lured by the too-sexy combination of Kevin Nash and Russell Brand, but Rock‘s most impressive feat was managing to simultaneously be wildly showy and brightly coloured, and yet drained of all life and hope. In ten years, we’re due a big nu-metal jukebox musical, where eyebrow-pierced “teens” with white-man dreadlocks form unconvincing stage-school moshpits, and a runaway hitchhiker seeks her fortune on the open road, while belting out a Coal Chamber classic, inside a thundering Big Truck.

Once again, the year was heavy on the superheroes, but while everyone had spent the preceding 18 months giddy with anticipation for The Avengers, I wasn’t feeling it. See, I don’t share this inexplicable hardon we’re all supposed to have for Joss Whedon. To me, he’s the finest example of bad writers who have but a single voice, where any line of dialogue could be put into the mouth of any character, and you wouldn’t tell the difference. Everyone speaks in the same self-aware, self-deprecating zingers, and even the lines that aren’t me-so-smart are just a set-up for the next guy to jump in with the chicken-headed sass. Imagine my thrill when he was announced as the writer/director for the biggest ensemble piece of the year. But you know, he did alright. Not Top 20 alright, but entertaining all the same. And Avengers did well enough to fall into the stink-fingered clutches of those creepy internet fangirls who spend their days making gifs and thinking how positively squee it would be if all the pretty male characters were having arse-sex with each other. For every person on the planet, there are officially sixteen Tumblrs comprised of cute wickle psychopath Loki tilting his head or doing a smile.

98% of the content of the internet

As unjazzed as I was about The Avengers, I was metaphorically laying face-down and unmoving on a cold pavement for The Amazing Spider-Man. I love Spidey, but another origins run-through so soon after the previous one is Hollywood at its needless worst. And when did general opinion make that sudden switch to deciding we all hated the Raimi films? The third one, sure, but the first two were fantastic. Anyway, ASM was just about different enough to justify its existence, with a flashy, visual style all of its own, but if I see another fucking origin story, I’ll inject myself with toxic waste to see if I get the superpower of really bad cancer, so I don’t have to suffer through one more. The most surprisingly good superhero movie of the year was Chronicle, which finally answered the question of “Yo, String? Where Wallace at?!”, but I am a sucker for found footage movies, and I won’t even begin to tire of them until there’s been a FF movie in every genre. Romcom; Holocaust; schmaltzy biopic of a loveable yet tragic figure with a severe mental impairment — let’s do this.

A minor oddity I noticed in compiling the final twenty is how little comedy made it in. Comedy is hard, I guess, as a lot of stuff — like The Dictator — made me laugh at the time, but didn’t leave much of a lasting impression. The Campaign was essentially a Seth Galifianakis movie with added Will Ferrell doing his usual (awesome) yelling of rude non sequiturs in a serious voice, but loses points for its extended cameo of that fucking bell-ache Piers Morgan, a “man” I only ever want to see onscreen if he’s on his knees in a Saudi basement, pleading for his putrid life. Meanwhile, Ted had all the MacFarlane trademarks; a talking thing, big band sounds, and the fan-led ruination of a character with the piggybacking of a billion unfunny Twitter parody accounts by hee-hawing simpletons who like all the funny swearing.

You might be surprised that I, or indeed anyone, watched the Three Stooges movie, but the draw of Larry David as a nun was just too strong. And you know what — not that bad. I mean, it’s a two star movie, but nowhere near the disaster people would like to have you think. It raises an interesting idea, of whether the Stooges themselves transcend that line into characters that could be played by someone else, like Santa or Batman. Maybe it’s because I’m British, with no inherent cultural sense of the Stooges in the core of my bones, but I wasn’t offended, and the three main performances were clearly loving, well-honed tributes, rather than grotesque or lazy impersonations. Its main problem is that it’s a comic style so wildly outdated, it’s like rebooting the George Formby franchise, and while he’s smiling away on his ukulele, making a barely visible double-entendre about seeing a woman’s knees, on the next screen over, an audience cackles at a man in a spray-tan fucking a hamburger. Another thing most people wouldn’t admit to watching, let alone really digging, was Piranha 3DD. Yeah, you heard. I caught some shit last year for having Suckerpunch as my #20 pick, so I’ll probably be paraded around as floppy-cocked King of the Misogynists for this one. Look, even the title is a joke about big tits, so we’re openly dealing with the lowest of the low brow, but at least it’s trying. 3DD didn’t have a second of dead air, even if that screentime was flowing on images of a shotgun-legged, crippled Ving Rhames, or a severed head motorboating the giganto-jugs of a shrieking woman in a bikini. I welcome that sense of fun and creativity more than I do another dreary, po-faced Wrath of the Titans.

I am all class.

Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie is worth a mention, but something truly for fans only, whereas super-broad, big budget Wanderlust worked in that modern comedy kind of way, where everyone’s constantly riffing for the line-o-rama section on the DVD, but you wouldn’t watch it twice. 21 Jump Street came the closest to cracking the Top 20, proving that Channing Tatum is much more than just a handsome face (and abs, and arms, and overwhelming feeling that you should just fucking kill yourself because you’re a grotesque, worthless blogger). Likewise, he was great in Magic Mike, which had the added bonuses of more Kevin Nash, and the hunky werewolf from True Blood inflating his lovely big william in a penis-pump.

