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An old dog passes. It has one white paw, like Michael Jackson. A hipster toughs out the thirty-degree heat in a floppy deerstalker and thick rubber gardening wellies. Shirtless men parade the prom like sweaty peacocks in perpetual mating season. This is the beach; a world of faded tribal tattoos, hot lifeguards, and all the beauty and horror of humanity, laid out on towels under the sun like thinking bacon.

In the summer of 2011, the beach is where Stuart Millard made his home; observing, people-watching, and taking copious amounts of notes, like a surf-hobo Samuel Pepys. He emerged some 20,000 words later, with a farmer’s tan, and the Beach Diaries. Uncovering the narrative behind the mundane, with a metaphorical plastic child’s spade, Millard’s accounts of those days are now available together for the first time, to give your Kindle an eclectic, endless summer.

This is expanded from what you saw on here in the summer, with a couple of appendices of deleted scenes, and proto-Beach Diaries writings from 2010. So if you read them in their previous form, there’s still new material, as well as the swankiness of having them all collated, or if you thought at the time “If only there were a way I could show my appreciation financially for all this free stuff!”, you can now do that too.

The Beach Diaries 2011 on Amazon.co.uk (£0.99)

The Beach Diaries 2011 on Amazon.com ($0.99)

If you don’t have a Kindle, Amazon do a free app for PC/Mac/phones/tablets, and the inside of your actual mind, which is available from here.

While we’re here, Amazon UK have ditched their 15% tax on ebooks, so all my previous stuff is a lot cheaper, if you were holding off on buying them because you owed that extra 30p to the mafia.

Dirt Baby and Other Small Mercies – £0.77

Frantic Planet: Volume I – £1.92

Frantic Planet: Volume II – £3.20

Alright, have at it.

Attack the Block is a welcome antidote to the horrendous Noel “Absolute Fucking Fuckwit” Clarke-style pics about teeth-kissing, hoodie wearing urban teenagers lurking in stairwells that have stunk up the British film industry this past decade. Working with that tabloid reflection of feral youth, surely helped by images of this summer’s London riots, gives Attack the Block the least likely group of heroic protagonists since the movie I just made up starring Robert Mugabe as himself, as he learns how to love by escorting an orphaned circus bear back to the wild.

Using the towerblock setting for an alien invasion puts a nice modern-gang spin on the eighties-style defend-your-home-from-nasties flicks, wit’ dem yoots putting a brrap brrap upside the head of what might be best described as neon-toothed furry silhouettes from space. The score was a perfect, immersive choice of bassy, whirry shit that I literally don’t even know the genre of (Drum and bass? Dubstep? Grime?), because my musical knowledge consists of mid-late 90s SoCal punk and Metallica, but it was all stuff that’d probably be pumping out of the earbuds of one of those little fuckers as they mugged you for your trousers and called you ‘grandad’ even though you’re only thirty. A glimpsed Spider-Man duvet reminded us that, violent thuggabes or not, we’re still just dealing with kids, while Cornish masterfully wrote himself out of the corner of a seemingly irredeemable, despicable lead, by wooing the audience onto his side, while still staying true to the character.

Audiences in the US seemed taken aback by Attack the Block, with an unknown cast, and writer-director they’d never heard of, but long-time fans of Adam and Joe weren’t in the least bit surprised at such a confident, witty, and thrilling debut. British film industry, the quality of and reception to Attack the Block should tell you something important, and you need to listen. We need more Cornishs, and less Clarkes. Get on it, blud.

Nicolas Winding Refn has made my Top 10 three years running, the only director to do so. What’s striking about that is the sheer diversity of films landing him the Millard Seal of Approval. In 2009, there was crazy technicolour con-biopic, Bronson; then last year’s sparse, bleak trudge through the Godless lands of Valhalla Rising, and in 2011, the pulpy power of Drive.

There’s a sleepless quality to Drive, which has the aura of perpetual twilight; the cast at times seem like they’re performing under hypnosis, like those in Heart of Glass, with a lead who’s sedate and monosyllabic, until needs require him to take a hammer to someone’s forehead. And it’s the sudden jerk from heavy-lidded haze that makes the violence all the more jarring. The opening car chase is won by stealth and smarts, but when the shit hits the fan, it’s swift and brutal, and it’s loud; gunshots that lift you out of your seat, and blood that comes in jizzy squirts.

Despite Drive’s noire trappings, we thankfully don’t suffer through a character that needs his gruff walls of defence tediously chipped away, with Gosling’s toothpick-chewing crook slotting into Carey Mulligan’s life pleasingly easily. And on that supporting cast, any time you’ve got the great Bryan Cranston sharing screentime with a wiseguy gangbanger Ron Perlman, spewing angry fucks, mad blood flow is happening to the erectile tissue of my cinepenis. As with Bronson, there’s a skilled melding of song and image, while the pinks, blacks and towering cityscapes make for a gorgeous pallet, and Gosling’s – increasingly blood-stained – scorpion jacket will go on to be one of the iconic cinematic looks. But in all this, I can’t help but imagine a crossover, where Alan Partridge fixes a watch onto the steering wheel, as he waits for Lynn to finish visiting her mother’s grave.

“You’ve got five minutes.”

First, I should let you know that I did a lot of crying over this movie. Generally, I’m a huge cinematic blubber anyway, and it doesn’t take much to get my eyes urinating all down my face. Stick me at a real-world funeral and I’m cyborg-cold, like aliens who fall to Earth and flatly ask “What is this human thing called e-mo-tion?”, but put one onscreen, with lingering close-ups of the coffin and soaring strings, and I’m gushing like a cuckolded white wife squirting on a big black bull. But even by my standards, Rise of the Planet of the Apes produced a lot of tears. The first half was a genuine struggle to get through without drying to a pile of dust, with sad-eyed, lonely animals that reminded me of the family dog. I’m one of those pussies that can’t connect with humans at all, only animals, so Rise… took me on the following emotional journey:

Cute, lonely little chimp watching children play outside – sob. Monkey drawing chalk window on wall of cell – choke. John Lithgow, riddled with Alzheimer’s – pfft, whatever. Maybe he’ll confuse a horny lion for a bicycle and it’ll be hilarious. Of course I’m being glib, but to emote such feeling out of anyone is testament to both the visual effects work, and the astonishing performance of Andy Serkis and co. Big, heroic, sexy man like me, sat there with all my muscles and gorgeous Jesus-like hair, loudly weeping over monkeys that don’t even exist.

But there was more to Rise… than a dreamy hunk crying. It was the perfect example, in this dreadful Michael Bay infected world of ours, of how to make a smart, absorbing action movie. Eschewing the ‘people narrowly missing stuff’ formula for moments that mattered because you cared about the characters – human or otherwise – Rise had some breathtakingly timed reveals; apes on the roof, armed with pikes; a horse riding out of the fog with Caesar on his back. The conceit that animals could fuck our world up in a heartbeat if they so chose works, because we know it’s true. The ‘morning after’ scene with a smartened up Caesar was incredibly sinister, like catching a dawn meeting of magpies or cats, and feeling like you’ve stumbled on some secret ritual not meant for human eyes.

There’s going to be a lot of talk come Oscar-time of Andy Serkis, but on the back of this performance, he simply must be nominated. We’ve crossed the line where motion capture is any different from acting under prosthetics (not that Brad Pitt’s head-transplanted Benjamin Button nod was much different), with a level of nuance from the simians that legitimately took me out of my regular “cool effects bro” mindset into letting go and believing in them as characters. A particular highlight was Rise’s clever take on the prison movie cliché of wise old prisoner, with the aging circus orangutan, every bit as nuanced as the lead. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was everything that shouldn’t, and usually doesn’t work. A prequel-cum-remake, some 40-odd years after the beloved original, and relying on heavy CGI; yet against all odds, it was the best big budget movie of 2011. In a story about how we all just want to be free to our true nature, hopefully through Rise’s success, Hollywood will learn to let loose the shackles on their committee-led blockbuster movies, just a little, and allow them the same.

“There’s no shame. No one can see.”

It took me a while to get Sleeping Beauty, with its casual, bohemian hedonist world, where the protagonist’s pouring vodka on her cereal, and using coin tosses to determine which stranger’s getting to fuck her. It’s all casual sex, coke and pompous dialogue, but then I realised; it wasn’t the movie that was try-hard pretentious, but the people who inhabited it. And they are; pretentious and cold. Sleeping Beauty is such a cold film, I’ve got nipples like bullets just from remembering it, with everyone walking on eggshells, and desperately trying not to crack any smile-lines onto their haughty faces. In her other life, Emily Browning’s Lucy is Xeroxing documents, wiping down tables, and paying humouring visits to an alcoholic friend, but the crux of the story is her other career, as a (literally) unconscious vessel for broken, impotent old men who’ll never be looked at as anything but ever again, to say and do the things to an exquisite sleeping girl they can’t or daren’t anywhere else.

“Match the lipstick to the colour of your labia” she’s told, in a crass line of dialogue which doesn’t do justice to the tragedy beneath Sleeping Beauty’s snooty exterior. There’s a definite Eyes Wide Shut vibe, with women reduced to faceless, exposed vaginas, spread and squatting as fireside ornaments for creepy diners, but rather than the tiresome hedonism of the upper classes, this is a film about the burden of beauty, fleeting and fragile as it is. Sleeping Beauty is a treatise on beauty as an aspirational commodity, where no matter how hollow or dead inside they may be, a beautiful person is something the normals will always desire. Lucy is a real woman as a Real Doll, and we see what she does not, laying drugged in the arms of naked men whose only rule is ‘no penetration’, where she’s held, or just admired, or in the most disturbing scene, aggressively licked by a flaccid, nubby-cocked man who barks impotent threats about ruining her with his “fucking horse’s prick.” In print, that might read as exploitive, or comically grotesque, but the tragic hopelessness, particularly in one long, to-camera monologue from an elderly man, is incredibly powerful. God help the children who’ll be getting this from confused, Disney-loving grandmothers this Christmas.

Emily Browning’s fragile porcelain beauty, pale and ghostlike, is the flame to which the film is drawn, as are we, having just about as much chance of sharing a moment with someone like that, beyond slipping her a Mickey, as they. Browning listlessly wears it like a curse, with a lifetime of no real connection that cuts beneath the surface, even with a friend who requests she take her top off as he lays dying; a craving moment that mirrors what she does while she’s ‘asleep’. Like the old man tells us, the biggest truths are unsurprising. Lucy’s flat thank-you to her office-life boss for firing her is the most human interaction she has in the entire film, and when she finally lets it all out, it comes in screams; awake at last.

Thankfully, gargoyle-men who resemble Corey Feldman after a near-fatal car accident, naming no names*, will never know such troubles.

*me. It’s me. God, I wish I was beautiful.

Another Earth’s second Earth is a maguffin for a film that explores guilt and grief, and hope. It’s a film about those what ifs. Little moments that become the ripples in the pond that alter the course of our own lives, and those of others. The premise of this film kinda happened for real this month, with the discovery of an Earth-like planet, although our one is 600 light years away, and not bearing down on us, and unlike the movie, it’s not a complete mirror of our own, inhabitants included. The appearance of the other Earth of the title is the event which sets in motion the events of the film, knocking a pair of lives completely out of orbit.

