Finish With All Your Gobbledygook

Religion has brought so much good to this world that it's no surprise that people are open enough to believe in it. Just look at the great works of art, the literature and the millions of lives that have been given some sort of comfort. Of course, where the Catholic Church is concerned, there's the small matter of its fondness for child rape to put a small downer on things, but I guess that's just swings and roundabouts isn't it? Err- no, obviously it isn't. The whole church-pedo-thing is fucked up beyond belief, with more effort seeming to be placed on hushing it up than stamping it out. I swear that only the other year, in the church down the road from me, the priest was caught mid blow-job with a boy in his care. Not only that but a friend who has relatives that attended that church told me that his family were apparently more concerned by when the abuse started in case it meant that they had an impure Priest perform the ceremony at their wedding. I mean, what the actual fuck? I'm sure religion has brought some good to the world but at the end of the day I'm also sure that we all have to agree that it's really more trouble than it's worth. To quote the great Billy Connolly who was himself a victim of child abuse and for which he also holds the Catholic Church accountable, “that's it for me- religion is fucking finished. That's it, it's fucking over lads. It's fucking over! You've had a couple of thousand years, you've fucked it, it's over. It's fucking over! So take your reformation, your Vatican, your fucking Mecca and fuck off”.

So... Calvary is the latest film to star the always amazing Brendan Gleeson and originated from the psychotically dark mind of writer/director John Michael McDonagh. It tells the story of the one good Priest in an area full of selfish arseholes who are all intent on abusing him in some way for the various atrocities being committed by the Catholic Church. Whereas most people are simply content to verbally punish or belittle him, the film begins during confession when one angry fucknugget goes one further and informs the priest that he's going to kill him in seven days time. His murder however won't be a revenge attack for one of his own past crimes but rather because the would-be-killer had also previously been abused and feels it'd send a stronger message if he killed a good priest rather than a bad one. Within the first thirty seconds, the entire film has now been laid out as Father James then potters about his local area whilst trying to help the various scummy people wherever he can and yet also coming to terms with the possibility of his own upcoming death. I can honestly say that if this film was an emotional roller-coaster then it couldn't have been more of a ride had they replaced the chairs with the raging hard-on of a weeping sex-pest. I'm currently writing this blog at midnight on April the twentieth and as of now Calvary is by far my favourite film of the year. Perhaps even of the last couple of years. I'm in awe. Oh, and yes, for those who looked it up, that does means I'm writing a film blog at the peak social hours of a Saturday night but you know... Fuck you!

I retract that bit about your cunt fucking kids...

Anyway, I saw In Bruges when it first came out a few years ago and it has also since become one of my top ten favourite films of all time. That was of course directed by Martin and not John Michael McDonagh however having now seen all of their movies it seems that the two brothers have a lot in common. Both make the darkest and most bleak- but hilarious- comedies that deal with themes such as guilt, duty and forgiveness and generally revolve around an Irish actor at the centre of it. And by Irish actor I guess I mean Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson or both of them. The two directors can also be quite self referential at times too, with Martin Mcdonagh's Seven Psychopaths basically being a film about a writer called Martin who is writing the film that he's unknowingly in. Even here with Calvary, characters comment on everything from the opening line of the movie, they discuss which of them is an interesting character and which is clichéd and they also try to second guess what they actually refer to as the upcoming 'third act revelations'. I don't want to spoil too much but for what are presumably sold as comedies, each one of their four films has a fucking grim-as-fuck ending to it too. Particularly in the case of In Bruges and Calvary too, half of the jokes aren't even jokes with both films really being more like downbeat, melancholic dramas but with an obvious sense of the absurdity of life. I guess my point to all of this is to suggest that the McDonaghs must have had some seriously fucked up parents... and thank god they did because their work is amazing.

I've read a fair few reviews of Calvary since seeing it and pretty much all of them have gushed over it as much as I am now. However, the one slight criticism I've read is that perhaps it has some minor tonal inconsistencies to it but I disagree. I mean- yes, this is a film with a laugh out loud scene in which a weird young man argues that he should be allowed join the army because his desire kill women is basically a qualification, and yet, at the same time, there are scenes of such sadness and emotion that I was honestly holding back tears at times. I mean, I suppose I could have just had a little cry but you know... I was with friends, I'm young, male and British so fuck that! However for me, the balance seemed just right with the first half being more about the jokes and the second half simply being the observations of the shitness of life. I think if there's one scene that sums this film up then it's one in which a coffin is being wheeled to a plane for transportation. At first, the sheer lack of dignity as the corpse is trollied over seems quite funny, however when Father James looks again, the two baggage handlers in charge are now leaning over the coffin and chatting before it can be loaded on board. What was originally fairly amusing becomes heartbreaking as, along with James, we see the emptiness of life in all its pointlessness. I mean, maybe I'm wrong but the journey from jokes to melancholy seemed perfectly natural to me. Compare this to Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards for example which would go from a tense scene of Jewish abuse at the hands of the Nazis to one in which Mike Myers did his Austin Powers schtick and Calvary will look like a tonal fucking masterpiece... but then again, by comparison so would most films, I suppose.