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter was tons of fun, and the prosthetics were better than that of Hitchcock, wherein Anthony Hopkins resembles that horrifying Kinder Surprise ad from the eighties, but it was a weak year for horror. The only real standout was social media-gen portmanteau V/H/S, which was a sort of Amicus/Tales from the Crypt, had they been around in the era of vlogging and casually videoing every sexual encounter. Compliance would make a good almost-companion piece to V/H/S, while more of a “the horror of people” thriller, based as it was on that time a ‘cop’ called a McDonalds and coerced a teenage girl to do naked jumping jacks and let a janitor peer right up her with a torch. I guess Dark Shadows was a kind of horror too, but at this point, the world’s just letting Tim Burton get on with things while saying “That’s nice, dear” over the tops of our newspapers. Likewise, it’s been a while since Oliver Stone made a dent, and he came close with Savages, but for a film about a girl and two guys who all love each other equally, with nobody having to choose, he pussied out by doing exactly the same with the ending(s).

THE AWFUL

I usually don’t see many bad movies, because I know well enough not to catch the latest Tyler Perry or Nick Love, or Plan B’s foray into directing (Got some guns has it? On a council estate towerblock? Quell surprise Mr. Welles!), but this year I particularly buried myself in cinema, so I caught more than my share of absolute turds.

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“You guys, my farts smell great today.”

The Wicker Tree was the archetypal shitty sequel. Completely pointless, and coming decades after the beloved classic, bizarrely, it was written and directed by the man behind the original. A single perfunctory scene with a frail Christopher Lee, shot against green screen so bad it felt like trying to watch a PS1 cut-scene when your great-grandad’s wandered in front of the TV, was supposed to be a nostalgic link to an iconic character, but was merely heartbreaking. The sacrificial leads were coyboy-hatted, Jesus praisin’ American innocents, so racially stereotyped I’ll have to coin the phrase Texas Blackface to fully explain just how offensively bad they were. The accents were like when you played the A-Team in infants school, literally spouting dialogue like “Gee golly shucks!” and condemning The Wicker Tree’s sole achievement to actually being stupider than the Nic Cage remake of the original. On the lines of defecating into the mouths of classics, it goes without saying that Len “Give me a green-light, I’ll give you a two-star movie!” Wiseman’s Total Recall was another pointless exercise in bereft creativity, boredom, and lens-bloomed shots of his rubbish wife’s arse running down darkened hallways.

An actual shocker, considering who was involved, was the awful Cosmopolis. Sadly unwatchable garbage, it was a GCSE media studies project with the name ‘David Cronenberg’ inexplicably atop the credits. Though not unwatchable, rather, just a tepid collection of jarring strings and sudden faces out of the dark, Hammer’s Woman in Black remake is best summed up by its sequence of a bewildered Daniel Radcliffe in a creaky old house, literally running from one not-scary jump-scare to the next, for an excruciating twenty minutes. Oh, and if Get the Gringo was supposed to be Crazy Mel Gibson’s kickstarter to a comeback, he’d have more chance after getting caught smearing handfuls of excrement over the walls of a Synagogue.

But those honkers aside, the absolute worst movie of the year by far is one I’m expecting to see on plenty of (wrong) Best Of lists written by idiots. On your feet, Cabin in the Woods. More like a portacabin, am I right?! Filled to the brim with stuff that’s come out of cocks, arses and wherever women wee out of (their clitorises?). There’s this bizarre idea that Cabin was a smart, meta take on the genre that forever changed the face of horror with its insightful deconstruction. No. It wasn’t even a satire — it just was the exact thing it thought it was satirising. Unbearably smug, Cabin in the Woods is an hour and a half of a braying sixth-former trying to suck himself off in front of a full length mirror. When it came out, I read a brilliant takedown of the widely accepted, but wholly false idea that Whedon’s good at writing for strong female characters, or geeky “Hey, they’re just like us!” everyman nerds. It noted how his casting is no less shallow than the GQ casting of a Michael Bay. Look at the IMDB page of the stoner character. Straight off the catwalk. Oh, but he’s got a t-shirt and a bong, and a voice like Shaggy from Scooby Doo — NERD! Dreadful.

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“It’s a g-g-g-godawful movie!”

Besides less of that, the two things I’d like to see stamped out in 2013 are 1) The constant noisy cocking of the safety on every single gun, in every situation and 2) Hollywood’s latest lazy get-out of writing some actual characterisation by establishing someone as an oddball failure or probable murderer solely by having them still living with their parents.

Coming up next, the bottom half of the Top 20. Feel free to make any guesses at my picks in the comment section below.

Alan Moore and Chums

Halloween is awesome. I was going to spend the day watching horror movies and searching Instagram for pictures of college girls playing beer pong while dressed as Boltie or Slutty Richard Harrow, but instead, here’s a treat.

I was looking through one of my many back issues of the superb Fortean Times, and came upon this wonderful and terrifying thing in the March 1995 letters page. Yes, that’s Alan Moore. The Alan Moore. With a ghost.  Click for bigger.

Letters of Note? Pfft. As far as I can find, this picture (and letter) didn’t exist online until I stuck it up right now, so maybe this is a new avenue for me. Although, if any celebrities do happen to snap off a picture with a ghost, maybe they could kill two Halloween birds with one stone and get caught with a spectral cheerleader, or a Slave Leia that drove off a bridge on the way back from a frat party.

Jimmy Savile and David Icke – All the Pieces Matter

Long-time readers will remember my dissection of Jimmy Savile’s disturbingly rapey 1974 autobiography, Love is an Uphill Thing, and those of us who survived that journey aren’t exactly bowled over by the revelations that the screeching, schoolgirl-obsessed scarecrow-man was the world’s most prolific paedophile, haunting the highways, byways, and television centres like a predatory Jack Kerouac, seeking only the freedom to be left alone in a room with an under-age girl, while wearing tear-away tracksuit bottoms.