William Mapother, aka Lost’s Ethan Rom, who, until Another Earth, I truly thought would never be anything to me but creepy, Claire-stealing Other, is another of this list’s characters who’ve abandoned themselves to the junkyard of depression (with more to go!), while unknown Brit Marling crashes into your cine-geek world like a firey meteor, as a hugely exciting talent to watch for. Both star and co-writer, she gives a tight, stripped-down performance, weighted down by the exhaustion of reliving a single moment of her life, over and over. The chemistry of the two leads sells a plot point that would seem wildly implausible on paper, and is in keeping with Another Earth’s habit of making you ask a lot of questions about yourself.

Like the next film on the list, I’m not going go into much more detail, as this is a film that needs to be discovered in the moment, but watch out for an electrifying telecast scene that redefines talking to yourself, and the utterly stunning final frame. It’s that ending which left me breathless and sat in a stupor as the credits rolled by, before laying awake and going over it all in my head. I don’t know if I’d want to go to our Other Earth, because 600 years is a long time to be sat playing Travel Scrabble and smelling astronaut farts, but if they had this movie there too, it’d at least give me one thing to look forwards to when I got to the other side.

Rubber is not the movie I expected. In fact, there’s no real way to watch a film like this without being completely thrown by what you’ve just seen. The trailers, the poster, and the pitch of “Killer sentient tyre with telekinesis” suggest the kind of movie that probably ruined (or saved) a lot of frat parties, where they expected B-Movie schlock they could have a drinking game over, with tits and exploding heads, but got an existential meta-movie about the reality of cinema, and, well… also some tits and exploding heads. The weirdness makes more sense when you realise the director is a) French, b) The weirdo DJ behind Flat Eric.

Rubber lets you know where you stand from the get-go, which is “Nowhere you’ve been before,” with a lengthy, slightly aggressive to-camera monologue about how film operates under the system of No Reason, yanking you from your expectations like a rotten tooth from a mouth. And that’s about all I’m going to say, because I went in totally blind, and it blew me away. Rubber was the first great, or even half-decent movie, that I saw in 2011, and I was virtually dancing on the ceiling with how inspiring it was. It’s a testament to that that so many movies later, it made enough of an impression to be so high in the final Top 10.

Hesher preys on that nightmare childhood fear of your home, the one sanctuary from school and the outside world, being invaded. When I was a kid, there was a bully in the year above me. A whole year. Terrifying as a child, when there’s nothing more frightening than bigger boys. His name was Roger, and he’d follow me home – me walking, him on his bike – belittling, threatening and hitting me all the way from the school gate to my house, and spitting inside my gate (and once, all over me, head to toe) as he cycled off with a sneering “See you tomorrow.” Hesher, the character, unlocks the Rogers lurking in all our psyches, violently latching on to troubled kid TJ, while the boy’s sad-sack father, Rainn Wilson, broken by the death of his wife, impotently does nothing to evict his new house guest.

It’s A Room for Romeo Brass as directed by Werner Herzog, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s mononymous Hesher a shirtless, headbanging creation that doesn’t really compare to anything that’s gone before. He’s the inverse Manic Pixie Dream Boy, inserting himself in the moribund lives of a boy and his family, pulling them out of their world and into his. But this is no quirky Zooey Deschanel elf-girl waking you up by throwing jellybeans at your window; he’s unpredictable and dangerous, a psycho that turns on a dime like those slightly scary friends of older brothers when you were growing up. Both saviour and villain for TJ, as an audience we’re as wrong-footed by him as the boy. The whole “Garden State through a spit-smeared funhouse mirror” feel is helped by the casting of Natalie Portman, who’s dowdy and downtrodden in a pair of $5 glasses. Well, as dowdy Natalie Portman can be.

I had a feeling of dread that it’d all go down the path of movies that similarly centre on an anarchic protagonist, fearing that ending where they’ve accepted that The World’s way is the right way, and they grow and learn, and throw away childish things. Hesher, the film, has the balls to see it through to the end. There’s no big character flip, where Hesher learns to love and cuts his hair; everyone stays wonderfully true to their characters, resulting in an ending that’s as uplifting as it is ballsy, and would be flat-out ridiculous in any other movie, but is thoroughly earned by the preceding 95 minutes.

Snowtown is an astonishing film. It’s the third best of the year. But I don’t know that I’ll ever watch it again. I see a lot of movies, but there’s only ever been one to give me nightmares as an adult, and Snowtown was it. It’s a brutal watch, kitchen-sink and mostly-handheld, with all the silences and unfiltered moments of real life, immersively pulling you into the horrible reality of Snowtown; an experience made all the worse by knowing that everything actually happened, based as it was on the true life ‘Bodies in Barrels’ murders.

It took a while for me to shake that feeling of dread, with the sheer intensity leading me to feel complicit to the crimes I’d seen unravelling onscreen, just like the killer’s young accomplice. In the days that followed, Bunting was constantly skulking over the shoulder of my mind’s eye, both the real killer from the articles I’d felt compelled to devour once the film was over, and the ever-present spectre of Daniel Henshall’s chilling portrayal. Speaking as the kind of 21st century internet-desensitized digital boy who wouldn’t bat an eyelid to see a real life Lemonparty writhing on the living room rug, the sense of dirt with Snowtown, where you could almost feel the weight of rotting bodies in your arms, was a real shocker. I was shook to even be shook.

Henshall’s Bunting may be the purest, most frightening portrayal of evil in the history of film. He’s simultaneously a complete fucking monster, and the normal guy who worms his way into your life; into your home and family. An early scene where the neighbourhood yammer-mouths gather in the kitchen to compile a list of local nonces who need their genitals mashed with a brick rings familiar with witch-hunts you only have to venture onto the statuses on your Facebook newsfeed to see for real. As the film goes on, Bunting’s flat, emotionless manner is the drone that signals horrible events; a silent, atonal sense of impending doom, like a dog pacing circles before an earthquake. If they’d thrown in a glance directly down the lens, I think I’d have blacked out with fear.

When it slips, briefly, out of kitchen-sink vérité, into slow-mo, rain-soaked tableaux, it’s beautifully shot, even if we are listening to the final words of victims who are having them tortured right out of their mouths. Of all the scenes in Snowtown, one in particular is the most harrowing death scene I’ve ever sat through. For all the try-hard kills of the grotesque, in b-horror, or self-styled torture porn, the sheer reality made the bayonet kill from Saving Private Ryan look like a clown sliding on some custard into a swimming pool filled with whoopee cushions. Just like the boy, there’s no escape; Bunting’s not letting him, or us, step out of the room. Instinctively, as Snowtown draws to a close, you’re waiting to be saved by the Hollywood payoff, waiting on Bunting’s slow realisation there’s a cluster of red dots on his chest, for the SWAT Team come bursting through to save the day. But they don’t. The realest feeling movie about murder and evil that’s ever been made also had the realest ending, and it’ll stay with you for a long, long time.

Ah, Lars von Trier. Not a lot of apathy where he’s concerned. Either he’s producing flat-out works of genius like Dancer in the Dark, or trolling up a storm in Cannes by empathising with that rascal Mr. Hitler and calling himself a Nazi. Of all his output and related antics, one thing that won’t happen, is that you’ll come out of a LVT film thinking “Eh, whatever.” There’s love or there’s hate, or even not knowing where exactly you stand between the two, but never indifference. With Melancholia, my mind was made up right away; it’s one of the greatest movies of the 21st century, and Lars von Trier’s masterpiece.

Von Trier proved he could step beyond the flat aesthetic of Dogme 95 or the stagey, lines-on-a-floor presentation of Dogville into the visually beautiful with Antichrist, which managed to make the slow-mo swings of a thrusting ballbag something that wouldn’t look out of place in a gallery. Similarly, Melancholia opens with a series of stunning, super-slow motion shots, that grace the screen like (barely) moving paintings; Kirsten Dunst entranced by static lightning from her fingertips; a terrified mother cradling her child, leaving deep, sunken footprints across an ethereally lit night-time golf green; even robbed of any context, these opening scenes set the stall out early, telling us what we already know. They’re all going to die. We’re all going to die. The world’s going to end. What follows is an infinitely more mature, artful take on depression than hilarious misfire, The Beaver.

Reminiscent of the Dogme’s movement’s tour de force, Festen, in the first half, Dunst’s manic depressive tries to stay afloat during her wedding day, but falls beneath, with increasingly desperate glugs, until she just lets it take her. The second half deals with a family member trying to cope with a loved one who’s locked in a depressive episode, and the buckling weight of helplessness that can’t help but drag anyone who cares enough to stand nearby get dragged down into the same black hole. But then there’s the end of the world, and the planet of Melancholia, on a collision course for Earth, is literally looming in the sky, pulling closer with a distant, ever-louder rumble. Everything’s affected by this; tides, nature, horses who pace the stables like the strange portents of anxiety, the stomping horses of the mind, ready to buck and kick with panic attack that will strike whenever it may. Birds chirp a midnight morning song as the planet rises brightly in the night sky, illuminating the world; like those 3am barefoot strolls around the kitchen, when depression takes hold, and you lose any sense of being tethered to time. Night, day, who cares? Sleep comes when it comes, and the curtains are always closed anyway.

As Dunst’s mental state is externalised into the wider world, Act I’s stable of the two sisters, Charlotte Gainsbourg, becomes paralysed by fear, while Dunst’s broken figure, is pacified by Melancholia’s destructive arrival. “The Earth is evil,” she says calmly, “We don’t need to grieve for it,” mimicking the freedom of the suicidal, once they’ve taken that decision to let it all go. More than just a massive allegory for the misery of misery, Melancholia features incredible performances all round, and a career best from Dunst, depicting the duality of depression; the weight of hopelessness, and the flat elation of “Oh right, things can be okay. I guess I just forgot.” In any correctly balanced world, Dunst would stride away with the Oscar while throwing up her arms like a Maury guest in a “Whut? Whut? Ya’ll know I’m all that…” but Streep did Thatcher, so that’s probably not happening.

The part of this movie that will cut the deepest with anyone – like Lars von Trier – who’s suffered with depression, is Melancholia’s mocking and harmless first pass. Just when you think it’s gone, and that you’re safe to breathe and be free, and live – it’s there again, bearing down on you. And there’s no escape.

Even as a gigantic man-nerd whose wardrobe consists of 90% Superman shirts, at this point the prospect of another superhero movie sends me into a 17th century-style fit of the vapours that require me be fanned out of catatonia by a passing gentleman. Adaptations of existing comics that I love, sure, but original properties? Especially going down that ‘but what if vigilantes were really, really real?’ route – again? Ugh. But Super had a lot of things I already loved, to reel me in like Wonder Woman’s stupid little lasso. There’s Ellen Page, Rainn Wilson, and the directorial stylings of James Gunn, with a tagline of “Shut up, Crime!”, so what was I gonna do, say no? You do that, and Matthew Vaughn has already won.

So here’s how it goes; Super is the greatest motherfucking film of the year. From the superb animated title sequence, this is a movie crammed with moments; vivid emotions, zingers, subtle looks and lines; there’s not an ounce of flab, or a single word of dialogue that’s wasted. It’ll take more than a couple of watches to pick out the layers and layers of beautifully crafted detail. Rainn Wilson, having already cracked the Top 5 as a sad-sack depressive in Hesher, is a man who’s had but two perfect moments in his wretched life, both of which he’s hand-drawn and pinned to the wall just to get him through the rest of it. Called to action by Bibleman inspired religious visions, on the surface Frank may be going vigilante to save his damsel in distress, but really, his transformation into the Crimson Bolt is all about saving himself. Meanwhile, though for plot purposes she may be the sidekick, Ellen Page is no second-fiddle.