As I said, this film is an emotional roller-coaster which, as well as the director, is also thanks to the mesmerising performance of Brendan Gleeson whose huge talent is only matched in size by his huge ears. Seriously- check them out. The man he plays isn't a saint but rather a human trying to do his best below that shroud of misery that smothers our lives. He's the one man attempting to show that the Church isn't the child-fucking-nonce-fest that it's presumed to be and as a result every member of that town is trying to break him to validate their own positions on the matter. However, as he absorbs all of their abuse and even their problems, and tries to counter it, you get the sense that actually they don't want to beat him. As much as they're trying to justify their own cynical positions, he represents hope to them and at the end of the day they need him to give them a chance of redemption. Gleeson's priest is basically a piñata at a party of the angriest, brattiest children who might be hitting him as hard as they can to vent their frustrations by hurting him but secretly they really just want to eat his sweets and enjoy the party. Okay.. not sure if that analogy works and it's also kind of weird but fuck it, you get the point.

Speaking of the locals, it's also worth stating how amazing some of the performances surrounding Gleeson are with randomly small but memorable performances from Dylan Moran, Aidan Gillen, Chris O'Dowd and some creepy looking old coffin dodger that I later realised was M. Emmet Walsh. I haven't seen Walsh in anything since Blade Runner and he looked old then and yet it seems in the subsequent few decades he's managed to age even more into what looks like creepy, porn addicted hobbit. Still good though, and I suppose he's in his late fucking seventies so it'd probably be weirder if he didn't look old. In fact, you've got to just presume that all of these people have turned up solely as a result of the writing which is up there with The Coen's at their best and easily matches the genius that people wrongly credit Tarantino for being.

It's easy to moan about how easy it is to make fun of their religion... That should be a clue...

Anyway, I don't want to say much more because I'd hate to give away the ending and I'd hate to just spoil everything that made me laugh. Although, I do think that it's ironic that Aronofsky's Noah is the film that's causing the most controversy at the moment seems as all that movie did was try and make the religious fairy-story seem a little more believable. Considering that this is an angry film with genuine issues that the Church needs to address you've got to wonder where the outrage and attempted censorship is here? Is it that religious people only get mad when the film that they believe is offensive to them has a bigger budget or perhaps more likely is it that in the case of Calvary they've actually got something to be ashamed of? With its mass marketing, there's no way that Noah is going to go away but perhaps if it's just ignored then Calvary's accusations of the Church’s evil just might... for now. There's nothing left for either of us to do now except just go and see this film again because it's the most hilarious, profound thing I've seen probably since In Bruges. Apparently the next 'comedy' that Gleeson and McDonagh will make will centre around an angry paraplegic, investigating the murder of his best friend. Count me the fuck in.  

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Suspecting The Worst

If you've not yet seen The Hunt yet then cancel everything and get the fuck to it! It's a genius slab of drama that focuses on the trauma an adult can suffer when accused of introducing a child to his fleshy man-dick. I know the film has been out a little while but due to life’s incessant bullshit, I'd somehow unknowingly avoided it for far too long… however like the irregular schedule of the bastard bus, you wait forever for one pedo-film and then two come along at once. Only a couple of weeks after buzzing off The Hunt, I recently caught up with the pervert-tacular Prisoners. Both films take place during a holiday, begin with a deer hunt and feature the fucktarded consequences of spontaneous vigilantism. The difference between the two is that in The Hunt you know that the accused is innocent of his crime. Prisoners on the other hand is a bit more of a kiddy-fucking free for all.