Another of my fascinations, and one that I’ve written about before, is with those wacky, mentally unbalanced conspiracy types, who think the moon is a giant spaceship filled with lizards, and that the Jews are behind everything bad, cackling into piles of our money with fresh baby’s blood around their big Jewish beards. But as much as I mock, they’ve always maintained the notion that every celebrity, policeman and politician is part of one great big paedo ring jamboree. Could it be, they’re onto something? With a hundred new Savile news articles a day, I needed a source that could dig through this mess to the underlying truth, so, it was off to the David Icke forums to see what the members there have to say, and to become enlightened.

Open minds please, sheeple, and let’s put on our best Lightworker hats and get to the truth. Icke forum quotes are in yellow, with [sic] all the way through.

It’s sickening. They need to get to the root cause of this: the freemasons. But they won’t because they’re all in on it.

Here we go. The Masons. I suspected it wouldn’t take long for them to crop up, as they’re in on everything.

very provocative cover of the Times Literary Supplement dated 12/10/12 for anyone interested.

Said cover. Eh? Eh?!

Savile is a Jewish surname.

Again, not a terrific shock. Anyone who follows truth-seeker forums, and those four hour documentaries on Youtube that you have to be permanently unemployable to sit through knows how everyone involved in the conspiracy scene is a huge Anti-Semite that the tricksy Jews are the ones running the show.

While not, apparently, religiously Jewish, it is more than feasible that Savile was ancestrally Jewish. That is, he was of the Jewish bloodline.

The Icke forums are (unsurprisingly) big on the Jew angle. Savile’s ‘crimes’ include the fact he’d been to Israel, spoke Yiddish, and had Jewish friends. But there’s another angle. Regard…

Are you all certain he is dead? Let’s look at some facts:

* He was physically fit – he did a marathon in 2005, aged 78.

* He had a very distinctive appearance – cigar, track suit and stupid hair. He had the same look for 40 or more years.

* His coffin was open to public view, but it was closed.

* His coffin is now buried in concrete

* He knew a lot of influential people, including people in the police, mortuaries and so on

Is it possible he has shaved his head or dyed his hair, smokes cigarettes and wears old man’s clothes and NHS glasses? Who would recognise an old man living in a semi-reclusive life that looked like that? I’m sure if he had the influence people here are suggesting, a fake death could have been arranged.

Oh wow. He could still be among us. Have you witnessed any pensioners in your post office queue smoking on a cigar the size of Jonah Falcon and braying like an ejaculating donkey? Although, he’s not the only one to leap to this conclusion.

Makes for a bit of a question, is Savile really dead? Of course, the allegations can’t be legally challenged because corpses can’t sue for libel.

Yes, he was 84 when he “died,” be he was also physically fit, running marathons well into his 70s.

Could be his grave is empty.

Could be! However, this chap does not agree, with some passionate ideas about the removal of Jimmy’s headstone.

The elaborate tombstone was removed at midnight on Tuesday after Savile’s family requested it be taken away out of ‘respect to public opinion.’

not 7.22pm 8.26pm..9.18pm.10.24pm..11.07pm..11.53pm but by pure fluke midnight dark night. i think we missed a masonic ritual in Scarborough in the middle of the news vortex. wow fucking energy vampires never stop.

fresh blood swabs should be taken of that grave crime scene.

the broken up headstone will not be landfilled.

it will be broken up.

the sacred stone will be sent to every lodge in jersey,england,scotland and wales.

maybe even the bbc and israel.

special pieces for ester ratface ransom,alan yentob,bbc entwistle,prince phillip.simon cowell and fuller

EXPOSE THESE MASONIC BASTARDS.

MASONIC BASTARD

There’s a lot to deal with here. Magical rituals at the witching hour (luckily they got this in before the clocks changed, because that’d probably shit everything up), MASONIC BASTARDS, and the naming of names of those Slave Masters who’d just love a piece of sacred stone sat on their mantelpiece. Look out for it on the next series of The X-Factor, when the contestants get invited to the judge’s houses, and sandwiched between Simon Cowell’s BAFTAs there’s a granite slab just cursing with magickal, nonce-ring energy.

Also note the phrase ‘Energy Vampire,’ to which we’ll be returning. And Yentob is, of course, A JEW.

If it’s not dismantled, I bet his bones would be dug up and used for rituals.

Half a teaspoon of crushed Jimmy Savile pelvis, and you’ll have an erection that lasts for a thousand years.

Of course, Sir Jim’ll was famously buried at a 45 degree angle, supposedly, so he could look at the sea. Although that’s pretty suspicious, seeing as he’s 1) buried under the ground in a coffin, and 2) dead. I know estate agents and hoteliers take liberties with the phrase ‘sea view’, but you’d be pretty livid if they murdered you, stuck you six feet down, and then asked if you were enjoying the beautiful ocean panorama. So what’s the deal?

Sa-Vile telling us in plain sight that he was a 45th degree mason !

Ahh.

I even now think Ester Rancid and child line is a scam, maybe jimmy had his own hotline set up for him for the really vulnerable kids, you know the ones that no one will miss or is suicidal, the ones that are killed.

So Childline was essentially a Chinese takeaway for monstrous paedos?! Also, “Ester Rancid.” You’ve told her.

Access all areas. Not only access to the morgue. As a porter he would also likely be able to have some access to records and files, to see what patients are on what wards; who is new on the children’s wards, what medication they are on.