It’s no secret that I have a massive obsessive fixation with completely normal appreciation of Ellen Page, and Super is Page at her absolute best. Adorably batshit, Libby/Boltie, the excitable, abrasive, and foul-mouthed ADD fangirl of Wilson’s Crimson Bolt, will clearly shriek her way into the friendzone-splintered hearts of nerds everywhere. If Hesher was the inverse Manic Pixie Dream Boy, Libby is simultaneously the inverse MPDG, and the ultimate, and her proud display of clumsy gymnastics as an audition to be his Robin, before breathlessly reading from a list of prospective names had me sewing up a costume of my own out of TapouT shorts and egg boxes, before thinking better of it. Libby’s psychotic hipster enthusiasm and Frank’s browbeaten-by-life-but-no-more ‘tude make perfect bedfellows; him cracking skulls with a wrench, and her running over dudes in just her bra.

“Inbetween the panels. Is that where we are right now?”

It’s that gore and mucky humour that clue you in on Gunn’s Troma beginnings, and really allow for that often-pondered but never properly done, until now, angle of “But isn’t Bruce Wayne just a complete mental?” to bed itself in. Real superheroes wouldn’t swing into action at the sound of a distant mugging, they’d sit behind dumpsters waiting for crime and getting bored; and when when you beat someone for real, they’ll bleed all over the pavement. Once things escalate, queue-jumpers are getting wrenched upside the noggin, and we remember that we’re basically watching a guy in the throes of a long-time-coming mental breakdown. On his knees to God, Frank bemoans “this disgusting me…” and it’s in that choice to make crime shut up, that finally, “I found my skin.”

As with a lot of movies that made this list, Super has a series of extraordinarily well-chosen soundtrack moments, and visually it’s luridly inventive – Frank’s imagination visible through a comic-style cut-out look at his brain; a vision of Liv Tyler in a pile of vomit. Every line of dialogue is a joy, and by rights, this should be the most quoted movie of the last few years. Also, in what’s sure to be a highly competitive field, Super has the sexiest rape scene ever (female to male, it’s cool bro), which’ll get me some creepy search traffic over the upcoming months; and a bravura finale, drenched in blood and severed limbs, where hoods might be getting gibbed by pipe-bombs, but it’s the big emotional moments that’ll put you on the floor.

It’s that heart that puts Super above everything else this year, while also being the outright funniest movie of 2011, and it’s a movie that deserves much, much larger recognition than it got. We’ve established in the Rise of the Planet of the Apes review that I cry over pretty much any film you’ll put in front of me, but Super, with all its insane gore and sweary humour, pulled out an ending that left me a complete fucking shambles. It may even be my favourite ending of all time, and without question, the one that’s left me the most destroyed. You should have seen me. I was like some horrible, spluttering jellyfish. It’s beautifully done, but if you’ve not seen the movie, completely unexplainable, so just go and find out for yourself. It’s the saddest happy ending you’ll ever see.

We can all take something from Super. Frank’s lesson was that you can’t always be the hero in your own story, but maybe you can in someone else’s. As for me, I learned that, incredibly, one day something could come along that’d usurp Princess Leia in the gold bikini in the pervy nerd fantasy costume stakes. Now I just need to find the Boltie to my… well, whatever I am. The kind of guy who churns out 12,500 words about the movies he liked best. We’re the real heroes. Same time next year?

To finish, here are a couple of Youtube compilations of 2011 in cinema to remind us why we love movies so much. Film <3

Genrocks’ Filmography 2011

The 2011 Portfolio

I know what you’re thinking. Millard, you’re a sex-case. Any guy who actually enjoyed Sucker Punch has so little respect for women that they belong back in the seventies, leering over a fence at the dollybirds who live next door; a priapic Sid James whistling at bottoms as he rubs his semi against the washing line. You’re wrong, I say, but you won’t listen. No, Millard, you touch women in alleyways, hoof a kick at every vagina you see, and the only thing that stops you from deleting your Facebook account is the distant hope that someday one of your female friends will post low-quality bikini pictures from a Spanish holiday. It’s fine, you’ll just snip the husband out in Photoshop, after all, that’s what someone who enjoyed that piece of trash would do. And this, this is how you’re going to open your top twenty? With Sucker Punch? We waited a year for this shit, and this is how it starts?

Yeah, it is. And you’re right. Not about me being an alleyway-groper, but I’ll concede your second point. Sucker Punch really was little more than an excuse for crazy-hot women dressed like sluts to twirl and shoot their way through various outlandish action sequences. But my, what sequences they were! In the rush to over-analyse the rampant misogyny, everybody missed the best cinematic allegory of all, of having a character in a Zach Snyder movie stuck in the terrible helplessness of the ‘real’ world – whatever that may be – learn to survive by bridging to another reality via slow-motion and music. And those speed-tinkering, soundtrack booming Snyder moments were all in place; this was Alice in Wonderland filtered through nerd obsessions of video games, anime and hot chicks in cosplay, and set in that kind of Frank Miller world where there are only two types of girls; hookers, and girls who used to be hookers but got murdered into a corpse. A sexy corpse. Filmed against greenscreen with the actors shooting a million imaginary bullets at nothing, Sucker Punch works in its balls-out, embracing-the-silliness way, that the Star Wars prequels, for example, didn’t, with that glassy-eyed, super serious way of trying to earnestly emote terrible dialogue against a tennis ball on a stick.

Clockwork Nazis that let off gusts of steam when shot, Jena Malone in underwear designed by a pervert, giant mechs with pink bunny faces; yeah, Sucker Punch was just a great big visual festival, but fuck, was I ever just laying in the mud and joyously kicking my legs in the air until it was time to go home.

Surely every Bridesmaids review must touch on the ‘Who knew women could be funny?!’ cliché. They’re certainly not given much of an opportunity to prove otherwise. Sarah Millican giggling obnoxiously over every panel show has the TV booking quota filled for another year, while in Hollywood terms ‘comedy’ and ‘female’ generally means insipid Kate Hudson / Julia Roberts / Katherine Heigl trash, with everyone remaking that same awful romcom twenty times a year. Bridesmaids was given the tag of ‘Female Hangover’ by a lot of critics, but it really wasn’t. Other than being a ensemble piece, it’s really not that structurally different from most less acclaimed, more generic comedies. It goes down the accepted paths – main character finally deals with ‘growing up’ issues, best friends fall out, eventually reconcile having grown as people – it was just, you know, funny and any good.

Being a Judd Apatow production, of course it ran over two hours, but didn’t outstay its welcome like some of his stuff does, seemingly determined as he is to do ‘more’ than comedy by throwing in thirty minutes of unneeded drama, as if being funny isn’t a noble enough aspiration. They weren’t afraid to go lowbrow with it (“You’re really doing it, aren’t ya? You’re shitting in the street”), but without the joke simply being the fact that tee hee, a woman is saying dirty things out of her delicate lady-mouth. Melissa McCarthy’s standout performance is absolutely worthy of the recognition it received (because unattractive people are all weirdos, right?), I just wish there’d been more of The Office’s Ellie Kemper, who’s my televisual Megacrush. Sigh.

When I was seven years old, my teacher, Mr. Saunders, worked all his lessons around the gnomes that lived at the bottom of his garden. Almost everything we did would be related to us in some way via the gnomes, and what they’d been up to, and he’d regularly fill us in on their continuing adventures. They all had names and quirks, and a social hierarchy with its own rules and intricacies; their own little structured world. Some of their words would be backwards, he told us, so instead of going to the pub, the gnomes had a little ‘bup’ inside the hedge, that they’d go and glug a pint in at the end of a hard gnome day. Gnomes being naturally curious, they asked after us when he went home in the evenings, and eventually, he brought one into class to meet everybody, in a bucket that he placed under his desk. Unfortunately, the gnome refused to stop being invisible and show himself, because of one child in the class who rudely didn’t believe in gnomes. I’m ashamed to say that child was me, the lone sceptic, ruining things for everyone. Although I eventually switched stances to firm gnome-believer, by then it was too late, and our innocences were finally shattered when a kid from the year above sneeringly broke the news about Mr. Saunders that “He’s lying. My brother had him three years ago, and at the end of term, he said the gnomes had all died in an explosion in his shed…” As an adult, I realise that Mr. Saunders was the greatest guy, fostering our imaginations five days a week, and I wonder if you could get away with something like that with the wised-up children of 2011. I’d like to think so.

Anyway, Troll Hunter evokes the magic of being that age, when things like gnomes or trolls were hiding in the world beyond your door. It’s not a kid’s film by any means, but shifting the mythologies of actual giant trolls who roam the hillsides to a grown-up setting makes for an awesome movie, and the troll-lore is kept totally storybook, with species names like Ringlefinch or Mountain King. Looks-wise, they’re like something from a bedtime story played entirely for real, and sinisterly comical, with multiple heads or bulbous noses that sniff out the blood of Christians, while the found footage gimmick adds to that sense of unreality in a real world. The human star of Troll Hunter is the chap of the title, a rumble-tumble, Quint-like figure, who marches in home-made armour, to lay bait under bridges. An American remake is due in 2014, but I don’t know how that will work outside of the distance, and pre-existing cultural folklore of Northern Europe, where there’s a still a belief in hidden races of beings. I mean, look at Björk. Maybe she’s crazy because she saw an elf or something.

Lucky McKee is known for films that really get under people’s skin, and not in the obvious Hostel-shock way, but with a special kind of lingering creepiness that takes a week’s worth of showers to scrub away. The Woman is McKee at his “Holy Christ, I feel like I’ve spent the day rubbing up against corpses” best. Unfortunately, most people, if they’ve heard about The Woman at all, will have only done so through the Youtube video from the Sundance premiere, of a livid audience member screaming about how the film should be burned, and the people who made it put in jail. I’m not saying it’s an understandable reaction, but if one movie this year was going to push someone’s buttons to the point of them shrieking in a spittle-flecked hallway, this would be it.

Angela Bettis, the Leo to McKee’s Scorsese is back, fabulous as ever, while Sean Bridgers, better known as the more jittery of Al Swearengen’s henchman in Deadwood, is the powerhouse centre around whom the members of his family revolve, strangely unmoved by his experiment for reasons that don’t become clear until late in the story. The women of the title, Pollyanna McIntosh, draws considerable empathy from a role that’s essentially a savage animal, chained full-frontal bollock-o in a barn, without even the ability to speak. One of the strengths of The Woman is the score, comprised of a one man, alt-rock soundtrack which sits surprisingly well with the visceral nature of the material. There are a number of sequences in the film that play like 3 minute pop videos, and they’re fucking fantastic. The last film that comes to mind with such a perfect blend of music and visuals is the similarly awesome World’s Greatest Dad, and as soon as it was over, I was rushing to IMDB to find out who was behind the chugging guitar.

