27.03.17 The Dilemma of Having Your Face Tortured From February 2016, I began to have laser-hair-removal treatment done privately for my facial hair. In December, I began the process with the NHS, through a 'photographic' session. Over three months on, I'm still waiting to hear when I can start the treatment, but in the meantime, here is my st...

26.03.17 Life Gruesome and deeply disturbing, this is a film I should qualify with the caveat that I entered the cinema feeling low about life. I didn't realize quite how low; that day in Edinburgh included sunny weather and a stillness in the cool air that I love. A few days earlier, however, I'd received rejections for things I'd applied for, inc...

What's On? 23.03.17 This weekend there's a sci-fi with Jake Gyllenhaal called Life and I don't know how to react to it. I love a visually fantastic sci-fi; the Tom Cruise movie Oblivion is an example of the kind of eye-candy I could happily watch and not be affected by the silly, committee-manufactured ending. Even Matt Damon's Elysium was . . . we...

20.03.17 Personal Shopper It's always interesting when you come across two reviews of the film you watched that diverge so differently. Empire magazine makes Personal Shopper out as a three-star movie (out of five), opening with the line, 'There's no one aspect of Olivier Assays' latest film that entirely works.' Elsewhere in 'review world,' The Gu...

19/03/17, Now Close Your Eyes I have continued to listen to the recordings, the ones promoting mental health. I lie on my bed on these evenings, the room is dark like the Scottish winter outside, there's light coming from the living room, and from the laptop next to me. I'm dressed in black, in leggings, vest and long black cardigan, with a basebal...

What's On? 16.03.17 I am both fascinated and repelled by ghost stories. I began watching The Ring on my own and then decided not to, at a certain point, early on. Similarly with Paranormal Activity , I started to watch it alone some years ago, and couldn't cope with it, despite its fear coming from tricks with shadows and sounds. There's a ghost st...

16/03/17, Kong: Skull Island Confessions first: I like exotic, monster movies, even if the good ones rarely come around. I really liked the Jurassic Park films, including the most recent one, Jurassic World . I enjoyed the 1990s Godzilla with Matthew Broderick. And when I was very young, I was besotted with Conan Doyle's The Lost World (the Ladybir...

13/03/17, Listen and Relax . . . My gender-transitioning nurse – my current doctor Frankenstein if you will – gave me a link to a mental-health-and-wellbeing site, full of listening tracks. Up until yesterday I'd ignored them, being too anxious about wasting valuable study time that I waste anyway. And so last night I downloaded, clicked on and lis...

12/03/17, Logan A film in which an old gunslinger is called into action one final time, Logan has heart and a tenderness, at least for the first two-thirds. Its conclusion embraces a nondescript action sequence and that's a shame; I even wonder if the anticlimactic predictability of the end made this film appear worse, for its contrast with its eng...

What's On? 09/03/17 Should I go and watch Logan ? There are no easy answers, despite the strong reviews. The X-Men did nothing for me, though I do have a soft spot for the third in the series, when they're fighting on Alcatraz Island; Vinnie Jones being tricked by Ellen Page into running into a wall. But the others? The characters are too two-dimen...

07/03/17, Certain Women A slice-of-life film about the lives of four women in a dead-end town. The camera stays on things longer than is usual, as if the character of Time is playing Best Supporting Actor. In the final scene, as a lonely protagonist is working in the stables, you wait to see the woman she loves come back to her. And you wait. It's ...

05/03/17, Sciatica, My Enemy Since I use these posts to write about what's on my mind, I'd like to write about what's bothering me at the moment, it's a thing that won't go away, and is starting to shape my life again. It's called sciatica. To explain: a few years ago, I used to work out in the gym, two or three times a week. On one occasion I did ...

04/03/17, Trespass Against Us It's an issue worth considering: in modern Britain's paradigm of high rents and the elusive property ladder, is there another way to live? Like the Travellers, for example, with their caravans and open-air and camp fires? It's a grim alternative that's depicted in Trespass Against Us , it has to be said. The film shows...

What's On? 03.03.17 A dilemma arises when you've watched too many good films consecutively. Moonlight , which won best film last week at the Oscar's, needs no introduction, while the film I watched after it, the German comedy Toni Erdmann was arguably even better, or at least, it was for me. Prior to both, I watched John Wick 2 ; it renewed my fait...

28/02/17, Toni Erdmann I've noticed a pattern that it's more difficult to write about a good film than a flawed one. Be it a 'bad' film I liked despite its flaws, like Underworld: Blood Wars , or a film that's just plain shit, as was the case with John Wick 2 , they're fun to write about, like a dream that doesn't make sense. Should I only go and w...

25/02/17, The Way the Wind Is Blowing It was Thursday morning when I saw the news, the Trump administration policy that US states would be able to legislate against trans students having access into the school restrooms of the gender they identify with. It sent a chill because I thought we'd get four years of Trump making a fool of himself without ...

What's On? 24.02.17 La La Land is being flaunted in Cameo cinema right now, not only a sure-fire winner for the coming Oscars but a film for our times, so says a Guardian journalist who condemns the film/musical. It's a musical of solipsism and uncaring, grasping individualism, so also says the journalist . . . To be honest, that kind of condemnati...

21/02/17, Moonlight From the ridiculous to the sublime; I know, cliché. Having watched Keanu Reeves's increasingly untenable act of bullshit in John Wick 2 , I grabbed the student-friendly, £5 Monday offer at the Cameo and watched Moonlight , a film that's gotten five-star reviews with everyone. A recipe for disappointment? It's not a film of speci...

19/02/17, Late Night Life It's late for a computer room, I can hear the wind outside and I know I'll have to walk my way through it. It's dark, of course, outside, and I am the last one here. I went to the cinema last night, to a late-night showing, a shitty film with a 10.30pm start. I walked home, passing pissed teenagers in a bus stop, I haven't...

19/02/17, John Wick 2 There are films where at a certain point you feel like you're standing at a precipice, staring out into the void. I had one of those moments last night at a late-night showing of John Wick 2 . How to summarise my anomie? I felt I had accidentally wandered into a pornographic cinema for people who love guns. It was, as the clic...