In short, it is the perfect position for a vampire to feed off the sick and vulnerable.

‘Vampire’ being a metaphorical term, right? Like, say, ghoul?

The sexual energy of virgins must have had some part to play in why he did it. Sexual Energy vampires – These individuals feed on energy produced during sex, or produced by any other sexual activity or influence. They are often referred to as “pranic” vampires.

I see. This is, apparently, a big thing in the conspiracy world. Everyone has something to say about it…

People have been talking on here about energy vampires, if this is the case then all of the anger and outrage on this thread and that is being whipped up by the tabloids, is being lapped up by them.

You are being involved in the ritual and they will be loving it.

You fools! With your lunch-room gossip, tweets, and constant news articles, we’re playing right into the energy vampires’ hands!

What is it about pedo abuse that they LOVE so much? Why is it so widespread?? I have heard it is to do with extracting energy and that pedo energy keeps you young..(maybe why old cliffy is so young looking ? )..WHY is it SO important to the elite??

Pedo Energy — it gives you wings! I know the first thing we all think when we see a mugshot of recently-nabbed molesters or internet groomers is how beautiful they look, with their lustrous, shiny hair and flawless skin. To Catch a Predator could have been taped on a catwalk, right ladies? Phwoarr!

Pedo Energy in action. He’s, what, twenty five in this picture?

One thing did come up in my mind though with the talk earlier about the authorities tolerating him because of their respect for the spirit that occupies him. There is also something about him nearly dying at 5 months old, perhaps as part of a possession ritual?

Look, I know I promised I’d keep an open mind, but this is all getting mildly far-fetched for me. Spirits, energy vampires and possession rituals? Does anyone have any proof? Any actual concrete evidence?

I went onto the Astral (the astral realm — he astrally projected) and I went back to look, I saw a vile and run-down house in Manchester with a dirty bed or mattress on the floor, it had the aura of Jimmy Savile. I assume that I am somehow correct.

Good enough for me. Moving on, let’s go back into his family history, like an episode of ‘Who do you Think You Are?’ hosted by Egon Spengler.

I get that there is a link between the Savile family crest and the City of Leeds crest, but I sense people are saying there is something sinister about owls per se. What’s the story with owls?

To which, somebody replies:

Google Boheimian Grove/Moloch….

Dun dun dun! Now the American elite are involved. We’re onto you, Bush.

Leeds is an occult ritual centre and has been for thousands of years. I didn’t know Saville’s family was connected to Leeds historically, definitely worth more research.

There’s a hell mouth here but only those who’ve lived here a while believe it.

A Hell Mouth, like in… Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

I went to Leeds Uni myself for a spell, that’s how I know what books they have in the library. Kids are sold this idea of going to ‘Uni’ and being a ‘Student’ from an early age. It has nothing to do with education, it’s to get them away from their families and into drugs/drink/sex and debt so when they then get put into managerial roles they’re easier to control. Along the way their energy (both physical and monetary) is drained away from them.

Every september they ship in a new batch and by december there are signs up for them going missing, hushed reports of murders and rapes and the bodies start getting pulled out of the river.

If anyone ever wants to see a real occult ritual city full of people walking around that aren’t really people, visit Leeds. Just don’t stay too long

Leeds city centre

Blimey. When I think of Leeds, I think of that live album by The Who…

When questioned on the Savile allegations Pete Townshend, in a piece in The Guardian has stated that he knows too much to be able to answer the question! It states quite openly there that John Entwhistle was a freemason. Wonder if that’s Townsend sending a message to someone?

!!!

What does all this mean? We’re so far down the rabbit hole, there’s no way out, but what’s it all building to?

Something to watch out for in the near future is ‘real x-men’ or people with ‘special powers’ it will sound crazy, however there are many here with abilities they may not know about but their egos and their current mindset have suppressed them.

That’s the villain for Avengers II sorted. Tagline “He fixed it for them. TO DIE.”

Does anyone know why his fellow miners shunned him down the pit and why they referred to him as a witch? Could he even back in those days have been involved with dark stuff and they knew about it or heard rumours of it?

I’d love to hear more. Anyone got any information for this trainee lightworker?!

While Saviles workmates, at the pit they worked, would finish work with coal blackened faces and dirty clothing, Savile would emerge immaculatly clean, not a speck of dust on his hair or clothing.

So he wasn’t just, say, hiding in the canteen all day, wanking?

I’ve been thinking about this and kept seeing Jimmy’s weird old school haircut. Then all the bloodline and knight information from yesterday. The haircut seemed to match the era of the knights.

A while back I read a theory that all of the ‘famous’ types we see are actually the same spirits reincarnating throughout the centuries. A major part of their magic and obsession with recording bloodlines is so they can gain control of their reincarnations and overcome the ‘forgetting’ that happens when we incarnate here. That’s true immortality.

If ‘Jimmy’ was the same Savile that has been incarnating all these years as a ‘Knight’ then that would explain how some ‘random’ guy achieved all that political power and reach.

It would also explain the need to feed on energy from abuse. Destroying the personality of Jimmy Saville also wouldn’t matter as when he comes back next time he’ll have a fresh identity.

There you have it. As proven by his haircut, Jimmy Savile was, among other lives, a Knight Templar, cutting a swathe through the Crusades, but as the centuries and personas rolled on, the one thing he couldn’t bear to part with was his sensational barnet. That’s possibly why so many indie kids in the last couple of years adopted that ‘medieval serf’ haircut. It’s just the trappings of the era from which they’ve reincarnated.