While the father’s motivations are clear from the moment he lays eyes on the naked wild-woman of the woods, the gnawing, subtle undertone of The Woman, like the niggling feeling you’ve gone out and left the front door unlocked or the gas turned on, is how his family deal – or don’t – with what’s happening. There’s a strange sense of something unspoken, something other than fear, and once that is explained, in a moment you never see coming, the entire movie, the sins of the father, it’s all suddenly cast in a completely different light. Just watch it, and watch it twice. It’ll be a different movie the second time around, but you’ll still need a dozen showers.

So, how about that Nic Cage, huh? At a certain point, soon after the Wicker Man edits hit Youtube, Nic Cage transcended his position as ‘pretty weird guy’ to become the icon of cinematic insanity. Imagine if you will, that Gary Busey was still getting the big roles; all Stonehenge-teeth and bellowed acronyms that make no sense; and in movies that got trailed on TV and opened big at the box office. That’s what’s happening here. Is Cage acknowledging and embracing his own madness? Like the Iron Sheik becoming a cartoon of himself as a springboard to an irony-laced reinvention? Or, like when the studios had some old time movie star with a penchant for murdering call girls, and finally got tired of sweeping the bodies under the rug, is Hollywood accepting that his natural Cageness cannot and should not be covered up any longer? Cage became a thing unto himself, where directors be all “just go be Nic Cage and we’ll roll” like some modern day Klaus Kinski, riding his craziness like a bucking bull, and pointing cameras at him to preserve it for the ages.

Whatever’s happening, Drive Angry is Nic Cage mashed down into a projector and spunked all over the screen in big, glorious spurts of movie jizz. Drive Angry is exactly how I want my Nic Cage. With the grim reaper giving chase, Cage’s John Milton escapes from hell – in a car, because you can get there with a SatNav I guess – to stop his granddaughter from being sacrificed by a Satanic cult. You might as well stick this one in the documentary pile, cos it’s just a regular day for Nic Fucking Cage, and I suspect I blinked and missed the “Based on a true story…” title. William Fitcher’s grim reaper-slash-’the accountant’ is awesome, Amber Heard is so much more than a squealing damsel, and Billy Burke gives great ham as the cult’s leader, but this was one man’s movie, and that man was driving a massive car round in a circle really fast, while shooting at Devil worshippers who were on fire, and drinking beer out of a human skull.

It’s an exploitation flick that doesn’t so much embrace its own schlock, as autofellate for 100 glorious minutes, flipping a middle finger to anyone who throws a disgusted look because they’re trying to eat a big saveloy. Trust me, there’s plenty of room on this Top 20 for me to get all pretentious and arthouse, but Drive Angry had Nic Cage fucking a naked Charlotte Ross while shooting guys that were busting in and trying to cockblock by blowing his head off for Satan, and for that, and many other wacky, fabulous reasons, Drive Angry absolutely belongs on the list.

Thanks to the shitty, medieval bandwidth caps in the UK, I can’t keep up with Conan’s talk show anymore, which sucks because he’s one of my genuine heroes. His goodbye speech from NBC was incredibly inspiring, and it sometimes pops up like a ruler-welding nun to slap me down when I feel myself becoming too aggressively cynical. Yes, it’s all just showbiz, so in the grand scheme of things, what happens when a chat show gets moved to a different slot isn’t terribly important, but this is a world where Kim Kardashian probably tweets an update whenever she gets an itch in her labia, and anyway, Conan himself says that we shouldn’t feel bad for a guy that got to live his dream.

The clue to the content of Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop is in the title. With six months to fill, legally prohibited from television thanks to the NBC rift, Conan hit the road in a way that felt Muppet-esque in its gleeful “Let’s do a show!” haphazardness, with nobody knowing if the show would even work, let alone sell. But it does both, and it’s a joy to watch the creative process at work, as the show evolves as it rolls along. Tour documentaries usually promise demons and darkness, but there’s none of that here. Conan isn’t hoovering up coke or drunkenly forcing a sobbing, naked Andy Richter to back himself into a broom handle, until at least two feet of the wood is inside him. “Three, if you want to eat tonight…”

As a side-effect of the NBC fallout, Conan rocks up to the venues of America with a much grown, and wildly passionate fanbase, most with ginger foam beards and the desire to leap into his arms for a hug, or let him know just how sorry they are over what happened with Evil Jay Leno. Fresh in the radioactive fallout of the Late Night scandal-bomb, everywhere he goes, Conan’s met with Beatlemania shrieks, and crowds of people who just want to touch, to have their moment with him, their picture, their handshake. His mild irritation at a poorly organised backstage seeing him shake a thousand hands every exhausting night, while constantly fighting against losing his voice, is the darkest that Can’t Stop gets, yet he shakes every hand, laughs at every joke, and is equally gracious and funny with everyone that’s foisted towards him to play Coco for.

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop also features, for my money, the (unintentionally) funniest scene of the year, when he’s asked by a large Latino family at a gas station if they might say a prayer for him. Sure, he says, ready to bid them farewell, but finding himself clamped to the window of a minivan, hand on hand, for excruciating minutes, as God is asked to help out poor Conan with everything from his health and the tour to his personal finances. Of course, he handles that situation with grace and humility, and I’m not ashamed to say that all those hooting, apoplectic crazies that chant his name and squeal for far too long over his opening monologues can count me right among with them. All the adoration is totally deserved. In a world of pricks, Conan’s not only a great guy, but a super funny, super inspiring one too. We love you, Uncle Coco! Ooh, ooh, and can I have a hug?!

Super 8 was a gigantic bundle of nostalgia. Nostalgia for childhood; the one you actually had, and the one you wished you did. Nostalgia for this movie, a movie you vaguely feel you already saw when you were a kid, and are rewatching now as an adult, years later, with the wonder flooding right back. Most of all, Super 8 brought nostalgia for those movies that are fucking magical, and make audiences of all ages feel like kids again, yearning to go and hunt out the adventure that’s out there somewhere, just waiting to be found.

A pure love letter to that kind of cinema, and the magic of film itself, Super 8 wore its heart on its sleeve, with the young movie geek angle reminiscent of the brilliant Son of Rambow. To make another comparison, it also made me think of Where the Wild Things Are, in that it’s partially a kid’s movie for adults. I probably shouldn’t spend the whole Super 8 review comparing it to other movies, but it was, one suspects deliberately so, a near-perfect emulation of those Adventuring Kids vs. The Man films that riddled the eighties, like Goonies or Explorers, that you really don’t get any more. Setting it in 1979 helped recreate that aura of being an eighties child who grew up watching the same films over and over on stretched-out VHS or on TV, films that had already been out for a few years with a weird distance of time and (to a Brit) suburban Americana. The group of kids had such great chemistry, with all the archetypes accounted for, and without ever dipping into stereotype, that I wished they’d stuck together more as we got into the final act; while their finished zombie film in the closing credits was more proof that the kind of idiots who leap out of their seats and put on their jackets the second we fade to black don’t deserve nice things.

Oh, and for the record, I didn’t notice enough lens flare for it to bother me or pull me out of the movie in the slightest, so stop going on about it, you pricks.

In the last few years, horror fans have been overrun with shitty, low budget zombie and vampire movies with but one goal during the writing process; finding a wacky setting in which to transpose the action. Stag nights, trailer parks, strip clubs where naked vamps get staked on the Viagra-juiced penis of a sweating businessman; so long as you’ve got a few gory kills locked down, that setting’s all you need. Similarly, just have two genre creatures facing off with each other in tiresome hipster pairings – Vampires vs. Pirate Ninjas! – don’t even sweat the need for story or characterisation! Well, Stake Land brings things back to basics, and I mean basics.

Stake Land is the movie The Road could have been, with the pairing of a boy, Martin, and his surrogate father figure, simply known throughout as Mister. Nature-scorched landscapes are the order of the day, with bare woodland that stretches on forever over leaf-strewn ground, and empty roads with nothing but dead cars and posters of the missing nailed to trees; victims of the vampirism that swept the world like the great plague. The dirty faces, ragged clothes, and itinerant towns of Stake Land are images that ring of those from the great depression, and in 2011, at times it feels like we’re in the brooding cinema of a different era. It’s super slow-burning, with nary a snappy, vamp-killing one-liner to be seen, and with the bleak minimalism of a Winter’s Bone. The religious angle is cranked right up. The end isn’t nigh, it’s now, as the Southern states are rife with tent revival cults of sackcloth-wearing rapists, waiting the return of Christ, who sent the vampires to smite the sinners. With Kelly McGillis’s nun, crucifixions, and rumours of roaming cannibals, this is pure end times stuff, and when the gang of two starts to fill out with new blood, it’s everything the honestly-pretty-dreadful Walking Dead mistakenly believes itself to be.

Though Mister and the boy “don’t talk history,” the backstory of humanity’s downfall is sketched in, with talk of Christian terrorists loading up planes with vampires and crashing them into cities. The film’s most exhilarating action sequence sees vampires being dropped onto a town out of a helicopter like bombs, although such an insane sentence unfairly paints Stake Land as a crazy action movie. It’s measured, downbeat, and though there are small moments of joy and hope, incredibly bleak, particularly in the final act. Everybody is so tired, it’s like the world herself has had enough, wanting nothing but to curl under the porch like an old dog and breathe her last; but in this quiet minimalist hell, you find the freshest, finest vampire movie for a great number of years.

There have been a huge flood of MMA movies since the UFC boom began in 2005, mostly straight to DVD, mostly fuck-awful, with horribly unrealistic fight choreography and cameos from fighters who can barely speak coherently in post-fight interviews, let alone from a script; but Warrior crushes the memories of those pretenders, like so many Marco Ruas footstomps. Yeah, I’m an MMA nerd, so my take on this film might be a little different to those who wouldn’t know Jonny “Bones” Jones if he back-elbowed them in the face and then orgasmically thanked Jesus for helping him do it.

Warrior is hugely intriguing from the get-go, with its duel protagonist set-up which throws all your Rocky expectations for a loop. Every sports movie, every underdog movie, shit, almost every movie, has you rooting for that one guy (who’s victorious 99% of the time). We know who we’re supposed to cheer on, and we definitely know who’s going to win. Not so with Warrior, which sets up a conflict in the audience that’s unfaltering even as the end credits are rolling. Are you for Tom Hardy’s heroic soldier, with his Nick Diaz-level grumpiness, or Joel “always looks like he just got done peering in a wasps nest” Edgerton’s gutsy family man? Even the compulsory training montage, a series of kinetic, frenetic split-screens of both guys, doesn’t let you forget that for one of these guys to win, the other has to lose.

Nick Nolte gives great grizzle, and he does a fabulous one here, lawnmower throated, intense, and in one particular scene, utterly heartbreaking. Old trainer, let alone reformed drunk, is another by-the-book cliché, but Nolte and the material elevate this far above the expected. The only real misstep was the viral Youtube angle, which is incredibly hackneyed at this point, and Warrior’s playing up to the media image of MMA as violent human cockfighting, with dudes beating on unconscious guys forever, and too many flash knockouts. My MMA-Nerd hat (“One-night tournament sanctioned by the athletic commission?!”) had to come off, with my Movie-Nerd hat in its stead, but it still gave me a powerful rock-on to see a two minute scene in a Hollywood movie of a guy applying a Kimura. I don’t know how the sheer amount of fight sequences played with regular folks, and the second half doesn’t quite match the stellar build-up of the first, but finally mixed martial arts has a movie for which to feel pride instead of embarrassment.