Prisoners tells the story of two families whose Thanksgiving is ruined when they misplace their daughters like a set of shitty car keys. Luckily though there was a greasy looking critter parked outside their house all that day in a large pedo-mobile who probably knows where they are. One of the missing girls’ dads, played by Hugh Jackman, therefore makes the logical decision to kidnap the oddball and punch the living shite out of him until he talks. I guess he just figured that the chap would be more likely to co-operate if choking on his own teeth and being screamed at by fucking Wolverine. Meanwhile, detective Donnie Darko is on his own mission to find the girls and uncovers so many more pedo-ish suspects that the area starts to resemble a holiday camp for retired BBC presenters. The plot set-up then is simply that there are several potential kidnappers with Jackman's character already having picked his 'molester du jour’ before even glancing at the full menu. What plays out is therefore just a classic game of nonce-roulette in which you take one of several local creeps, crack open their head and then hope to fuck that you had the right one.

You've got to love There's Something About Mary...

On the bright side, there's no doubting that Prisoners is a good film. In fact for the first two-thirds there's an enjoyably suffocating Zodiac-esque feel to the thing as it attempts to establish itself as being both sombre and weighty. Helping this is of course the predictably brilliant acting in which Wolverine and Donnie Darko do their best to inflate their unblinking eyes to blood-shot and bulbous levels of intensity and anguish. Nothing hammers home the serious intentions of a film more than having your two leads stare so hard that their face veins explode in a way that only naturally occurs during anal rape. Although both men are indisputably impressive throughout, I think that for me I was perhaps most impressed by Gyllenhaal. I guess that you kind of expect intensity from Jackman because he's most famous for playing an angry twat with knives up his hands, however Gyllenhaal has had to fight to be taken seriously as an adult against the curse of his annoyingly handsome but boyishly dopey face. Here though he manages to believably play a demented detective so successfully that I almost didn't mind the odd haircut that made it look as though he was being scalp fucked by a tattered doormat.

If they're on one side though then I suppose we should also have a little look at their rivals over on Team Nonce. Sadly though, I kind of think that this is one of the areas that the film kind of lets itself down in as it lazily just reaches into the big bag of pervert clichés. Paul Dano plays one of the twitchy suspects and don't get me wrong- he is as amazing here as he usually is in terms of immersing himself in the role. I don't know what it is about Dano considering I know nothing about his real life but for some reason I really think me and him could one day be friends. Although that might just be because of his mute performance in Little Miss Sunshine and my desire to know somebody who literally has no choice but to listen to my everlasting drivel… However as great a performance as it is, his character couldn't be more classically pedo if he walked around with his cock disguised as a new born puppy. As the other suspects show up they too all have a look about them that's so sinister that you'd be forgiven for an involuntary scream of “FUCK OFF, CREEPER” if you passed them in the street. Films like Hard Candy and The Woodsman went someway to showing that the most dangerous thing about a sex offender is that they don't necessarily look like monsters. They could be anybody, anywhere and at any time, but here with their greasy hair, twitchy energy, bullet proof glasses and the pin-prick, tiny eyes of shrew, they couldn't be anything fucking else.

The other festering cock of a problem is pretty much the entire third act which, in my opinion, kind of undermines everything that had been done over the previous two arse-numbing hours. Like I said, the film has a moodiness to it that suggests a degree of realism and importance however the concluding third just goes a bit fucking mental. I won't spoil the details but it's like the plot slips over and accidental falls tit first into the boring world of the bog-standard thriller- the kind where some dick of a main character starts acting like the worlds thickest plank and walks gormlessly into the gaping, toothy snatch of the villain. Real life is both dull and as predictable as fuck and does not contain as many twists as this story attempts to suggest. If a little girl goes missing then the odds are she's dead- killed by either the school caretaker or her pervy uncle. What starts off as a downbeat, gritty depiction of child abduction concludes with so many bullshit 'surprises' that it's like a weird pedo-sequel to Ocean's Eleven. It's a shame too because everything starts off pretty great, it's just that when it comes time to explaining itself, it kind of starts to fuck up. Maybe if they'd gone for the gothic horror of Silence of the Lambs, the conclusion would have rang slightly more believable. It's like that moment when you ask somebody who’s lying a question and suddenly they get stumped and splutter out some panicked bollocks that sounds so much shitter than the previously prepared story of crap.

Anyone who uses a Blue Shell is a dick.

Still the whole thing is still pretty enjoyable for the most part. It's just such a shame that for a film that's about two and half hours long the story still seems to have bigger, gaping holes than an eighty year old whore. If they could just re-write the end and then squeeze the bagginess out of it then I think you'd end up with a movie worthy of its performances. Although, to give credit where it's due in regards to the end, there is a pretty cool high-speed car scene in the middle of heavy snow as the driver's head-wound gushes blood into their eyes. The film was lit by a cinematographer named Roger Deakins whose work, for those who don't know, is the human equivalent of having your eye gauged out by a golden paintbrush. Everything he works on has his unmistakable stamp of beauty on it and this is no exception. However this speeding car scene near the end is almost painful in its artistic genius. With the snow, the blood and the passing neon signs, there's so much colour being seared into our retinas that everything starts to look like Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road if it had been designed by a psychopath.

