What's On? 21.09.17 Flags are funny things. For countries they're so pivotal, and actually can be nice to look at. I used to have a bedroom poster of all the flags of the world, I was drawn especially to Africa, and the flags of Kenya and Uganda, and for their colours, Botswana and Tanzania. Favourite flag of all? Obviously Wales, but Ireland's fla...
What's On? 16.09.17 The big movie event this weekend is Mother! starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem (with Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris supporting), a disturbing psychological horror about terrible things in the adult world, to follow last week's It and the focus on childhood. I'm looking forward to Mother! because I could really do with...
What's On? 07.09.17 I was around 14 when I fell in love with the works of Stephen King. There was one particular summer when I picked up my older brother's copy of It , a book I knew he adored. It should have taken me weeks but I finished it in around four days, and I'm not a fast reader. A day or so afterwards I started on another of King's classi...
What's On? 31.08.17 There are three films in the Cameo cinema this weekend enjoying top billing: Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky , I've already seen and thought was a bit pointless, and that's despite my finding the American Midwest a fascinating part of the English-speaking world. Leaves of Grass (2010), for example, I would happily part cash with...
What's On? 23.08.17 A trove of good films coming out, clashing with the final weekend of the Festival. I haven't even seen Charlize Theron's kick-arse action movie Atomic Blonde but how can I say no to Soderbergh's Logan Lucky with Adam Driver and Daniel Craig doing a heist in the American Mid West? And what of Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit about the r...
What's On? 11.08.17 This is usually a small and simple post to do, but with the Festival in full swing in Edinburgh, my head is turned a dozen different ways. There are trans-based shows in Edinburgh at the Traverse theatre, one named Adam (about being a trans man) and the other predictably called Eve starring the playwright and actress Jo Clifford...
Edinburgh Just Festival 11.08.17 I haven't been on stage before as a trans person, but I will have my fifteen minutes this coming Friday, on 11 August, at Edinburgh's Just Festival. The festival-within-a-festival serves to create a safe space for dialogue, and I'm joining that dialogue, as I discuss perceptions surrounding trans people in modern so...
What's On? 15.07.17 I remember the disturbing nature of Planet of the Apes when I was young. Not so much the first one with its iconic, Statue-of-Liberty ending (1968), but subsequent ones including the creepy Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) with its scarred, surviving ancestors of humanity's nuclear victims. Then Escape (1971), imbibed with ...
What's On? 06.07.17 The international football competitions are over, I have no TV or Internet (at home), it's time to re-focus on what's important. And that means Spiderman . The third iteration of Spiderman. Why can't we have Spiderwoman? I remember the animated series of Spiderwoman back in the eighties, she was able to fly and looked pretty coo...
What's On? 29.06.17 Everyone's talking about the five-star movie Baby Driver and it's out this weekend at the Cameo . It has ingredients I'm not partial to, including the presence of Jamie Foxx and a story line about a teenager(ish) boy. With nothing else of interest out there, though, this is one of those times to watch a film that doesn't seem 'y...
What's On? 23.06.17 The Edinburgh Film Festival has started, I have seen the queues outside Cineworld cinema on Fountainbridge. I admit there's nothing that leaps out at me in the schedule, but perhaps that's the thing with these festivals, and with life in general. Get outside your comfort zone and test yourself, you might be gently surprised. Cam...
What's On? 15.06.17 I could refer to The Mummy at Cineworld or Churchill at Cameo but there's a brightly coloured elephant in the room and its name is Gay Pride, coming to you, Edinburgh, this Saturday. But first, some honesty. I really, really don't want to go to Pride. Shall I count the ways it will discomfort me? Here's three: contrived fun, lou...
What's On? 02.06.17 Well, there's the UK General Election for one thing. Shall I affect casual indifference? 'All politicians are the same, liars and opportunists the lot of them, etc.' No. I'll be watching it on Thursday evening with the kind of excitement football fans have for the World Cup (and both are approx. every four years, so don't dismis...
What's On? 25.05.17 What to make of Studio Ghibli? I think 'anime' and my mind conjures images from Howl's Moving Castle , Laputa: Castle in the Sky , Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away . The latter is arguably the most celebrated, but they all share something in common: near-sexless adolescent heroes, starring in particular a kind-hearted girl dr...
What's On? 18.05.17 What I like about this post-Oscars period is that good films you might have missed return to the cinemas, for lack of 'big box-office alternatives' that are now in storage for the summer. I haven't seen Get Out! for example, which was lauded months ago as a dark and funny film that stands out from the crowd, but there it is agai...
What's On? 04.05.17 In the end, I didn't go to watch King Arthur . Money issues, among other things, told me not to. But for this weekend's cinema, a person whose tastes I respect has urged me to go and watch The Handmaiden , a South Korean special about pornography and crime within elegant surroundings. I'm aware the film reviewers loved it too. O...
What's On? 04.05.17 I would be worried about the new King Arthur movie, if the legend hadn't been ruined already some thirteen years ago. I still remember the 2004 'version' in traumatic flashbacks, a film so bad it took me a decade to realize Clive Owen was good at acting. Of Ioan Gruffudd, however, I still dare not speak his name. What the hell k...
What's On? 28.04.17 The Mad Max movies were never my kind of dystopia. What is my kind? Probably a 'safe' bureaucratic Byzantium, like Terry Gillian's Brazil or Richard Ayoade's The Double , a world not unlike the totalitarian monoliths of the European past, a concrete land of broken heating or air-con where getting things done requires forms signe...
What's On? 21.04.17 The reviews haven't been great, but The Belko Experiment has to have one of the most interesting premises of any film this weekend. I've seen the trailer, so can you tell you this much: an office of staff finds themselves locked into their building, and told to murder each other otherwise they'll get killed themselves. As I'm wr...
What's On? 13.04.17 Black cinema is not something I know much about, and that's including Afro-American; by 'black' I'm not sure what I mean, except I guess cinema within a subculture, defined by a particular, disempowered ethnicity, the one I know as 'black,' especially relating to America. Is there just one 'black' cinema? Or do I see the colour ...