As an aside, you should probably avoid the BluRay for a first watch, because the cover is Planet of the Apes-spoilery in its “Hey, here’s pretty much the final frame of the movie. Enjoy!”

I remember when the terrible Butterfly Effect came out in 2004, everybody was all “That really messed with my head, man. I couldn’t sleep for days!”, having been forced to wonder where their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, might have ended up had, had they made different choices. Source Code inspires similar introspection, but (obviously) in an infinitely deeper, more interesting way; and without any unintentionally hilarious scenes of Jake Gyllenhaal waking up without any arms – well, not quite – or running down a hallway like an ape.

Duncan Jones is a nerd through and through, and I truly don’t mean that in the pejorative sense at all. Look, this is a blog, a blog about movies at that; we’re all nerds here. His emotional BAFTA acceptance speech, about how it took him a long time to find what he wanted to do in life, but finally, he’d discovered the thing he loved most in the world really hit home with me, having not written a word outside of the requirements of schoolwork until I hit 22, and instantly knowing that was all I’d ever want to do. Duncan Jones geek sensibilities come through in spades, with Source Code a classic high-concept, riffing on Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation and the theory of Quantum Immortality. It’s also familiar to the gamers among us as a real-life take on what goes on while you’re sat, barefoot and BO-stinking, at your console. Forced to re-do the same eight minutes over and over, until you get it right, you get just so far, fuck up, then reload for another crack, hopefully getting a little further each time. One more try, then I’ll go to bed. Or, if you’re Gyllenhaal’s doe-eyed, mysterious soldier, a bunch of people will die, for reals. There’s a deft skill to keeping what’s essentially an 8 minute scene done over a bunch of times fresh, each time Gyllenhaal reboots, and there are some huge emotional pay-offs, which isn’t easy when you’re dealing with far-out sci fi.

On the lines of harping on about myself, Source Code saw me toss out a script I’d written, which had similar themes of quantum suicide, and welding physics as an undo button, but if I’m gonna be theoretically usurped, I’d rather it was a director like Duncan Jones, who’s sure to always find a place on these lists, as long as he keeps making his thought-provoking, intelligent, wonderful movies.

Maybe in some other universe, he’s writing a blog about me.

…

Alright, next up, the Top 10. And please feel free to hammer the shit out of the share buttons and spread this piece around.

Although you won’t see it on mine, I’m expecting Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life to appear on a lot of Top 10s this year. Opening with an extraordinary series of images, almost reminiscent of the Cremaster Cycle but playing on a cosmic scale, it feels like it’s going to be something very special. Spectacular creation scenes, the writhing power of nature, both on vast landscapes and at a microscopic level; it’s completely hypnotic, and then… Tree of Life slowly and drearily falls apart, like wallpaper peeling from a widower’s lonely bedroom. It’s clear what Malick was trying to do, but for me, it didn’t click. Two hours of Brad Pitt being a lousy father through weird, vaguely-floaty camera angles that make you feel extra disconnected, watching through distant trees like the perennially setting sun that seems to be winking through the branches in every scene, and an ending that’s outright horrific in its saccharin overload; I wasn’t feeling it. But I’m glad Terrence Malick exists. It didn’t work, but he tried, he really did. Conversely, I’m guessing Tower Heist (which I haven’t seen, obviously) won’t crack many Top 10s this year.

In films that were a lot of fun, Tucker and Dale vs Evil was a riot. There’s really not a lot of places left to go with the whole meta-angle on horror. Scream, (with this year’s Scream 4 being a pile of shit) and the various imitators that followed in its wake mined the self-aware thing dry, while The Rise of Leslie Vernon flipped the cameras to the killer’s perspective. Tucker and Dale similarly set the killers up as the protagonists, but the kills by the two beleaguered, dungaree-sporting rednecks all come accidentally, at the hands of some inventive and gory slapstick. And for a film that has people tumbling into wood chippers, there’s a genuinely sweet core.

Nice to look at, but up its own arse. Like Beyonce.

As we’re talking comedy, Paul was pretty good, there’s just something about these bigger studio comedies that make it harder for me to connect, compared to the likes of Shaun of the Dead. It’s not a huge complaint, and Paul was definitely better than Your Highness. “McBride, Franco and Portman? How can it miss?!” Well, it kinda did. Horrible Bosses was one of the better big comedies of the year, although went with the disappointingly lazy cliché of having the female boss’s horrible quality be her sex-crazed lunacy. Is there no other way to convey the batshitness of female characters then endowing them with vaginas that might as well be screaming “Feed me, Seymour!” and flailing towards you with writhing labic-tentacles? Cock-Obsessed Harpies are right up there with Vengeful Rape Victims in “must try harder when writing female roles.” Not to come over all Andrea Dworkin (because she’d hate that), but female characters should have more to offer your movie than what’s between their legs. My favourite comedy not to crack the top twenty was 30 Seconds or Less, with Danny McBride at his lovably prickish best, and Aziz Ansari walking away with every scene with that misplaced cockiness that’s such a joy in Parks and Rec. Plus, 30 Seconds or Less has the best last-second of any movie this year. Jackass 3.5 is an odd fit on any year-end list, being that it’s a straight to DVD quasi-sequel consisting of deleted scenes and interviews, but I love this stuff, and many of my biggest movie-laughs all year came from 3.5. The joy of the Jackass franchise, aside from guessing which animal will bite Pontius on the penis next, is the sense of camaraderie between the cast, so it’s going to make an odd rewatch following the death of Ryan Dunn.

Generally, jump cuts are just a lazy way of horror movies eliciting scares without bothering to inject that sense of creeping dread. The two great modern jump scares are in Signs and The Orphanage. Or were, until Insidious leapt out of a closet, with fifty of the greatest jumps ever, all in a single movie, and with such a terrifying sense of dread, that I was aching for days after watching, from being buckled in my seat, or pacing the room like a dog waiting for its violent master to return from the pub. Another cracking horror was Mother’s Day, a remake of the little-seen Troma film of the same name, which was relentless in the back and forth brutality, and with a fantastic performance from Rebecca De Mornay as the calculatingly unhinged mother of the title.

Just watching a nice, quiet talky scenOHJESUSFUCKGOD

Thor was the best of the summer’s big budget superhero-packed slate. I was so euphoric as the credits rolled, that I was convinced it’d have a top five placing by year’s end, but in hindsight, I just liked it a lot. By far the trickiest superhero adaptation to date, with space-Norse mythology that potentially could have been ridiculous as real sets, costumes and dialogue, Branagh’s luvvie sensibilities eased the transition beautifully. Captain America was similarly fun. My absolute favourite comic growing up, I was stretching out my pants like Mr. Fantastic as the opening credits rolled. While not great, it was solid enough (Is that what we’re aiming for now? Solid?), with Weaving’s Herzog-channelling Red Skull great heelish value, but never quite lived up to the note-perfect USO sections. Perhaps I’m just bitter because I always felt it was my destiny to write and direct the Cap movie. I even had the best DVD easter egg ready to go – a picture of me in the local paper, aged 12, in a home-made outfit, head-wings and all, punching the air with a cardboard shield. Unfortunately, when Samuel L. Jackson snuck into my school to recruit the young me for The Avengers, he was arrested for being a paedophile. (Fun fact: I got the shit kicked out of me three years after the newspaper photo, in an incident which began with catcalls of “Look, it’s that wanker who dressed like Captain America…”)

Green Lantern was nowhere near as bad as I’d heard, but growing up a Marvel kid, aside from the big two, DC’s characters weren’t shit to me, homie, so I could just sit back and enjoy Ryan Reynolds’ question-your-own-sexuality charisma without the need to yell “You’re ruining this! I’m going to sue!” every two minutes. X-Men: First Class was your typical Matthew Vaughn movie; solid and mostly entertaining, but nowhere near as good as it thinks it is, and as visually flat as a Xerox of a Romanian gymnast. First Class just about avoided that prequel need to backstory everything, like having a scene where James McAvoy falls out of a tree and loses all his hair like Duncan Goodhew.

I’d never seen any of the Fast and Furious films, but was lured into Fast and Furious 5 by the dinosaur-cocked masculinity of a Rock/Vin Diesel pairing, which was an enjoyable enough way to kill a couple of hours, while social networking horror, Panic Button, rekindled the massive crush I had on Scarlett Alice Johnson when she was in Eastenders. Everything Must Go was the last movie to get shunted down from the Top 20 onto the also-rans piece, which is lucky for all of us, because I’ve lost the notes I made at the time while screaming “Oh! This is definitely making my Top 10!” Yeah, I take notes sometimes. What of it? I had my growth spurt after the “There’s Captain America” incident, so you don’t want any of this. That’s right, keep walking.

Whedon's obviously got it all under control.

Everyone knows I love me some Werner Herzog. He’s probably my third most utilized point of reference, after Brutus ‘The Barber’ Beefcake and that night-vision video of Paris Hilton doin’ it. However, the sense of wonder at the amazing discovery in his Cave of Forgotten Dreams had worn off me a little after the first hour, maybe because there wasn’t enough of a sense of Werner himself, either in his ‘Ecstatic Truths’ or his actual presence. There are flashes of the way he sees the world and brings something out of people, in his questioning of a scientist revealing himself to be a circus performer in his previous life, but in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog felt a little too distant; observing, rather than shaping, the events (amazing as they were) of the film. In other documentaries, Knuckle‘s multi-generational look at the world of bare-knuckle gypsy fights, shot over the course of twelve years, is a thousand leagues above the other toot coming out of TV’s tiresome obsession with gawking at gypsies. With badly-tracked VHS footage of shirtless men brawling in fields, feuding families, and the strange code of respect that goes along with bashing each other’s mugs in, the highlight was the bizarre pro-wrestling style promos sent on video cassettes to rival families as fight-hype.

The fact that I’d totally forgotten Battle Los Angeles existed says most of what needs to be said about it; Cowboys and Aliens on the other hand, had a hellaciously exciting first act, which promptly dropped straight off the thrill-cliff into a pit filled with yawns. I’ve not read the comics, but there was an episodic nature to the pacing “We’re in an upside down boat! Now we’re with the old gang!”, which may have worked in a graphic novel, but didn’t translate to a movie. The last half hour was way more fun, though.

Confirming Asian genital stereotypes since 2009

It’s a cliché now for people to complain about sequels being retreads of the original, but The Hangover Part II hits every single beat of the original, in exactly the same order, like it was created exclusively for audience members to yell out greatest hit requests at the screen. “Find the camera with the pictures of what happened! Woo!” It’s the movie equivalent of a Malibu Stacy with a new hat, except it’s the same hat, just someone drew a jizzing dick on it. There’s an improvised song about how fucked they are, Stu has the brainwave about where the missing friend is, and oh hey, there’s Mike Tyson again, for no reason. By the point Alan’s getting a monkey to fake-fellate an old man, just like the wanking gag in the first one, the sense of deja vu is so overwhelming, you’re looking around for Ned Ryerson. Bing! This time, the character turns in the final act didn’t ring true at all, and whereas the first one was rooted in a kind of reality, Hangover II goes so big, that the final denouement and noble speeches feel tacked on because it’s the end, and everything needs to get wrapped up. It’s possible to go bigger without going so outright wacky, but wacky was how they went, with Mr. Chow’s man-clit, and the lingering, swinging penises of Thai ladyboys, which probably make for a better experience in a packed theatre than on your own, in a room, looking at a lady’s big floppy cock. Not that Hangover II wasn’t funny, because it was, and despite all this, I enjoyed the shit out of it, but if they’re going to rip themselves off so hard, they should just go all Von Trier’s Five Obstructions and remake it another three times.

