Caff: Okay, so Patrick didn’t write an introduction either. P-Rock is a wildly awesome writer and great friend, who spent this year dominating both the blogosphere and print world. He was kind enough to come back to the OL hood for the besties. Check out his Top 10 Films of 2012 over at Mishka while you’re indulging in his righteousness.

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There are few films with more buzz surrounding them this year than Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master – his first film since 2007’s cynical masterpiece There Will Be Blood. The rumors boiling online that it’s a fictionalized look at the origins of Scientology have fueled controversy – peaking when word spread that the church’s shit-eating poster boy Tom Cruise “has issues” with the film.

But the film is not an expose on Scientology and certainly not an attack on its sci-fi theology. Although nearly everyone in the film is a member of a blooming, controversial cult, PTA only uses Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard as a loose framework to stage his perplexing and brilliant character study set in post-World War II America. At this point, PTA’s grasp of cinematic expression is ridiculous. Every shot, every camera movement is sharp and profound. As with There Will Be Blood, The Master grips you by the balls before a single line of dialogue is spoken, which doesn’t happen until several minutes in. Once Joaquin Phoenix opens his mouth…game over, man.

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The Expendables 2 comes out this weekend and while it looks like fun, I’m going to wait for the DVD. It pains me to say this because I honestly love Sylvester Stallone. With Rocky Balboa in 2006 and Rambo in 2008, he revisited the two roles that made him one biggest stars in the world and ended a shaky lull in his career. These two movies led to The Expendables and a pseudo-ironic revival of the big-budget beefy action genre. Mr. Stallone is a busy man once again. But to me, he’s always been at his best when his biceps mirror his heart and his fierce defiance against the pricks in power.

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This isn’t really a Prometheus review. By now you’ve most likely seen the movie, read reviews, or heard about it from your boys. This article is a rant with plenty of spoilers.

Does anyone honestly expect greatness from Sir Ridley Scott anymore? There’s no doubt he’s still a master craftsman who can create some truly stunning visuals. But for a while now he’s been more concerned with those visuals than with minor annoyances like story and characters. That’s why for his prequel to Alien Scott was cool working off of a script originally written by the guy who wrote The Darkest Hour (remember that one?), that was later touched up by Damon Lindelof. We all know Lindelof from Lost, which we still argue about, but that’s only because we still love it so much.

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(I hate to start this piece in the most boring way possible, but) I grew up in Andover, New Jersey. Nestled in the farmlands and forests of Sussex County, Andover is an old mining town and the polar opposite of the general population’s image of “Dirty Jersey.” Expansive corn fields, forests criss-crossed with streams, and a local hot-spot called Lake Illiff make up most of the geography of my homeland. The neighborhood was a giant nipple feeding my imagination. I lived there until I was 19 when I thought it would be a good idea to go to college.

Like most young boys, I harbored a large imagination. With tools like action figures and my Mongoose BMX, Andover was one big playground. My dad introduced me to Star Wars when I was in the 2nd grade (because that’s what everyone should feel like happened to them during their first Star Wars experience, right? We’re “introduced” to it). I read a lot of escapist fiction like Dragonlance and Lord of the Rings – also courtesy of my dad. All of these sacred works blew my imagination up, made me want to jump in my X-Wing and take on the Empire up. I wanted out of Andover. This town wasn’t big enough for Patrick Cooper, who would surely grow up to save the planet from evil. Then along came Ray Bradbury.

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Judging from its matter-of-fact plot synopsis – “A drama focused on five months in the life of pedophile who keeps a 10-year-old boy locked in his basement.” – first-time director/writer Markus Schleinzer‘s drama Michael isn’t going to appeal to a wide audience. It’s certainly the darkest character study I’ve seen in recent memory and also the most well crafted. Schleinzer, a disciple of Michael Haneke (Funny Games), presents the character of Michael without passing any judgement, which makes it all the more unsettling.

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From the ’60s-style promotional video for the Arboria Institute that opens the film to the final jarring minutes of the film, Beyond the Black Rainbow brings you under its control and lulls you into a visual and audio trance. During your immersive state of hypnosis, it might be easy to overlook the heady themes of writer-director Panos Cosmatos’ debut feature. Against a throbbing, psychadelic backdrop, Cosmatos tells a story of repression and contrition set in an alternate 1983 that will not be easily shaken from your memory. It’s a beautiful nightmare I didn’t want to end.

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The Big Bang Theory is now on its 80th season and I don’t get it. Recently I started catching snippets from the show while I waited for Seinfeld to come on. And I don’t fucking get it. I’ve always been okay with the knowledge that the show existed and that an insane amount of people like the show, but now that I’ve seen it I want some answers. Whether you   hate it or love it, please, I beg you, read on and sound off on what you think is appealing about this 30 minute saccharin stream of “nerdy” references and painfully placed Battlestar jokes.

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On April 6, 1993, Makome M’Bowole, a youth of Central African descent, was shot in the head at point blank range while handcuffed to a radiator in a Paris police station. The police called it an “accident.” There had been hundreds of these so-called accidents since the 1980s around Paris and its low-income suburbs – known as banlieue districts. Needless to say, these senseless deaths at the hands of bonehead cops repeatedly led to rioting and birthed an unbearable tension between immigrant youths and the police.

This volatile banlieue society is captured in Mathieu Kassovitz‘s landmark 1995 film, La Haine. An eruptive and stylistically beautiful film, La Haine looks at one day in the life of three kids from immigrant families living in a working-class banlieue housing project outside of Paris. Vinz the Jew (Vincent Cassel), Saïd the Arab (Saïd Taghmaoui), and Hubert the African (Hubert Koundé) are all recovering after a night of heavy rioting. During the previous night’s chaos, a friend of the boys, Abdel, was shot by a cop and is in critical condition in Paris. One other possibly explosive thing happened the night before: a cop lost his gun. And Vinz found it.

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I was never into hardcore but my ex-girlfriend in college was. She was into all those bands with “blood” in their names and local Boston groups like Suicide File. I tolerated it – anything was better than Morrisey, her other love – and I even liked a few. My favorite parts were, of cours, the breakdowns. All of them. Any of them. Breakdowns make me want to do push-ups and bang a chick – at the same time! The Raid: Redemption is like a bunch of hardcore breakdowns strung together with some flimsy exposition thrown in between. I couldn’t care less what was going on in between the breakdowns – just fast forward the verses and get to the throwdowns.

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