Prisoners is a good film that's just nowhere near perfect. If you have a few spare hours and there's nothing else to do then I recommend you give it a go.  On the other hand though, The Hunt almost is perfect and as I said at the start, you should go check that out before it's too late and we're all dead. They're both very enjoyable but if you only get chance to relax to one film about child abuse this year then really, it isn't a hard decision as to which you should go for. I don't regret having paid to watch Prisoners at all but if I'm honest I don't think I'd pay to own it on DVD. If however I was lucky enough to trip over the frozen corpse of a rotten tramp and he had a copy of it in his lethally chilled begging-claw then I would be more than happy to steal it from him and I'd appreciate the repeat viewing. But only under those circumstances.

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The Girl Who Cried Pedo

There's no denying that if you're trying to get shit to stick then you can do a lot worse than calling somebody a kiddie fiddler. Take my friend’s neighbour for example who, about five years ago, was genuinely sent to jail for abusing his very young grand-daughter. From that point on he'll forever be known as a paedophile no matter what he does. Say the same guy wakes up one day and discovers that one of his kitchen cupboards contains a portal leading directly to heaven, he'd instantly become the most famous man on the planet- I mean, he would basically be discovering proof of God so how could he not? But if that did happen, now and after he's been to prison the printed headline most news papers would actually go with would still be something like, “Creepy Nonce To Definitely Burn In Hell”. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing either, by the way. I'm pretty much of the opinion that even if you did do something great like say... oh, I don't know... direct Chinatown... then as brilliant as whatever you've done might be, you'll still never be excused for your unforgivable rapeyness. However that's not also to say that as a society we aren't maybe a little bit over-paranoid about the boogeyman breaking in and you know... fucking our children.

Over the years there's been surprisingly few films that examine the sexual damage that a fully grown adult can inflict on a minor. I guess Hollywood just feels that those stories might not have the feel-good conclusions that audiences flock to piss their cash all over. As a result, each one that does get made kind of focuses on a different aspect of the world of the kiddy fiddler. For example, 2004's The Woodsman looked at what it might actually be like to be a paedophile whereas 2005's Hard Candy was more concerned with the joy of chopping off their fucking balls. I'm not sure if it's the most recent pedo-centric film to be released but the other day I saw a new entry on the subject called The Hunt. This movie was directed by Thomas Vinterberg who people may remember as being the co-creator of the pretentious dogma 95 movement along with the worlds most awkward Nazi, Lars Von Trier. Here however Vinterberg has kindly made a film in the conventional manner that this time tells the story of a school teacher who is falsely accused of being a pedo by some six year old little bitch.

"Can you show me on the doll how big his cock was?"

The teacher in question is played by the always phenomenal Mads Mikkelsen who is shunned from his community with more haste than a leper with an erection. As it turns out, the lying little tart is his best friend’s daughter who, to be fair, does deny her life-destroying claims as soon as she witnesses their consequences. However thanks to this blanket of fear that we all seem to live under, the adults don't care about her retraction and instantly set about finding proof of her evil teachers cuntish ways. They bombard the child with leading questions until she's so confused that she doesn't know what she's admitting to and then they tell her what they imagine happened. Within a couple of days the bastard-stupid school that Mikkelsen worked for has convinced every parent that their kid was probably maliciously jizzed over causing them to start an ill-informed rampage of revenge. At no point to us is the accused’s innocence under question with the film more interested in the escalation of the witch hunt and the idea of mud sticking. As I mentioned at the beginning, as hobbies go, society isn't too fond of child abuse and so we tend not to forget the name of those who practice it. I suppose that in the end the message of The Hunt is simply ‘who really needs evidence when you've got so much fucking hate?’

Before watching the film I kind of knew I'd love it because it was getting such a positive reception and I'm a huge fan of Mikkelsen however I didn't expect to love it quite as much as I did. I think I've mentioned it in another recent blog but I'm kind of a sucker for some self-controlled annoyance and so for me this was a field day of irritation. Every time some idiot parent jumped to the wrong conclusion or vilified the innocent man I wanted to scream at them for being such a fucking dickbrain. I mean, it is good that we care about the wellbeing of our younglings, but it's the way everybody is so happy to destroy a good man’s world with so little actual proof. The only evidence that they have is that the young girl briefly claimed it and according to them, “Children never lie”. I mean are you actually kidding me? I might be knocking on now but it's not been that long since I was a kid and I'd lie all the god damn time if I needed to. In fact I knew one little girl who took a dump in the middle of the street and told me to tell everybody a dog had gone and done it. Now that wasn't exactly the fucking truth was it?!

