amber can walk

This review is going to contain major spoilers of  American Pie Presents: Beta House (2007) and  40 Days and 40 Nights (2002) , as well as minor spoilers of  Sex Education (2019-present) . If you wanted to watch these, then here is your warning to stop reading and go and watch them. Also, there are graphic discussions of sexual assault and transphobia in this post.  If this is something that you are uncomfortable with or unable to cope with, I won't blame you for skipping it. Take care of yourself. * I truly hate the term 'guilty pleasure'. This isn't just because it creates shame around liking a thing but that it can often devalue that thing entirely, framing it as only worthy of attention because of some need to indulge in cringe. Like the only reason you would watch or read something would be to hate it. I think it's pretty common on the internet to only talk about the things you hate and when you do that, the conversation about that thing is very limited to its...

This review is not going to contain spoilers but it is going to talk about the film in detail so if you wanted to watch it and feel like this would spoil it for you, then here is your warning to stop reading and go and watch the film. * Jane Campion's In The Cut (2003) discusses fear and desire in its story of a college teacher, Frannie Avery, as she pursues a police officer, Detective Malloy, believing he has been committing violent murders, slowly becoming drawn into the case itself as well as the man she fears. This film did not get the love it deserved at the time and is still in bad favour with many people now. But I feel like I've been looking for this film. I've been aware of it and its poor reputation but I didn't watch it until recently. And now I'm obsessed. I've wanted to see a film the blends murder and sex in this way, distinctly from a female point of view, and how the desire to transgress the male gaze, in all senses of that word, can lead to actu...

Last year, when trying to figure out what to read, I decided to go through some of the Penguin Modern classics I'd bought for like a quid each. I hadn't got round to reading them so I decided to give it a go. They usually have essays or short stories or poetry from different authors to give you taste of what their work is like. Gertrude Stein was one of these authors. Source: Foyles What I realised from reading her book from this collection, Food , is that I love Gertrude Stein. In the book were short poems about various types of food. There is a poem in there called 'Rhubarb' which insists that the vegetable is both susan and not susan at the same time. This might not mean anything to anyone and I'm not sure it means anything to me. But the kind of work where the meaning isn't immediately obvious just seems to click with me.  Stein worked within modernism and, as Deb Jannerson states, a process called 'automatic writing', where you essentially just writ...

This review is not going to contain spoilers but it is going to talk about the series in detail so if you wanted to watch it and feel like this would spoil it for you, then here is your warning to stop reading and go and watch the show. As of the date of this post, it's on All4 in the UK ! * According to Louis Staples writing in BBC Culture , a recent GLAAD repo rt revealed that 'there were more LGBTQ+ characters on primetime television than ever before', and I have to say I have been glad to see the change. I can actually name queer characters on certain shows now, where about 5 years ago, we maybe had one and they probably ended up dying! However, he goes on to observe that it is often straight people who are 'reaping the rewards of queerness becoming more mainstream'; as in, they are the ones creating and writing the shows, acting in them and then winning awards for those performances. Whilst the conversation about whether straight actors should be playing queer ...