BY ANDREW MOODY Now that Jeremy Corbyn has publicly supported a second Brexit referendum, I’d like to flash back to 1972. Coppola’s The Godfather was the smash hit of the summer, Nixon was two years away from impeachment, Edward Heath was Conservative Prime Minister and unemployment (which kicked off the punk movement) exceeded 1,000,000 for the first time since the 1930s. At this time, the … Continue reading Working Class Toynbee of Toynbee Hall
BY ANDREW MOODY English celebrities aren’t a patch on our American cousins. The teeth! The collagen injections! The breast enhancements! The penile implants! Us Brits prefer curling up with our smartphones tweeting sarcastic comments about Brexit (Pro or Remain, your choice) whilst farting into our favourite sofa cushion. Those that want to actually crack the media industry need to be six foot classically trained beauties … Continue reading Dear Trump
BY ANDREW MOODY Yesterday I had my fourth bout of ECT (Electro Convulsive Therapy) – so-called because they pass an electrical current through your brain while you are unconscious. Where I once tried to put a positive spin on it, I am now firmly against the procedure, owing to irritability, confusion and memory loss that does not look like fading away – not to mention … Continue reading 4 Rounds
BY ANDREW MOODY In the haze between exhaustion, sleep and consciousness, I feel something tapping my foot. It’s pouring with freezing rain, and I’m curled up in a ball by a bus stop somewhere in Aldwych. I’m penniless, no bus or train pass, no way of returning to the acute ward I absconded from some days ago, walking for hours and hours sobbing through the … Continue reading Homeless in Haunted London
BY ANDREW MOODY The first time I heard the term “transsexual” was around age fourteen in Thomas Harris’s horror classic The Silence of the Lambs: ““Do you know the procedure for testing male applicants for transsexual surgery?” “No.” “It may help if you bring me a copy of the regimen from any of the centers, but to begin: the battery of tests usually includes Wechsler … Continue reading Transinsanity
BY ANDREW MOODY Back in the early nineties my family got cable. There were two movie channels back then, and when Coppola’s flawed but in many ways brilliant adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula came on TV, I begged my Dad to let me watch it. I was allowed to watch violent films, just not sexual ones. Dracula is both, so as an eleven year old … Continue reading Dracula
BY ANDREW MOODY Cannibal serial killer and psychiatric genius Hannibal Lecter first emerged in Thomas Harris 1980 novel Red Dragon and probably remains the most iconic literary character of the 20th century. It wasn’t until Jonathan Demme’s 1991 classic The Silence of the Lambs (the novel was released three years earlier) that Lecter gained rockstar status and became the most influential villain in American art … Continue reading Lecter’s Enduring Appeal
BY ANDREW MOODY Born in 1927, occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger (author of the famous Hollywood Babylon, a document of early celebrity scandals that has since been widely discredited) has made 40 films since 1937, including the notorious Lucifer Rising whose music was created by (recently dead) neo-Nazi Charlie Manson family killer Bobby Beausoleil. Anger, (born Kenneth Anglemyer) is an adherent of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, inspired … Continue reading Anger
BY ANDREW MOODY It’s interesting to note (given the type of man and artist he became) that Bret Easton Ellis, raised in Beverly Hills and internationally famous from the age of 20, has never had a job. He’s made millions from his writing of course, and when I queued up to meet him in London in July 2010 at a book signing the queue stretched … Continue reading Ellis
VICAR For the first time in my Country Squire Magazine career, I have received a prayer request (and, please, Dear Readers, send as many requests as You wish by using the contact page of the website). The request came from Andrew Moody, who writes film reviews for the magazine. Andrew describes himself thus: “Andrew Moody attended the top non-private grammar school in the UK and … Continue reading A Prayer for the Mentally Ill
BY ANDREW MOODY To many liberal Americans, Edward Snowden is a hero. To others (like Presidents Obama and Trump) he is a traitor who should be executed. In left wing auteur Oliver Stone’s weak film adaptation of the NSA whistle blower’s life and career, the very important and difficult job of National Security is treated like an all-powerful version of S.P.E.C.T.R.E and Snowden is portrayed … Continue reading Snowden
BY ANDREW MOODY William Burroughs, although an iconic figure who the Beats referred to as “The priest”, lived one of the most tragic lives of any major American artist. A heroin addict for the majority of his life, by his death in 1997 he still had not conquered his addiction and had lived only half a life. Kurt Cobain, also a brilliant artist and heroin … Continue reading The Devil Beneath My Feet
BY ANDREW MOODY The strangest thing about Nabokov’s classic, notorious novel Lolita is that if you type the title into Google it will be blocked from providing results – press on a few resultant links and you may well enter a criminal database. I read it first when I was about sixteen, now I couldn’t bear it, and, knowing the narrative (if not all of … Continue reading Lolita
BY ANDREW MOODY William Friedkin’s 1973 masterpiece The Exorcist, one of the few horror films to have ever been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars (to date The Silence of the Lambs is the only horror winner of the award) was re-released in 1999. when I was 16. I was underage, so I had to sneak in. The trailers back in the early digital … Continue reading Exorcist
BY ANDREW MOODY “He was some kind of a man,” an ageing Marlene Dietrich quietly states as the corrupt, overweight cop played by Orson Welles is shot to death at the end of the director’s expressionist inspired film noir Touch of Evil (1958). According the preface of Simon Callow’s epic three volume biography of Welles, in 1962 (and already an overweight, depressive chain-smoker) the director … Continue reading Remembering Welles
BY ANDREW MOODY Iconic Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, who once referred to himself as so famous and wealthy he was essentially “upper class”, called the anti-Semite psychopath (and potential UK Labour prime minister) Jeremy Corbyn “as the best of a bad bunch” in August 2017, shortly after the hung parliament. One of the most influential writers of the past twenty years, Welsh began life as the … Continue reading Welsh
BY ANDREW MOODY It is now the last week in September 2018, and it seems that many still refuse to accept the Democratic process. Look over at the Momentum Conference (it’s not a Labour conference, is it?) going on in Liverpool this week. It’s not as if in last year’s election people voted for these Trotskyites, is it? Labour is just depressing these days for … Continue reading The Bitter Momentum Conference
BY ANDREW MOODY When I first saw Scorsese’s drugged up, delirious masterpiece in Bromley cinema, the reaction was interesting to say the least. City boys (who seemed to comprise the majority of the audience) felt like they’d finally found a film that represented their lives. But a man in a McDonald’s uniform looked like he had inadvertently walked into the seventh circle of hell, and … Continue reading On Wolf of Wall Street
BY ANDREW MOODY Kubrick made some extraordinary pictures, but none appear to endure like his ambiguous Vietnam epic Full Metal Jacket. Former Gulf War veteran and author Anthony Swofford wrote a piece for the New York Times accusing the film of seducing his generation to war. At the end of the dubious article he talks about laughing at the Gunnery sergeant (Lee J Ermy) and … Continue reading Kubrick’s Most Enduring Masterpiece
BY ANDREW MOODY James Holmes is one of the rare spree killers who did not plan his attack with suicide as the conclusion to his carnage. It is difficult to know what exactly his motivations were, considering the only option a mass killer can hope to achieve should he survive is a life time of pain and incarceration. Does that make his actions, in a … Continue reading The Look of Evil