As I mentioned in last year’s go around, I really don’t see a lot of bad movies. Certainly, I steer clear of everything that’s an obvious bad fit with my tastes, so no One Day, but for some weird reason, possibly self-loathing, I should own up to watching Transformers 3. Firstly, why does Tyrese Gibson exist? He’s so indescribably bland, like the blank template you get at the start of a ‘create your character’ section on a video game. What’s he bringing to the table where someone’s got a script and utters the words, “You know who would be perfect for this role…” Stick a beanie on a crooked fence post, and you’re good to go. Tyrese solely exists to fill the token spot of “black guy” which is a whole stack of horribly damning indictments on Hollywood all at once.

The worst trend in action movies over the last decade, which is purely down to CG making these shots way too possible, is when they essentially become two hours of people narrowly missing stuff. Look at Roland Emmerich’s 2012. Actually, don’t. But to save you the bother, it’s literally 158 long, long minutes of planes that pull up just in time before the ground collapses, or speeding cars that swerve out of the way of falling bridges and skid around chasms at the last possible millisecond. Transformers 3 is filled with this shit; just a ton of running, ducking, and “Hoo boy, that was close!” Plus the robots are so overdesigned, you might as call it an adaptation of that toy where you draw the guy’s beard with iron filings and a magnet for all the physical sense you have of what’s actually going on. Michael Bay, if you want a quote for the DVD cover, here’s a freebie:

“If you love shapes hitting other shapes and spinning around in the air, Transformers 3 is the movie for you!”

Blu Ray cover for Michael Bay's Transformers box set

We all knew Transformers 3 would be shit, and it was exactly what it set out to be, but for colossal misfire of the year, look no further than The Beaver.

“You know,” I thought, about twenty minutes in, “this isn’t too bad.” But then everything happens way too fast, both story-wise and emotionally, and suddenly there’s a puppet on the cover of Time Magazine and being interviewed on TV, and what could have worked as a smaller scale story of a family dealing with a mentally unwell father is now just a ridiculous panto. And if you’re a gamer, it’s impossible to take the maudlin depression storyline seriously when Gibson’s choice of beaver-voice is that one comedy voice everyone used in Saints Row 2 because it was so funny. The other half of the movie concentrates on a completely insipid and unconnected sub-plot. I don’t need a good reason to watch Jennifer Lawrence, but those scenes just served to add “hot, popular girl learns to love unpopular nerd” and “noble confessional speech” to the list of movie crimes by The Beaver. Compared to another 2011 movie tackling the same themes that did make the Top 20, The Beaver feels like a film about depression made by a bunch of silly, stupid babies. So much was made of crazy Mel’s tabloid-splattered outbursts, and would people give this movie a chance after hearing his freakouts, but the truth is, it wouldn’t matter if he was Skyping a deathbed Bill Cosby, wearing blackface and making monkey noises as he aggressively masturbated into his own mouth, because The Beaver still would have been the most heinous, ill-judged act Mel Gibson committed all year.

Next up, movies 20-through-11 of 2011. I’m sure numerologists, “OMG, it’s the 11th of the 11th 2011! Better mention it on Twitter! Hey it’s 12:12pm!”, are loving that shit. If anyone wants to guess at what’s going to be in the list, take a shot in the comments. As a hint, this year swings wildly between super pretentious, and audience-insultingly broad.

It’s pointless to yak on about why the Grand Theft Auto series is so great, because either you’ve already played them, in which case you know why, or you don’t care and never made it past the first paragraph of this piece. Some people don’t dig the constant stream of brutal violence, pop-culture homages, or the gleefully childish humour that permeates everything, but in case you haven’t noticed from reading this blog, that’s kinda my deal. Possibly what most lifts the franchise above the many GTA-clones is a quality of voice acting that creates genuinely memorable characters, rather than exposition being rattled off in a booth. Scene-stealers like ADD roid-guzzler Brucie are every bit as cattle-branded onto our minds as anyone who walked away with an actual movie. But above all else, there’s just a general… GTA-ness that can’t be replicated by any other studio. My lust for the series is such, that if I get sick, my first thought is always “I can’t die! I won’t get to see the next GTA!” In this bleak, awful world, the thought of how amazing GTA 7 is going to be is often the only thing that keeps me from swan diving off the nearest high building.

San Andreas was my own personal favourite. Rockstar’s ability to create immersive, layered worlds was never better with their distorted take on early 90′s California. Snoop Dogg on the radio, autumnal coloured Boyz n The Hood-style Compton streets, and uzis blazing through the windows of passing cars. I was there, man. I was there, and I killed about a million innocent people. SA’s Flight School was our generation’s Vietnam. Those of us who lived through it will never be the same again, with the ones who emerged victorious stronger for having persevered. There’s a shared experience, like a quiet table at a Chinese restaurant filled with old school friends, all sexually abused by the same headmaster some decades before. It may be unspoken, but Flight School is always there, part of us. Just try it. Say the words “Flight School” at a group of men, and look for the tell-tale signs. Haunted expressions from those who can’t even cast their eyes from the floor; broad, puffed out chests from the stout who refused to quit until they’d 100%ed that shit.

The sheer audaciousness of that first leap from top-down, rail-led missions to open worlds and the Do What Thou Wilt approach was like the shift from silent movies to talkies, and there was no going back. That openness led to the kind of unique experiences that only come about when you’re gifted such freedom, with the randomness of the living worlds allowing for any number of unique moments to just happen. My own such nostalgic GTA moment was upon finally beating Flight School, and taking to the air. With an orange sunrise peeking over the horizon, Skynyrd’s Free Bird kicked in on the radio, right at the moment I found myself soaring freely above the game world for the very first time. Yeah, yeah, it’s only a video game, you’ll probably say if you don’t understand, but that’s precisely because you don’t understand. There’s no less emotional worth in these moments than seeing the Star Destroyer roar overhead for the first time in a cinema, or hearing a song that’ll stick to your soul until you fall into your grave leak out of a speaker in someone else’s bedroom.

GTA 4 really got a raw deal. About a month after release, everyone turned on it, trying really hard to convince themselves they thought it was boring and not any good. Possibly, there were too few multi-part missions, and barring the Heat homage bank heist, nothing replayable on the level of SA’s Terminator 2 chase down the Los Santos viaduct system. And not to be a show-off, because we all know how ladies are super impressed by guys that are great gamers, but it was just too easy. The majority of missions were all done first time, with most of those that weren’t down to silly mistakes on the initial run. There was no learning curve. But those niggles aside, the main problem was that it had to follow a level of hype that exceeded anything I’ve ever seen. I personally was in the sort of wild frenzy that makes me think I should video myself watching the first GTA V trailer, like those Twilight fans you see shrieking on Youtube and pretending to be 50% more excited than they actually are.

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So, for what I want out of GTA V, I should note the strangeness of how, with its two most universally loved titles – San Andreas and Vice City – set in the past, Rockstar have yet to revisit a period setting. For the pastime of Grand Theft Auto speculation, that’s the most important thing, the setting, so while this will never happen, I’d love it to be 1969 LA. The Rolling Stones, sixties cars, and a Charles Manson-analogue stalking the fucked up movie starlet wannabe characters of Vinewood. There’s a damp patch on my shorts just from picturing that, but I don’t see it happening, especially as LA Noire already did the period Hollywood thing. For a series so heavily based around cars and music, that there’s still no 1970s GTA is a massive disappointment, so anything set in this era would be amazing. So far though, all signs point to a modern day faux-LA, which is more than fine with me. In the way that Truman Burbank spent his days dreaming about Fiji, I’m all about Hollywood, and that kind of backdrop really lends itself to the spirit of GTA, as well as essentially playing as a partial current-gen do-over of San Andreas.

Features wise, from the way it was all but dropped in the Episodes from Liberty City add-ons, it’s possible Rockstar have already (rightly) decided that the social system isn’t the way to go. Mini-games like bowling or pool are fun, but if I wanted to make friends, I wouldn’t be sat at an Xbox. Also, I want the return of side missions – the taxi/ambulance/vigilante stuff, with the rewards that go with it. The multiplayer from GTA 4 is perfect as it is, and as long as the GTA Race option is there (something that literally burned up entire months of my life – and I don’t regret a single second), we’re cool. But really, all I want, all any of us want, is more GTA. That’s it, just more of the same. Little tweaks here and there, with a new story, new setting, and typically awesome characters making us do hopefully crazy missions. The format isn’t broke, so don’t try and fix it by making us go to the gym, or forcing the main character to find a urinal every five game-hours, or else his bladder will explode like a stinky yellow pipe bomb.

But mostly, I just need a copy on release day. That’s the worst part. I never lived anywhere that had a close enough midnight opening, and I always put my trust in Amazon. But man, that appearance on launch day of the postman at the gate… is he reaching into his basket? Should I have pre-ordered earlier? Gone with Play.com? (no). GTA 5 is probably a year away, and I’m already a juddering wreck. I just hope I don’t die before it gets here.

* It’s October the first. Autumn. October, and essentially the hottest day of the year – thirty crazy degrees. But I’ve already mourned for the summer. This is like seeing a crush in the street after convincing yourself you’ve successfully spent the last six months getting over her, and now it’s back to square one.

* Everything feels strange. It’s like a movie where someone asks “What’s the last thing you remember?” and we slowly piece together how everyone was just teleported here from their beds by aliens, in some eerie facsimile of paradise, to keep us quiet before they drop us into some giant alien mincing machine concealed beneath the waves. October is for lashing rain and horror movies, but there’s just sweat and sandcastles, bikinis and splashing. It all feels like a trap.

* All the usual sights are here. A faded Sammy Hagar tour shirt on the back of an old dad. Two lesbians the size of camper vans exchanging tender kisses by the waves. A man with the Red Dwarf logo tattooed across his pec. But the odd sense of “This shouldn’t be” lingers. The beach is absolutely heaving, with as many people as I’ve ever seen, but everything’s packed away, with the shutters down on the booths for shellfish and Littlehampton rock, the path for the little train sitting empty, and even the lifeguard shack craned away and put into storage until next summer. The one hangover from the tourist season is the deckchair man, who smelled some bonus money and doles out windbreakers like it was July, just running through the motions, like a widow who instinctively turns to crack an in-joke to her long dead husband when their favourite song comes on the radio.

* When I was 18/19, during the winter seasons I’d come to the beach a lot at night, and sit in the shelters, looking out to sea and listening to the distant clang of moored boats bucking on the river. The whole place had the feel of a creepy abandoned funfair where an evil, disfigured clown lived, ready to leap out of the winkle shack and skewer a candyfloss stick straight through your forehead. These days, without the badly carved and weathered Mickey Mouse and nutcracker soldiers peering from the wall of the old Smarts with their dead eyes, it’s all a bit art deco, and you’re more likely to be savaged in the shadows by the food critic from Time Out than by Bozo the Stabby Clown.

* Dogs run the sands with wild abandon, now in that October-April window where they’re allowed to roam freely. The dogs, who’ve only known free-strolling walks in the pissy Autumn rain, will talk about this day for years to come. “I swear, man, it was, like, thirty, thirty-five degrees! I did so much pooping on the sand!”