Effectively, Jimmy Savile’s life(s) was like that unproduced Gladiator 2 script written by Nick Cave, where Russell Crowe was a Gladiator in ancient Rome, then he’s riding around in a tank in WW2, then he’s reincarnated again and working in the Pentagon. Why has Jimmy not been featured in the Assassin’s Creed games yet? Probably down to those ruddy Masons.

The Jimmy and Vlad the impaler link is fascinating me right now- are the two the same? Could be?

A Knight Templar protector of the holy realm, a bloodthirsty 13th century Hungarian tyrant, and a British DJ who hung out with Dave Lee Travis and Frank Bruno. It’s like a particularly desperate season of Quantum Leap.

700 years before he kept a single chocolate digestive wrapped in clingfilm in the fridge

Moving on slightly, this observant chap noticed something when Freddie Starr was being interviewed about the Savile case on This Morning.

btw it was a nice touch of symbolism to follow it with the Queens cousin -

that MK Ultra illuminati witch Gwen Stefani singing ‘get in line & settle down’.

(a flop single which has been stuck at around No.85 in the charts since July)

Gwen Stefani. Wife, mother, musician, MK Ultra Illuminati Witch. Stefani’s a cut above the kind of C-List British celebrity we’ve seen mentioned so far. But what could proper American celebrities want in all this?

This is their agenda to try to decriminalise child-sex. Make it a trendy Hollywood thing. They’ll probably make a fucking charity song about child love!

It’ll be like Live Aid, but with Gwen Stefani and Hollie Greig on lead vocals.

I’ve been aware of the significance of the Holy Wood for some time, but the revelations just keep coming. I just thought about Shirley Temple and the Good ship Lollipop…………a blonde child as a Temple, licking a flippin lollipop for goodness sake. Talk about hiding in plain sight!

These Masons must think we’re stupid!

I read somewhere that Mick Jagger was involved for awhile with the film maker Kenneth Anger and also that he was a member of a satanic coven that included the 4 Beatles and Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate.

Fucking hell, can you imagine an ancient summoning ritual in Ringo’s dopey voice? No wonder everything went tits up. But this is exciting. Keep digging…

I read somewhere he was also a friend of Mick Jagger or something, its all starting to look very satanic indeed… Plus Tom driberg who was a disciple of Crowley allegedly. Jimmy Paige bought crowleys house on a Scottish loch where workings went on

From Jagger to Manson, right down to Aleister Crowley, who up to this point has been conspicuous by his absence. For those sheeple not in the know, ‘workings’ were magickal rituals conducted by Crowley, mostly involving drugs, and lots and lots of brutally rough anal sex. True. But what’s that got to do with Jimmy? Let’s keep delving.

There was a discussion on another thread some time ago which delved into the possibility that Savile was chosen by the Masonic elite to be some kind of living deity/god to their perverted desires.

A satanic working was done and in walked this monster…

My God. Just like Hellboy. The smoke cleared, and standing within the pentangle was a shambling, straw-haired homunculus, whose first words in human tongue were “How’s about that, then?”

Now, the police investigation of the Jimmy Savile case has been give the codename Operation Yewtree. We know how The Man loves to hide his perversions in plain sight, rubbing it in our oppressed faces.

OPERATION YEWTREE

CHECK OUT THE OCCULT SIGNIFICANCE OF THE YEW

The Yew is known as the death tree in all european countries. Sacred to Hecate in Greece and Italy. OCCULT ASPECTS: Destructive workings concerning death. Not recommended for magical tools

You know, I actually became suspicious when I realised how much the word ‘Yew’ sounds like ‘Jew’.

I think we could actually be witnessing a ritual here. The persona of ‘Jimmy Saville’ is being sacrificed.

I knew it! That’ll be why Kay Burley’s eyes rolled to the back of her head, while she writhed orgasmically on the Sky news desk, birthing black smoke from her slavering maw of a vagina as more reports of Savile’s abuse came rolling up the teleprompter.

I’m sure you’ve read the transcript of Peter Sutcliffe’s trial, forgive me for backtracking, but something really makes my blood run cold.

Page 19 – murder victim Josephine Whittaker (4 April 1979). Murdered in Savile Park, Halifax.

I was just wondering about dark energy/vortices/ley lines. Other names – Barker, McCann…..

All roads lead to Rome??????

Sutcliffe! Savile Park! Maddie! The Pope!

Exhibit A

A screenshot from a 1977, TOTP anyone have a clue as to what is represented by the ‘Chief Tadpole’ scarf? or whatever it is draped over this shoulder? Aren’t tadpoles canabalistic?

Exhibit B

Wasn’t Ronnie Kray known as The Colonel?

EVERYTHING HAS A HIDDEN MEANING. At this point, someone posts up a video of the BBC’s tribute to Jim’ll, and regarding a talking head; a friend of Savile’s:

Pause at 13.47. Reptilian shapeshifter?

No.

just watched the first few secs of 60 sec news on bbc3..just before conspiracy road trip.. leading, vile, and the vid they use…him waving his hand and one of the hand movements.. the devils horns…you couldn’t make it up!

,then again,watch ANY bbc show, or itv or ANY tell lie vision show and you will see copious amounts of satanic, masonic hand signs and symbolism…

Yeah, you will, you fucking nutter. Sorry, carry on…

only watched the first 10 mins of the road trip…countless masonic signs and subliminals..it is EVERYWHERE…and if anyone is new to this…just go and check out ANY show you like, any music vid, any news show, any documentary, any movie…etc. Etc…

He’s got a point. If you’re schizophrenic or an idiot.

