What's On? Quite a lot, is the answer, with it being Oscar season. Molly's Game got good reviews from my flatmate, and Jessica Chastain is always worth watching. What else? I watched Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (review to come) last night and it's one of the best films I've seen in quite a while. Like all great movies, it has an endin...

2018 All Shiny and New 12.01.18 I wake up in darkness: too cold and too dark. It's 2018, Edinburgh-style, in a freezing bedroom. Thoughts of studies and part-time work come to me. In my part-time job I am writing a manual, with a page of FAQs relating to work. There's a question I kept to myself for obvious reasons, but it re-appears in the morning...

Final Message of 2017 22.12.17 I wrote this post yesterday, but it had a strange effect on me afterwards: I wrote about my excitement buying things for my family, about spending money on stuff. Christmas can have a strange effect on people, on me at least. Briefly I got swept up in the glittering waves, imagining how it's going to be, tha...

What's On? 18.12.17 In Filmhouse cinema this week they're showing It's a Wonderful Life . I've never seen it and am aware it's the ultimate Christmas feel-good movie- But stop. As much as I'd like to talk about movies and good cheer, I'm going to refer instead to the images I chose for this post. Isn't there something creepy about Christmas? A patr...

Christmas Party 16.12.17 Isn't mulled wine the best? I am still glowing with the aftertaste, from last night's Christmas party. I wore my new, shiny black pleated skirt – which you can see in the top photo if you really peer and use your imagination. Well done Gina. Must model New Favourite Skirt with better strategy next time. Anyway, some introdu...

Star Wars: The Last Jedi 15.12.17 I would watch this film again. Not for the lightsaber fights, which were strangely banal, or for the romance that develops between Boyega's Finn and Tan's Rose, which glowed slightly at the end. In fact not for the many shoulder-shrug participants of this movie: Oscar Isaac's ace pilot Po and his one-dimensional ch...

On Orange Is The New Black 11.12.17 It was only a matter of time before I wrote about this show. Orange Is The New Black is the Netflix drama with one central location, where no one can escape, not the prison guards or their captors. There are several strong characters, all suffering from bad decisions that have cost them in life, from drug addicts...

What's On? 08.12.17 Note: I wrote this for a What's On? post, but I'd like to add it here as a companion piece to the Christmas Party posting. I so seldom write about clothes, especially the ones I like, and writing this about beautiful skirts made me happy . . . This is a difficult What's On? to do, because I've been invited to two housewarming pa...

On AIDS, Twitter, and a Bad Week at Work 03.12.17 I went to an event on AIDS on Friday afternoon. I know so little about AIDS, mainly fragments from my childhood in the 1980s, of adverts with gravestones, then later a televised concert commemorating the death of Freddie Mercury. In the late 1990s I read a book by journalist/broadcaster Andrew Neil,...

The Party 03.12.17 It finished so abruptly, there was hardly time for disappointment. The Party is a film that imagines what a soiree in London looks like. With the dialogue slightly dull, I stopped thinking about the minimal plot and wondered how much these characters would earn: Kristin Scott-Thomas's House of Commons Minister would have a salary...

What's On 30.11.17 It doesn't come out until April 2018, but I'm going to mention the next Avengers movie because its trailer is on release. Yes, that's how big the Avengers franchise has become: even its trailers are newsworthy. It looks good, if what you enjoy are the myriad superheroes from Captain American: Civil War – because Avengers: Infinit...

A Difficult Week for Trans Rights 26.11.17 Since I joined Twitter a month or so ago, I've become aware of the vitriol about trans and non-binary rights. Effectively you can boil the debate down to one side battling for its own existence, while the other side attempts to strangle this possibility at birth. It is a seismic debate. It is effectively d...

Battle of the Sexes 25.11.17 This was a sweet, uplifting experience, of a face-off in the zero-sum game of patriarchy, where on this occasion the right person wins. Emma Stone is a strong Billy Jean King, her battle for women's respect blended within a tender LGBT love story. Steve Carell is a surprisingly likeable Bobby Riggs, a little-boy-lost wh...

What's On? 23.11.17 There are no new blockbusters this weekend, just the accumulation in the multiplex cinemas of Blade Runner 2049 , Thor: Ragnarok and Justice League . I'm happy to avoid them all, I was absorbed but now I'm looking for something new. Is this the hallmark of my generation? There is The Battle of the Sexes in the Cameo cinema and i...

Justice League 19.11.17 I'm still not sure why they needed Aquaman. He has a trident, and he swims really fast; fine, but the single oceanic scene comes and goes in the shake of a fish tail, and for the rest of the movie, he really is a fish out of water. I want more female superheroes, and fewer macho, gruff-voiced bodybuilders, whose presence in ...

Trans Remembrance 19.11.17 We gathered, commemorated, and also celebrated our identities. I wish I had promoted the event more successfully, and yes, more professionally, but that's a thing for another time. Elaine Gallagher, our guest speaker, spoke movingly about unemployment, about being single, and the awkward, probing questions that she's aske...

What's On? 16.11.17 I've never watched a Justice League film. I'm going to take a leap of faith and assume you'd like to know why, with the added question: will Gina finally go to the cinema this weekend and break her vow with this awful-looking franchise? But first, my reservations. Let's start with Superman, even if he died last year or the year ...

Happy Fucking Transgender Remembrance 14.11.17 Trans Remembrance, that white, middle class thing that I do. I guess that could be your perception, for I am white, in a slightly Celtic-looking way, whatever that means. Last year I organized a screening of Tangerine , about African-American prostitutes in LA, a film I grow to love more and more with ...

The Florida Project 12.11.17 Like Harry Potter and the Enid Blyton stories, The Florida Project is partly a world seen from the perspective of children. Around them on the sun-drenched strip of cheap motels and garish junk food cafes, little girls and boys play together, are noisy, and seem not to realize the challenges faced by the adults. Providi...

What's On? 10.11.17 He's already famous for directing the low-budget Tangerine , one of the most uplifting accounts of transgender characters ever caught on film. Now Sean Baker returns with another low-budget special, The Florida Project , starring Willem Defoe and some unknown, brilliant child actors. If it's anything like as good as Tangerine , ...