However I suppose the main reason that I got so pissed off with these fucking idiots is because of Mikkelsen's performance as their victim. If I didn't care or couldn't empathise with the shitty-as-shit situation that he'd been forced into then the impact of the mobs retarded determination wouldn't be quite so powerful. The film constantly threatens to go into Straw Dogs, Rambo, one man against everybody territory, but intelligently never actually goes there. Instead, Mikkelsen's character withdraws from public only seeking to defend himself if directly accused. Considering the abuse he's receiving some might see him as being a pussy for this, but it does make sense. He's clearly suffering from the shock and stress of what's going on and any act of defiance really would cause the locals to run for their torches and pitch-forks. It is frustrating that he often fails to stand up for himself but it is perfectly believable behaviour considering the poor guy is also having the shit kicked out of his existence. I guess it would be the happiest day of the mobs’ collective lives if they could brutally murder a 'pedo' in self-defence and with no sense of mercy.

I don't want to spoil anything but this all builds to a supermarket standoff that is more emotional than watching a dying puppy get smothered by its sobbing doggy mother. It's at this point too that I noticed the similarities between The Hunt and another masterpiece; We Need To Talk About Kevin. Both films feature an adult being shunned by the town because of some fucking idiot kid and both depict the grimness of trying to do the weekly shop when surrounded by glaring, judgemental twats. I have basically no conclusion for having pointed that out but it's still worth knowing in case you ever fancied a gritty, grim-tastic double feature. I also enjoyed the emotion of the very end in which regardless of what actually happens, the mental scarring that the teacher has picked up is hinted towards. To be fair, if I could draw a face that represents a damaged psyche I would probably go for Mikkelsen's which is like a sunken eyed, Skeletor that's been garnished with a slither of Danish skin.

It's also a good time to see a film like this as we in England seem to be having a bit of a nonce-epidemic right now. Since the death of the pervy creepophile Jimmy Saville, pretty much anybody born before 1959 has been accused of sticking a part of themselves up someone who’s several un-grown pubes too young. Although there's no denying that pretty much all of them have the sinister face of a twisted pervert, some of them have also somehow been found innocent. However when it turns out that somebody like British television host Jim Davidson isn't guilty, the phrase we use to break the news is still, “He got off with it”… which kind of implies that even though he's been proven not to have done anything we still think he did and just got away with it. Even I can't believe that Davidson wasn't guilty although I suspect that’s more down to my dream that the hate-filled cunt would one day get shivved to death in the yard of some grotty prison. I guess the doubt that we retain about those sinister looking entertainers is the same doubt that the village would have for someone like Mikkelsen. Sadly for him though he doesn't have the expensive lawyers or high security walls that our great nations child loving entertainers can unfortunately afford.

"If you see it, you suck it!"

Despite having been released in 2012, it has just been announced that The Hunt will be entered as a candidate into the 2014 Oscar awards. This is an amazing movie and if we absolutely have to introduce a competitive element to art then I do hope it wins that giant golden dildo. The acting was amazing, the cinematography was gorgeous and the story was like a cattle prod to the brain, resulting in the occurrence of violently provoked thoughts. Having seen how little Mikkelsen had done to have his life come crashing down on him, I'm sure we can all empathise with his situation. The other day I was minding my own business when some wild toddler came running head first into my leg causing me to accidentally knee his face into the mudded, stony, ground. Although his grand-parents saw what happened and didn't give a shit, I'm sure in an alternate reality I could have been accused of attacking the stupid little knob. Having said that, I was also secretly chuffed about what had happened and the lack of any consequences simply became the icing on the child-assault cake!

Anyway, so as you can probably tell I'm waffling now which is usually a sign that I don't know how to end this shiz. So I'll just say that you should see this film because it's amazing. In Casino Royale Mikkelsen played a character called Le Chiffre who is one of my all time favourite Bond villains. Despite his character doing something as risky as gambling away his terrorist-clients money though the stakes in The Hunt are actually a lot higher for him. Le Chiffre suffers from a condition which causes his eye to randomly weep blood known as heamolacria. However if he went to prison for as long as your average paedophile does, it wouldn't be his eye that was dripping with blood but the rip in his systematically raped, arsehole. And with that image I'll call this a day. Bye everybody!

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