"DEAL WITH IT"

* University-age girls lay together in groups of three or more, everywhere you look; expensive toys in the window of a Victorian shop on Christmas Eve, glass dirtied with the hand and nose-prints of urchins like me who know they couldn’t save for that in 10,000 lifetimes, and even if they could, such delicate, well-fashioned things are not meant for inelegant fingers like ours. I think I’m one of those guys whose image of women has been warped by the internet, as they all put me in mind of the kind of girls you see on Tumblr, posing naked in the bathroom mirror with an iPhone, with a confident casualness that says “Everyone is 20, naked, and hot, except you. And this picture, taken for someone else, and posted up on a public website, is as close as you’re ever going to get.” I think I’d rather not know those girls exist at all. Their presence today seems rude, like going into a homeless shelter and showing all the tramps episodes of MTV Cribs on an iPad 2.

Three hot girls walk by, all big sunglasses and catwalk legs.

A coal-faced boy from the workhouse lays a wooden train on its side and pats it roughly with his hand, because he doesn’t know how to play.

* It really is Bizarro Day on Hot October. An old couple refer to me as “that gentleman,” (although one look through my notepad will dispel that notion real quick), and someone even yells “Bless you!” at me when I sneeze. And then there’s the paragraph that follows this one. It’s like when it snows for the first time, the novelty aspect is enough for people to actually speak to their neighbours without spitting at them first. I don’t even know that today is ‘canon’ in the Beach Diaries narrative. It’s like a single comic in between two longer arcs, written by a guest author. Maybe God went away for the week and left everything in charge of his cool, yet wayward and flighty younger brother, Rod (Belding).

* Someone passing by very obviously eyes me up and down, smiles, and then shoots me a wink. It’s a twenty-something Mediterranean looking guy, hand in hand with another man. Just twice in my entire 32 years, including today, I’ve had moments that could (in the very loosest of terms) be described as someone hitting on me. Both of those were men. This is the first under the age of fifty, though. The stats don’t lie; 2-0; I’d definitely have made for a better gay than I do a straight, but unfortunately, Ryan Reynolds and Alexander Skarsgård aside (and if either of those guys winked at me from the dunes, I’d probably have presented myself like a baboon on a car bonnet at the safari), I’m just not leaning that way.

I smile back at the tanned young twink, and it’s like a brief window into what it’s like to be those other guys you see everywhere, parading up and down the same promenade as me, the promenade of life, flirting back and forth all day with Tumblr girls that giggle and smile as they catch their eye – that weird dance of human sexuality. I’m not often on the end of this kinda thing – like I said, this is literally only incident number two, ever – but I can’t lie, it’s pretty sweet. If I had a better phone, I dare say I’d go home with a confident swagger in my step and take a picture of myself with my cock out for the internet. Bless you, flirty young gay. Truly, this is Bizarro Day.

* Samuel L. Jackson approaches me on the pier. “I’m putting a team together…”

Summer is the time for projects. Two years ago, we survived The Summer of Savile – this year, I took to the beach. Littlehampton beach, to be exact. Generally, I observed, people-watching and taking notes, like that dude who lived with bears, and eventually got eaten in his tent. Occasionally though, events or emotions would metaphorically reach out with a hairy claw, to give me a gentle pat on the head, or streak my face with scars.

Here is a record of those events.

#1 – Mother Nature’s sneak preview

#2 – Of (tit) Mice and (blind) Men

#3 – A wild Ron appears

#4 – “I  <heart> nerds – but only as a fashion statement”

#5 – Look the part, be the part, motherfucker

#6 – Gangsta trippin’

#7 – Tonight, the world is ours

#8 – Hot lifeguards, Hulkamania and Old Rog’s secret

#9 – Pay no attention to the Ron behind the curtain

#10 – Wherein hearts are restarted, while others crack

#11 – The day I nearly died

#12 – Egg-men, demon babies and widdy woo-wa

#13 – The monsters in the mist

#14 – Monsters II – The invasion

#15 – The sexiness equation

#16 – Giant Baby Man and the BMX Bandits

#17 – In which I find disgrace at the hands of the French

#18 – No means no: The red flag

#19 – Overheard Conversations bumper pack

#20 – This is how it ends. Not with a bang

- Epilogue -

Post-Credits Scene

(And if you enjoyed these (totally free) pieces, feel free to show your appreciation by buying my books so I don’t inadvertently scupper next year’s follow-up by dying of starvation before 2011 is out. I half-arsed the pimping of the Kindle books this summer, because I spent so much time at the beach, so a shill here isn’t too whorish. For non-Kindle owners, Amazon do a swanky free app for PC/Mac/iPad/Phones, and the books themselves are the price of, or cheaper than, a pint, with almost none of the threat of liver disease. Plus, not to blow my own horn, but they’re pretty awesome)

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Much like it did for the meat of the summer – the coldest since 1993 – the weather has called the shots, and brought an abrupt end to this project. I figured I’d get in another one or two seafront sojourns and wrap this up, but Autumn bumrushed itself in the door, and outside, an apocalypse is brewing. Sheets of violent rain and 60mph gusts of wind drive away that most important ingredient of people-watching; the people. So here we are, some months, and close to 20,000 words later.

The problem with any kind of episodic storytelling, factual or fictional, is that everyone’s conditioned to expect the narrative playing out like it does in movies. The familiar Hugh Grant rom-com structure insinuates that by the time the shutters are pulling down for the year, some readers – presumably those who didn’t know me that well – are thinking that me and Hot Lifeguard will magically hook up, just as the credits roll. But real life isn’t Hollywood. We never spoke, or even exchanged glances, and even if she’d been on duty on what I’d known was the last day, I’d have just scribbled in my now-almost-full notebook and slunk away for the season. Likewise, Big Shirtless Ron, who was such a presence in those early entries, what seems like an age ago, disappeared altogether. I’d assumed he’d take on a starring role throughout the summer, with various adventures and sightings, but after that final, rain-soaked appearance, I never saw him again. Although from that, perhaps we can deduce that he decided he was too old for this shit, and that the life of fast women and no shirts was a young man’s game. Or maybe he died. From wanking.

Set by the tone of those early entries, I had envisioned a revolving cast of familiar faces, but that didn’t really happen either. Mostly, I’d guess, due to regular people having better things to do than hang around the beach all day like some fucking surf-hobo Samuel Pepys. But also, that’s just the nature of a tourist town. For nine months of the year, she lays asleep and grey, with the beach itself, some ten minutes sign-less walk from the town centre, ghost-town quiet, with imagined candyfloss tumbleweeds blowing along the promenade. Only when the summer hits can she truly be who she is; alive, vibrant, colourful, and filled with outsiders who wouldn’t dream of giving her a second look when she’s not in full pomp, each leaving nothing behind for the year-round residents but piles of filth, in the overloaded bins and blowing around on the common.

No.

The true familiar faces of Littlehampton Beach weren’t included exactly because they’re familiar. Hot Lifeguard is a safely vague title, considering there’s a big team of them, but once you start riffing on the guy who rents deckchairs, or the woman who drives the little train, you’re asking for it. This is all pretty Google-able, and I’ve had a ton of search hits and the odd email from locals who’ve stumbled on the Beach Diaries.

As a related aside to this, I’ll tell you what The Beach Diaries wasn’t. Two of the most familiar faces around the beach are a couple of local tramps-cum-outsider-types who I have personal BD-style nicknames for, due to certain traits, but these same traits are what make them too identifiable. Despite seeing them constantly, they deliberately weren’t included for fear of tonally emulating those hateful Facebook groups devoted to local “legend!” tramps or mentally loose types, with photo after photo of sneery, ironic drunken students posing next to them with their thumbs in the air, like they’re a fucking tourist attraction. “Here’s me with the Shaky Hand man of Luton! LEGEND, LOL! Some years after he had a breakdown or bout of mental ill-health that put him on the streets, probably… And here’s a pic where I pretend to fuck him from behind!”

One of my favourite moments of the summer concerned these two chaps. One, let’s call him Chap A, has been a regular around the beach and river area for years. He was wandering the prom and snoozing in the shelters well over a decade ago, and he’s still around today, treading those same paths. I’d take an educated guess that he’s not fully homeless, but in some kind of hostel that requires him to be out from dawn til bedtime, and he has the deep, leathered tan of a man who’s never indoors. Recently I overheard him referring to a family he used to have, and possibly, like me, the beach is the place he feels most comfortable, and most at home. The other, Chap B, is another face that’s frequented these streets since I was at school. There’s probably only ten years between us, and he’s not homeless, just a little strange, and very quiet, and with a rather eccentric physical appearance, and a head down, march through the streets to get where he’s going urgency that suggests a wariness of others, and an unspoken throng of horrible incidents involving the cruelty of people. Chap A is generally seen to be alone, but if Chap B is around, they’ll be in each other’s company.

A couple of weeks ago, Chap A was fast asleep on a nearby bench, in the sun, sitting bolt upright as he slept. A little later, and now awake, Chap B appeared on the prom, and joined him in sitting on the bench. As Chap B sat down, his concentration quietly rapt in the task of removing the cornucopia of ever-present bags from his shoulders, Chap A’s hand went up, as if wondering whether to shake B’s hand, high five him, or salute. Instead, with B still absorbed in his task, Chap A patted him gently on the back. A tiny gesture to most, especially in a summer filled with all manner of ape-ish louts hitting or groping each other like it weren’t no thang. But even for the most sarcastic of observers, this little moment couldn’t help but elevate them from “Mr. Nickname and Mr. Other Nickname” to People. Friends. Two strange souls who may not have stable addresses or a ton of buddies on speed dial, and might not have more than one set of clothes, but who at least have each other.

In all those years, it was the first time I’d seen Chap A smile.

Checking the fashions, this was taken in Littlehampton... yesterday.

And that’s what The Beach Diaries was about – little moments. Finding the narrative within the mundane. That clichéd interview question I always find so bizarre, as it’s thrown at writers and artists “Where do you get all your ideas?” Look around you. People are so weird and awful and funny and disgusting and tragic and vile and beautiful, how can you not be inspired? Whether it’s someone pretending a Pepsi bottle is an ejaculating penis, or an old lady whose wheelchair is laden with stuffed toys from the claw machine, there’s a story behind it all, real or imagined. Werner Herzog’s ecstatic truth.

In writing these, I felt an obsessive, OCD drive to be there whenever I could, to catch and preserve these moments, and when I wasn’t, I’d be imagining all the glorious material that was going lost and unseen forever. This was actually more than just paranoia. I managed to miss a body washing up at the exact time and spot I usually eat my lunch, and the boat that made national news by running aground at the mouth of the river, as well as countless Overheard Conversation Snippets and who knows what else.

So now what? It’s dark, and wet, and cold, and the beach is back in snooze-mode, waiting for next June. This shit for another nine months? I can’t take it. The beach is the only place I feel sane. If I can’t bask in the little moments of others, I’m stuck with my own. As you may have noticed, I have the worst seasonal mood swings ever. I’ll be fine by the time October gets here; then, the wind, rain and darkness is perfect for creepy books and horror movies, and the world takes on another feel that, while contrasting wildly with the summer sun and hope, is fun all the same. But that first month after summer, I’m wearing a noose as a neckerchief. It also feels unsettling that I didn’t drag myself down there out of the weird sense of obligation to tie everything up by tipping my hat adieu to the shingle. Maybe I’ll find a couple of days to be down there if there’s a break in the weather, but that’ll all be off the clock, so to speak, and for 2011, we’re done.

