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 it ...

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 ...

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, it ...

Is Tintin Transgender? Last week I wrote about other dimensions. This week I'd like to take the plunge into alternative animated worlds: what if we could see beyond the published cartoon frames of my favourite character from childhood, Tintin? There was always something about Tintin's androgyny, his anodyne spirit about making the world a bett...

Murder on the Orient Express 05.11.17 Murder on the Orient Express. It's a film about the luxury train, with a murder on it. What else is there to say of this enjoyable, nothing-special film? I went for visual stimulation and escapism and I think it's what I got given, like caviar or some other overrated thing. I knew I would get a glimpse of how t...

What's On? 03.11.17 How many classic films have you seen? There are plenty that I haven't, including perhaps the most famous one of all, Citizen Kane – whose reputation, like Joyce's Ulysses, is of an art work more celebrated than experienced. If I ever make it to retirement, or better still to a post-studies settling down (with own home, car, and ...

Out Of This World: A Tribute To Brit Marling 29.10.17 There are moments, they appear before you on screen or in a book or in a song, and they capture what you yearn for. This might be the case for anyone, and is certainly so for those who repress something. But then, doesn't everyone have something they can't have? Isn't that how the psyc...

Thor: Ragnarok 28.10.17 Two thirds of the way through Thor: Ragnarok, there's a superlative piece of slow-mo action that should have lasted longer. We see in a historical flashback the Valkyries – an all-woman army on winged horseback – approaching the story's villain, Cate Blanchett's Hela, in a final role of the dice. It's a scene akin to those o...

What's On? 27.10.17 Perhaps the superhero I have the least connection with on our screens today is Thor. I never watch his movies; I feel nothing for the super-serious Norse world that he comes from – it strikes me in the trailers as bland, a pompous landscape of furrowed brows, facial hair, formal tones of voice and shining breastplates. As f...

Trans vs TERFs 22.10.17 It's the red rag to a bull, from a transgender perspective: radical feminists, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and what we're meant to think of each other. I read this week an article in The Big Issue (October 16-22) about violence at a protest from some weeks ago, between trans and anti-trans activists ...