amber can walk

Last year, one of my most rewatched films was Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), a film revolving around four people whose lives become entangled due to their various sexual neuroses. It's a film very interested in infidelity and what it takes to make relationships work. In general, I find the misery of heterosexuality, as portrayed in many a film, tedious. So, I avoided this film specifically because I assumed that it would be another film people enjoyed because it had straight people screaming at each other in it. Sex, Lies and Videotape invited me in through its depiction of loneliness and perversion, both of which are aspects of being alive that are often mocked and derided. The serial killer is lonely and perverted. The stalker is lonely and perverted. Your average middle class married couple are not typically lonely and perverted, not unless the film ends with some kind of violent climax (I'm looking at you, American Beauty !).  The film follows An

It's very romantic to view the creative process as an inherently transgressive one, and making movies should be, as it's one of the most collaborative modes of making art. However, filmmakers are at the mercy of production companies funding their projects, who in turn inform the market and decide what will sell. People who have no connections within the industry, aren't rich and aren't willing to comply with a company trying to churn out another forgettable money-making sequel/revamp/remake, don't seem to have much of a chance at all. Nostalgia has been a burden on culture, and maybe it always has been, but particularly recently, we cannot escape it. I'll admit myself it's really hard to not look back at the past and think 'it seemed so much easier to get an interesting and unique film made back then'. The 90s in particular seemed plentiful, with some of my favourite directors like Gregg Araki, Cheryl Dunye and Ngozi Onwurah making formally interesti

I gave you blood, blood, gallons of the stuff I gave you all that you can drink, and it has never been enough - blood (end credits) by my chemical romance In the middle of 1975, Christine Chubbuck, a Florida-based television news reporter, made history in being the first person to die by suicide on live TV.  As it's become a trend which has made a lot of people money, I've become vehemently anti-'true crime', the genre of podcast/docu-series/YouTube deep dive where the audience is invited to gawk at what is usually the most gruesome and grief-riddled time in people's lives. They often focus on murders and cults, topics that are both taboo and incredibly gendered. We have become more and more obsessed with women in pain and turmoil. Earlier this year, I watched  Christine  (2016) and  Kate Plays Christine  (2016) in succession after I realised they were both about Chubbuck. I don't mean to become fixated on troubled public figures and have become wary of my attac