Oh yeah, and if you enjoyed these (totally free) pieces, don’t feel bad about showing your appreciation by buying my books so I don’t inadvertently scupper next year’s follow-up by dying of starvation before 2011 is out. I half-arsed the pimping of the Kindle books this summer, because I spent so much time at the beach, so a shill at the end here isn’t too whorish. For non-Kindle owners, Amazon do a swanky free app for PC/Mac/iPad/Phones, and the books themselves are the price of, or cheaper than, a pint.

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Alright. See you all next year?

* A drunk man sings. “Scooby Doo, Scooby Doo, what we gonna do?”

“That’s not how the Scooby Doo theme goes,” I think. Except I don’t think it, instead, I accidentally laugh disparagingly and say it out loud. The drunk stops in his tracks and eyeballs me for a few moments, before continuing on his journey, no longer singing. Part of me wonders if there’s an unconscious desire on my part to create material for the Beach Diaries with such outbursts, my brain knowing that the end’s in sight. Thankfully, Hot Lifeguard is not on duty today, so even my evil-brain can’t fuck me by doing something there.

* In medieval times, they’d have equated these pieces with being a wandering minstrel. Maybe next summer some company can sponsor me to tramp along the length of the coast with a tent and a notepad and go full minstrel on the Beach Diaries. (Actually, that would be pretty sweet. Anyone? Throw in a phone and an iPad to upload them to WordPress, and we can talk.)

* Two dogs run in circles. A woman calls after them.

“Kat! Alfie!” Christ.

* It happened. The moment regular readers may have been waiting for. At approximately 1:30pm, for the third time this summer, I got shat on by a seagull. I didn’t even see the culprit – although we all know it’s the same one – merely the passing overhead of a swift, barely perceptible shadow, and the now familiar ‘plop’ of poo descending from sky to body. It was the back, this time; a messy, green evacuation that requires me to strap on my rucksack when in polite company. I suspect, like all good movies and TV shows, my nemesis is the bitter bastard son of the seagull who shat on my head in the playground when I was eight, causing @drewvis_uk to sprint around like a carny freakshow barker, drawing huge crowds to view my plight (and rightly so – I’d have done the exact same thing). The poo was enormous that day, my friends, covering the entire top of my head like a vast yarmulke, and I paid a boy in my class two M.U.S.C.L.E. toys to help me pick it out of my hair in the toilets. What my current nemesis lacks in sheer volume, he makes up for with bullying persistence. There may be less than three weeks before Summer wheezes her final death rattle beneath Autumn’s heavy hobnail boots, but I will have you yet, Evil Seagull Jnr, between two slices of bread. And then, I shall poo you out onto your own children.

* A hot girl passes in a shirt that’s all ripped in the back like one of Hulk Hogan’s. Something something, my 24 inch python, something something. Of course, the raised red and yellow flag, like those at Buckingham Palace, signifies that the man himself is in residence today.

“Scooby Dooby Doo, your heart is true. Thank you for being a friend.”

* My hair looked impeccable when I left the house. Thanks to a brisk southwesterly, I now resemble an old dead tree in Tim Burton’s personal cemetery.

* A small boy digs with a little blue plastic spade. Next to him, his dad aggressively hacks away at the sand with a full-sized metal garden shovel, specially lugged down to the seafront from the shed. His t-shirt reads ‘Let’s get physical!’ and as a friend passes, they do a stop-and-chat.

“We’re just down ‘ere,” says the dad, “digging some big ‘oles.”

* An elderly man sits on the edge of the prom, his feet on the sand below. Smoke billows in wafty grey clouds from between his legs. It’s just a portable BBQ that he’s self-consciously trying to hide, but until you get up close, it looks like his balls are burning down.

Probably ars(e)on.

* It’s decided; families are the worst people. Loud, obnoxious, miserable. They all look beaten by the world, throats raw from hacking on the noxious clouds from the dust of their crushed dreams, and wondering how the fuck they got here. We’re going to rule the world. We’re going to be rockstars. We’re going to be happy. But as they grew up, they became none of those things. They’re just a family, like all the other families, like everyone else; like their parents. Family after family stand on the prom, parents not speaking and standing two feet and a thousand miles apart all at the same time, while a grizzling child squeals and bucks inside a pushchair laden down with bags containing all of the many things required to keep them satisfied during a two hour jaunt to the outside world. Now that the parents have accepted the world will never be theirs, they’ve vowed to fill it with shrieks and the cries of their children’s names as they stand, amid the chaos, broken, exhausted, and in St. George baseball caps; or leather Jesus-sandals that say “Ten years ago I was at Glastonbury in a trendy hat. I liked bands. I had friends. Now I never sleep and I wish I was dead.” At this point, Children of Men seems like a utopian paradise.

* Sixteen-year-old girls in bright red lipstick and draped in long strings of pearls – you don’t look like the 1920′s starlet you picture in your head as you half-stagger in what you presume is an elegantly showy affectation, wondering where one might purchase one of those long cigarette holders. Rather, the world sees a bag lady who went a bit funny when her husband left thirty years ago, and sleeps in an old wedding dress beneath a kiss-marked poster of Rudolph Valentino.

* Two small boys sit in a dinghy while their parents watch from a blanket. I sense a compromise, where the boys wanted a boat, but the parents, with visions of them drifting to France, laid down the law with how far they could venture. So, the dinghy sits on the sand, with the front end lapped by two full inches of sea, like the cadet afforded an hour in the canoe in Brasseye. Later, the father, holding firmly to the back end, pushes the dinghy fully onto the waves. Land is all but six inches behind, but the boys scream with joy at this high seas adventure.

* Sitting in a certain place on the beach reminds me of something that happened there last summer, where a guy* sat reading, and absent-mindedly fiddling with a black pebble he found on the grass, rattling and rolling it in his palm and between his fingers, and batting it back and forth in his hands as he read. Only when it crumbled into pieces did he realise he’d spent the last 90 minutes idly playing with a hardened old dog dirt that had dried in the summer sun.

*me, it was me. I unintentionally played with shit as if t’were a toy. Sup ladies?

* A man with his legs in callipers stubs out a fag on the arm of his wheelchair.

Yea I told a tale of a Ron without a shirt. And a boy who sat upon the grass, playing with dog dirt...

* A father passes me, accompanied by two small children, and wearing a t-shirt that reads “TWO’S COMPANY, THREE’S A FANTASY!” in large block lettering. I don’t loudly ask whether his personal preference swings towards MMF or FFM, but maybe I should have.

* There’s maybe two more of these on the horizon, if that, so make the most of it. You’ll miss then when they’re gone.

* A lady passes with a King Charles Spaniel puppy on a lead, and he makes a break for me. I say hello, and he promptly leaps into my lap and climbs all over me, up my legs and onto my chest, all soft and excited, his puppy-nose prodding at my sunglasses. I sit hugging the happy puppy for a while, but eventually the woman pulls him away, and Oscar the happy puppy skips off. Our meeting is the best moment of the entire summer.

In light of that, and other animal encounters, here is an illustrative chart depicting my interactions during this summer’s beach-going.

You can extrapolate that out into my regular non-beach life to much the same result.

* Overheard conversation snippets Special Edition Spectacular. A family sit nearby, and loudly deride the accent of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. The one doing all the talking, a wiry 39 year old man, correctly and bravely deduces that the sea is “…either coming in or going out.” From there, it’s all I can do to get it down fast enough, all written as verbatim, despite the rapid-fire non-sequitur nature:

“How do you swim in the Channel?” he asks, “With all the riptides? How long does it take in a boat? You’d be all wrinkled.” He sips from a two litre bottle of Dr. Pepper and continues. “Ever taste your own sweat? When you’re in the bath? They say that hot drinks keep you cool and cold drinks keep you warm. Women do go topless, but not here. If you want to see that, then go to a special beach….”

One thing after another after another, the stream of consciousness dubious factoids bring to mind a flu-dream QI marathon, as I scribble like a court stenographer.

“Go topless and keep your bottoms on, if you want a tan. Men do that. Do you want a sandwich? Years ago we used to joke that Kelly looked like a (mouths the word ‘paki’) when she tanned, and Charlie’s ginger, so she’s pale. It’s like putting a chicken in the oven – you’re cooking yourself. That’s what we do when we go sunbathing. We’re meat; we cook ourselves. Gingers are a different meat. Thinner, I suppose.”

A thin finger of smoke trails across the sky, rising from the red-hot nib of my biro.

“Don’t forget, you can go out, he can’t. He hasn’t got the mental agility. I’m not being funny, but when I take him out shopping, I let him take the change. Training him up, see? Tasks.”

Slow, soft fade out. Slow, soft fade back in.

“I don’t really like the soft cheeses. Cathedral, that’s nice. So old it’s gone mouldy. We went to the place where they make cheese. Chedder. Place called Chedder where they make chedder. They had John Virgo up there, doing his cabaret circuit. Clotted cream. Fudge. Lunch and dinner, dinner and pudding together. I used to like Coke a lot, but the recipe has changed.”

I exchange smiles with a frail old lady in a wheelchair, and suddenly, transcribing reams of nonsense seems like a wicked waste of a life.

“Jay keeps reminding me what he done to his mouth on his bike. Nothing to what I done at Devon cliffs. I didn’t fall down a cliff! Me and Barry, we tied me handlebars up so I couldn’t steer. Couldn’t even move them, tied ‘em up with ropes. I rode right into a tree. It’s funny now, but at the time, it really hurt. Didn’t go to hospital. We went back and they’ve tied padding round that tree now. Health and safety, innit?”

* A hugely complicated electric wheelchair with a seat made for a small child sits empty in the garden area. On the ground next to it, a mother lays on a towel. A tiny, frail and buckled figure sleeps under a blanket, close at her side.

* Three lads walk along the prom, pushing their bikes. One’s silly little BMX is so small and low to the ground, he self-consciously switches between walking with his back at a ninety degree angle, or doing a strange ‘squat walk’ with his knees bent like he’s trying to catch a pig, ala Four Lions.

* Overheard conversation snippets. Eight-year-old boy to his dad:

“Were you alive when Elvis died? How old were you when Michael Jackson died?”

* A coastguard cleans his van and treats me to a masterclass in slapstick. It’s another thing that sounds made up, but I saw it with my own eyes, and I’ll fight you with a broken lightbulb if you think I’m a liar. He uses a brush, bucket and hose, and the following series of events occurs.

- The coastguard drops the bucket.

- The bucket rolls down the long slope, causing him to give chase, hose still in hand.

- He’s jerked to a rough stop by the hose, which doesn’t reach.

- He drops the hose and runs to the bucket.

- The hose, five yards away, writhes and thrashes on the floor, squirting him in the face with a jet of water.

- As he flinches from the water, he drops the bucket again.

Throughout, my whole body is tensing so hard to stop myself from yelling “Mr. Grimsdale!” that every vertebrae crumbles like a trodden-on Pringle.

* Overheard conversation snippets. Small boy to his grandfather:

“This drink tastes of wee!”