Im still holding on to the hunch that the reason saville called his mother ´the duchess´was because he was an illegitimate relative of the royals.

My mum wasn’t best pleased when I told her (off the back of the 2000 Louis Theroux documentary) that I’d be referring to her as The Duchess once she hit old age. In light of recent events, she’s even less enthused.

Claire balding made a bizarre “joke” about Muslims flying into towers too….helping to cement the MYTH that Muslims carried out 9/11.

The whole damn BBC is rotten to the shape-shifting, reincarnating, Devil-worshipping core!

Barbara Windsor – definitely in on it all. Went a long way with zilch talent.

Cranking out a willy-wank over that scene in Carry on Camping just gave more sexual energy to the Energy Vampires. I’m as much to blame as anyone in helping them enslave us all. I’ve been guilty of it twice today. Probably again later too, if I can squeeze one in between tea and Boardwalk Empire.

Sorry everyone. Another power-up for the energy vamps

I’ve just had a disturbing thought. Is Savile a Necro-Nonce?

And the quest to find a name for my black metal band finally comes to an end.

Savile given free hand to lurch about in morgues. I wonder if he can be linked in to an illicit organ harvesting racket?

To which somebody else replies:

I think that’s probably a bit of a stretch. The black market in organs is very real but they have their own people. Savile seems to be more about the occult/ritual/energy harvesting side of things for the elite.

Yeah, get a grip, mate. You’re going too far; trivialising the cold, hard reality of Satanic child-organ harvesting.

So, to wrap things up, there’s only one conclusion one can draw from all this top quality research. TV’s Jimmy Savile is an immortal energy vampire who’s been active since the beginning of time under a multitude of names, from Vlad the Impaler to the Knights Templar. Sometime in the sixties, he was summoned to our time in a ceremony by Mick Jagger and the Beatles, using the arcane, Satanic wisdom of Aleister Crowley, from where he procured children for the elite, via the Leeds Hell Mouth, which acted as an energy portal for the Jewish, Masonic vampires that enslave our world. It’s pretty obvious when you look at the facts.

But don’t sit back and let them get away with this. Let’s bust this thing wide open. Alert the media, or the Masons and the Jews will win! My own personal theory is that they tore his headstone down because someone got wind of Jimmy’s chosen inscription.

“Death is but a door. Time is but a window. I’ll be back.”

…

(Everything here was pasted word for word, and obviously, the absolutely fucking mental views are not my own. That’s not for the benefit of lawyers trawling the internet; I just don’t want people to think I’m a borderline schizophrenic who sprays vinegar into the sky to combat those mind-sapping chemtrails.

And all that was just a tiny, tiny fraction of the nonsense on those forums. BTW, it’s fine to laugh at these people, because they, and the likes of David Icke, see something like the systematic abuse of children as an excuse to gleefully circulate their anti-Semitic, paranoid wank-fantasies.)

Whatever Happened to The Beach Diaries?!

I kinda left it all hanging there, didn’t I? Everything was chugging along nicely towards the natural narrative conclusion, and then; radio silence. I didn’t get bored, or abandon the idea, like 99% of dusty, derelict blogs with a single post from 2003 entitled “Gonna start blogging more!”, rather, a series of other issues got in the way.

Partially, it was down to the sad truth behind that romantic idea of the penniless starving artist. That truth being, it’s really not romantic in the least. When things like food or heating become aspirational luxury items, a sudden event like the death of the ancient PC you use to edit and publish your work is a setback that’s not easily rectified. Then, within a day or two of finally getting re-computered, a storm brought down my phoneline, so I had no internet. Couple that with the constant, growling presence in the corner of — what do they call it? The Black Dog — before you know it, Halloween’s rearing down on us, and any Beach Diaries momentum is completely gone.

Summer’s long over now, and the clocks will be going back any weekend. So, while the final entries, and the conclusion to The Beach Diaries 2012, sit safely within tatty notebooks, posting up ‘real time’ anecdotes about what happened at the beach today from six weeks ago seems like an exercise in anachronism.

So here’s what’s going to happen –

I won’t be posting them. Not here. But… The Beach Diaries 2012 will be released pretty soon as a Kindle book, with the final entries (and a few thousand words of deleted scenes) included exactly where they should be. There’s no date on that yet, other than ‘sometime before Christmas’. I didn’t lose any material when the PC went down, but I’ve had to trade down Photoshop for Gimp, which is so user unfriendly, they might as well have hidden the controls inside a fucking wasps nest, and a real nob-ache when you’re doing your own covers.

Maybe some of you think this is a swizz, like getting to the last disc of a DVD boxset and finding a post-it note with a bum drawn on it, but let’s be honest, I did put up about 30,000 words of material throughout the summer that you didn’t pay a single penny for, so, you know, pipe down.

In general, I’m feeling pretty burnt out on prose. I went straight from Volume II to the novel I spent two years on (and continue to tediously send out to agents), to the Beach Diaries, with each project overlapping, and none becoming the kind of wild (or even meagre) success that encourage one to plough another exhausting round of write/edit/promote-something-new. At least for the foreseeable future, I need a break from straight prose. If the Beach Diaries does return next year, it’ll be in another medium.

So, that’s it. The Beach Diaries 2012 will be hitting Kindles (and Kindle apps) sometime soon, complete with those final chapters, and in the meantime, if you’d like to buy last year’s, or any of the other Kindle books I’ve got out there for virtually fuck-all, that’d aid some of the nonsense I’ve wittered on about here, as well as helping to fund 2013′s possible, hopeful new direction.

