Pink Sauce

Tonight I watched The Greatest Showman, which I hadn't seen before and is currently available on All4 for a few more days. I know it's a divisive film: some people love it and lots of people seem to loathe it. While I found it reasonably entertaining, I have to say that it is a bad film. Not in the quality sense (and then again) but in the moral sense. First the goods things: It looks good and the songs are pleasant and catchy. "It's Me" in particular should become a gay anthem. It's perfect for it. Then the bad things (quality and moral): the storyline is not very good. it ends very abruptly and the songs don't blend very well within the narrative which give it a distracting stop and start quality (that word again!). More importantly, though, and what makes this film ultimately reprehensible, is that it is another film about white male privilege. It's all about the two good-looking white blokes who just have to click their fingers to get the ...

I could carry on tinkering with it until Christmas and beyond, I'm sure, but I think the time as come to stop and let my short story go and live its stunted life in the big out there.  Plenty of Time For James, this grey morning of July 2005 is like any other, as he wakes up, gets ready and walks to the tube station to catch his train to work. Until he makes a mistake.   It is 3,400 words long and should take about 30min to read.  To mark the occasion I've created  a webpage  that includes my previous effort (and hopefully, soon, future ones). All in one place, now! This also has a feedback form, which I invite you to use should you kindly grant me time to read my work. The feedback can be given anonymously, so no excuse!  Enjoy!  Health warning: The language I use in this story (quite different from that of the other one) is not going to be to most people's taste. Readers of English tend to prefer simple language. This isn't simple. It's full of adje...

Last night I ended up binge watching the whole series of Emily in Paris  on Netflix, after spotting on twitter someone live-tweeting their viewing of the first episode , which is, admittedly, pretty bad.  The series, which comes from the creators of Sex and the City , is the story of Emily, a girl from Chicago who ends up being given a job as her PR company's envoy to its newly acquired French subsidiary. Her role is to tell that bunch of feckless frogs how to do their job. Something they prove surprisingly not very keen on...  Because this is all about luxury, glamour and attracting the yoofs, she is a Gen Z marketeer specialising in social media, even though she only has 48 followers on IG when the show starts(!).  She also doesn't speak French, which should probably disqualify her but that is not the case, because Emily, played by Lily Collins, daughter of Phil, is a pretty girl reaping the benefits of her white privilege, in her inordinately spacious, compan...

The original poster and Netflix's version There's a storm currently well past brewing in a corner of Twitter about a French film called "Les Mignonnes" ("Cuties" in English), directed by French-Senegalese Maïmouna Doucouré.  The shitstorm started when Netflix announced last month that it was going to show the film and accompanied that announcement with its own poster, showing the young girls at the centre of the film in tight-fitting, revealing outfits and suggestive poses.  Without having even seen the film, and solely going by that image, people started to denounce cultural condescension, exploitation and gratuitous sexualisation. The film is a paedophile's wet dream, capable of perverting the young (though the film has certificate 15), we are told.  Almost 400,000 people have signed a petition demanding Netlflix remove the film from its listings, and that the whole website be "cancelled".  The story has crossed over to the press. People are ...