I first caught Transamerica about 15 min in, on a tiny television set in a small family-run hotel in St Malo. That was back in 2006, about a year after its release and I was working as a tour guide in France. In the first few minutes this is what I thought was going on: a very masculine-looking woman teenage hitchhiker are driving through the US. What I didn’t get was whether it was a man or a (…) Continue Reading »

Superheroes are something else; it’s what makes them super. The premise of Kick Ass is to make ‘the superhero’ just another performance that any geek in a wetsuit can pull off. In fact, white nerd Dave Lizewski’s turn as Kick Ass is almost as easy as the ‘homo’ persona he adopts in order to get into the bedroom and under the bra of the school hottie, Katie Deauxman. What makes Dave (…) Continue Reading »

Swept up in the recent scuffles over representation in parliament (PR/AV/FPTP…) I’ve been thinking about representation on my little tv. It’s clear that of all my machinery the tv is the one least likely to make me ‘think the world more radically’. I expect it to be disgusting, disappointing and particularly muffling- like stuffing a load of sponge in your ears (I’ll admit the muffling is (…) Continue Reading »

This theme is a chance to look back at what to me was one of the best films of 2009. Director Nicolas Winding Refn’s most mainstream effort since the Pusher trilogy is a surrealist portrait of one of Britain’s most notorious prisoner, Michael Peterson or as he liked to be called, Charles Bronson, whose miserably comical attempt at robbing a post office in 1974 lands him in prison. Originally (…) Continue Reading »

I want to silently sew up every orifice of my body to violently impede my ingestion or production of any sub-atomic particle of matter. Terminate. (Vagina Eyeliner will return to this postcolonial nightmare when we’re ready to remove the stitches and inhale.) Now for some corporal haberdashery… Dir: Michael Patrick King, 2010 Continue Reading »

Here begins Zk’s mapping of the final series of Big Brother UK: DAY ONE DAY ONE IN THE BIG BROTHER HOUSE the creative director saying there would be EIGHTY of them. I think he said EIGHTY. All day I run through the practicalities and possibilities of this variation in format. Can Endemol guarantee our trust? Do they really have the resources? THE FIRST RITUAL OF BIG BROTHER, as with any (…) Continue Reading »

This is a special review of two of my coups de coeur from the recent International Human Rights Festival in Paris. This post is a little outdated as the festival took place in March, but many of the films have yet to be distributed on a larger scale and hopefully, some will be showing at cinemas or TV screens near you soon enough. The films are basically documentaries, but they are selected (…) Continue Reading »

A doctor connects three people arse to mouth. A doctor connects three people arse to mouth. If I read that somewhere I think my initial reaction would be to laugh. I watched the film and didn’t laugh. One thing’s for sure, it’s not for the faint-hearted. Technically less torture-heavy than, say, the Saw franchise, I found it more stomach churning. It left me unsure whether I liked it or not. (…) Continue Reading »