The Beach Diaries 2012 – #35

Previous: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, #15, #16, #17, #18, #19, #20, #21, #22, #23, #24, #25, #26, #27, #28, #29, #30, #31, #32, #33, #34

* I’m sat on the pier, idly looking out over the coast. The river flows behind me, cutting between the East beach, where I am, and the West, and emptying out into the ocean. It’s low tide, and the sea’s on its way back in, causing the mouth of the river to swirl in a way that instinctively makes you grip the rail if you stare at it too hard. Behind me, from the opposite bank, my ears pick out the sound of clapping, and a frantic voice. I stand and move to the other side, scanning the water below, and hoping — really hoping — it isn’t what I fear. But it is. In the centre of the river, a dog paddles helplessly towards the steep, flat walls that stand fifteen feet high on both sides. It’s not wearing a lead, and clearly fell in when it peered over the crumbling wall on the West bank. The raging swirl of undertow where river meets sea is barely twenty yards away. Among the dark rush of waves, the dog looks so small; so vulnerable. A bee in a hurricane. My gut wrenches so hard and fast that I almost vomit. Dogs can swim, but not forever. I’m going to see a dog drown today.

I’ve mentioned before about dogs being my emotional Achilles heel. I’ve a borderline pathological lack of empathy for actual people, and whenever there’s a terrible story in the news about something horrific happening to another person, I know it’s bad, and I do feel for them, but I don’t get that sick, teary flush until my mind says “What if that had happened to a dog?” Like a new parent who can no longer stomach films about murdered children, any canine abuse has me mentally flashing to the family dog, cutting and pasting her into the story; the fear, the pain, the neglect; projecting it all onto that furry, innocent little face I love so dearly. It’s a thing that makes me understand why we have Trigger Warnings, and why I don’t read the Daily Mail website just to moan about it anymore, with their constant, gleeful streams of dog-abuse porn.

DOGS > CATS, THIS IS KNOWN

Back at the river, and I know for sure that today is now going to involve my watching a frightened, exhausted dog drown, and being able to do nothing to help. It’s a dangerous river, one of the fastest in the country, and when I was a kid, coastguards would come into school and hold assemblies where they told us we’d be swept to our deaths it we so much as looked at it. For the dog, there’s no way up, and it’s in the most hazardous section, paddling madly in the black, completely stranded. On the opposite bank, the panicked owner peels off her shoes, tossing them behind her like she’ll never need them again. She dangles her legs over the wall, looking down at a drop that’s two or three times her standing height, ready to jump. By now, the rail on my side of the river is packed with people, and the lifeguards sprint from the beach to shout through a megaphone that the lifeboat is coming, and you mustn’t jump in. A man on the other bank — who’d held back the owner when she was about to leap — in a terribly desperate, terribly British effort to look useful, frenetically retrieves the orange life-ring. For a moment, you see it play out on his face. “Would a dog be able to climb into this? Would they even know what it is?” No, he thinks. He clutches the ring impotently to his chest.

The actions of the owner dangling over the edge lures the dog back across, and somehow, it finds a tiny slat or beam; just enough foothold to balance on, with the river lapping at the bottom of its jaw. A pink, bone-shaped name-tag glints in the sun. It’s a girl, I think, just like the family dog. So now, the lifeboat is on the way, and we just have to wait. But you can’t tell that to a dog, and she scrabbles at the wall, crying and scratching so loud that it’s the only noise there is in the world; just howling. I find myself pacing, with a genuine terror in my belly like those mad, paranoid moments when you’re sure something’s happened to a loved one, because they’re not picking up their phone, and where are they, and God why aren’t they picking up?!

Like a cliffhanger on a serial matinee, the dog’s nose is barely above the ever-rising waters, with her neck craned skyward, just so she can breathe. The fast, incoming tide is a tick-tick-tick that hangs an unspoken countdown over all our heads. The lifeboat crew are amazing, and close by, but they need time to mobilize, so waiting is all we can do. At points, the dog panics, swimming back out, until its owner calls it back onto the little foothold, where it stands, whimpering, and clawing at the timber of the bank, staring up at someone who must seem a thousand miles away. Suddenly — salvation.

A speed boat ploughs up the river. A chorus of people scream at the driver and his passenger, two shirtless men in their forties with leathery, bloated, pub physiques.

“Stop!” “Get the dog!” “Turn around! There’s a dog, help the dog!” The driver slows the boat enough to hear the cries and throw a look back towards the drowning, terrified animal, a few feet away. He literally shrugs his shoulders, pointing out to sea as if to say “I’ve got better things to do,” and gunning the accelerator. As the boat tears away, the resulting wash churns the water, rocking the river violently and hurling it over the dog’s head, knocking her from the foothold. She panics again, and paddles away, towards death. This is awful, I think, just the worst thing that has ever happened. The owner calls her back, for now. Nobody dares breathe.

For ten or fifteen or a million long, long minutes, we watch. This strange, shared tension is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Fifty people, with their hearts in their throats. A stranger’s ragged dog, the centre of all our universes. The tide’s getting higher, the dog’s getting more and more distressed. I’m a mass of nervous twitches and jiggling limbs. I crack each of my fingers the four different ways I know how. I babble swearwords and “Fucking hell, that dog’s going to drown, Christ…” out loud like a street-loon. My head glares towards the launch ramp of the lifeboat station, down the way, willing it to appear. And then, another boat comes burning along the river. Not the lifeboat, but a boat nonetheless. My stomach’s in knots as I remember the last time, how the wash almost pulled her under, how they’d shrugged and left her to die. By now, the crowds are bigger. People scream, furiously pointing at the dog and waving their arms at the driver like they’ve been shipwrecked on an island for twenty years, and cursing the men as the pass. “Why didn’t they turn around?” says a woman, utterly incensed. But they do. They turn around and come back. Only, the boat has caused the wash to get violent. Then, like that old, shit joke about buses, which everyone on the river seems to say out loud at once, more boats appear; four, one after the other. The water becomes a treacherous, writhing beast, with currents and tides clashing with the washes, the push-and-pull of nature and man, and a little dog somewhere among it all, clinging on. On the far bank, the man clutches tightly to his inflatable orange ring.

And like that, it’s all over. The men reach into the waves and pluck her out, up into the boat where she’s safe. There’s a spontaneous round of applause, whistles and cheers; the heroes of the day providing a brief moment of joy in Cameron’s wretched Britain. Beneath the shades, I’m sobbing. Uncontrollably sobbing. The whole experience, the fear, the indescribably intense relief — I feel like I have to get away. But I need to witness the ending for myself, so I push through the dispersing crowds and jog along the river behind the boat. On the far shore, the dog reunites with its owner, shaking it all off like nothing ever happened.

Meanwhile, out at sea, the men who drove on by and not only left the dog, but almost killed it with their boat’s obnoxious wake, had their genitals bitten off by a shark, and then drowned, alone and afraid. Hopefully.

…

The complete collection (plus appendices) of 2011′s Beach Diaries are available to buy for the Amazon Kindle for £1.99/$2.99. If you don’t have a Kindle, Amazon have a free Kindle app for PC/Mac/phones/tablets, available right here.

The Beach Diaries 2011 on Amazon.com

The Beach Diaries 2011 on Amazon.co.uk

The Beach Diaries 2012 – #34

Previous: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, #15, #16, #17, #18, #19, #20, #21, #22, #23, #24, #25, #26, #27, #28, #29, #30, #31, #32, #33

* Two old women sit next to me on a bench. They chat to each other about the last time they came down to Littlehampton, and had to go home early because the pale skin of “a ginger bloke — do you remember?” had attracted thousands of flies.

“Ooh, he was covered in them. You do remember, don’t you? You could still hear him screaming when you were halfway to the carpark.”

* The surface of the prom is covered with a canvas of words, etched out high and wide in different-coloured chalk. The largest is a delicately coloured, ten feet long mural that reads ‘LITTLEHAPTON’ with a tiny little forgotten M scribbled above the A and P. But otherwise, there’s a running theme.

BMX 4 LIFE

BMX FOREVER

BMXs ONLY

Future historians will mark these as the opening salvo in the BMX/Skater war that consumed the planet. After the assassination of Tony Hawk in 2013, Obama really had no choice but to launch a nuclear strike against his own countrymen.

* Certain combinations of people and actions will always be jarring. Dads crying. Teachers implying that they know something about popular culture. On the walk into town, a man coming out of a house meets the postman coming up his path.

“Anything good?” he asks.

“Just the usual shit,” says the postman, wearily handing over a stack of envelopes. Usual shit? Fine, he was probably younger than me, and took the role out of a need to pay the bills in a horrendous job market rather than it being a lifelong calling, but still. Uniforms give the aura of authority, and hearing a postman swear is rather like watching a policeman pissing over a bus.

* The kids have gone back to school. It’s like that scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where they first walk the streets of Vulgaria, and Benny Hill hides them all in his cellar. In a heartbeat, the families that packed this place for the last few months are gone, and the entire beach is of legal age to booze, smoke, fornicate, and huff on £10 worth of crack atop a pile of freshly slayed corpses, while Johnny Law can’t do a damn thing but stand there and watch.

“Alright, that’s the last of ‘em. Let’s break out the 18 rated videos and have a bloody big wank.”

* An empty wheelchair stands alone on a stretch of beach. Fifty yards away, in the ocean, a frail woman glows with laughter as her husband, carrying her gently in his arms like a child, dips her body into the waves.

* Shirtless old man. Shorts hiked right up to the nipples.

* On the back wall of a toilet cubicle where a fresh piece of graffiti on the door requests yet more ‘suck fun’ (“Teens only”), there’s the unmistakable sight of two grubby, perfectly formed handprints, either side of the pipe that comes out of the cistern. The placement of said hands suggests bending, and balance. Their grimy nature — a binman or tramp.

* A pair of lads approach, exchanging stories with bawdy enthusiasm.

“How old was she?” asks the older of the two, whose head is a matted mess of grey.

“Thirteen, fourteen…” he says, with a giggling pride.

“What?!” Grey Hair’s sudden, genuine outrage instantly puts his mate on the back foot. He didn’t see that coming, and it knocks the gleeful chuckles right out of his mouth.

“Nah, nah, only joking. Not fourteen. Definitely not. Just a joke.”

* Overheard conversation snippets. Teenage girl lazing in the shelter to her two friends.

“I didn’t know where the toilet was, so I went in the desk.”

* A pack of late-teens girls amble past, well within my earshot.

“Oh my God,” says one, “that guy looks like a really ugly version of your ex!”

“Which guy?”

“Right there. With the long hair, reading.”

“Eww, yeah. Yuck.”

…

The complete collection (plus appendices) of 2011′s Beach Diaries are available to buy for the Amazon Kindle for £1.99/$2.99. If you don’t have a Kindle, Amazon have a free Kindle app for PC/Mac/phones/tablets, available right here.

The Beach Diaries 2011 on Amazon.com

The Beach Diaries 2011 on Amazon.co.uk