Straight Outta Crouch End

It can be hard to be a vegan, and never more so than at Christmas, when returning to your family and partaking in centuries-long customs that have been passed down through generations. I have so many friends who tell me that they're perfectly happy and at ease with their vegan lifestyle in London, but when they get home they feel immense pressure from parents to relent and eat a bit of cheese, or potatoes that have been roasted in animal fats. Understandably this can lead to tense times, which everybody would rather avoid, and can spoil the present-giving and cheer. With this in mind, here are ten helpful tips for vegans this Christmas, to make your life easier. You can do it! Make as many vegan dishes as you can beforehand and take them with you. This will make your life so much easier when you have chained your parents to the downstairs toilet radiator with the intention of force-feeding them cauliflower wellington. They will cry and beseech you for mercy - a sign that you are...

When we get the first openly gay player in the Premier League, he will be crap at throw-ins, and straight people will joke that queers can't throw. When we get the first openly gay player in the Premier League, he will be ugly, and the average homosexual man will be privately upset about the lack of magazine spreads available to someone so unattractive. We will hold out hope for a prettier one to come out at a later date, having drawn great courage from the bold actions of the ugly football player whose pioneering bravery we recognise but on whose face we simply cannot contemplate sitting. When we get the first openly gay player in the Premier League, Wayne Rooney will send him a tweet that says "I knew it lol! Good on you mate" and we will all sigh with contentment at the evident progress that has been made since times when people would instead have thrown rocks at this man or burnt his dick with matches. When we get the first openly gay player in the Premier Leagu...

I only realised I was intelligent when I was seventeen. To be sure, until then I’d picked up a few hints of it along the way - a good mark in a dictation here, an uncle embarrassed to be corrected on having said John Major instead of Neil Kinnock there - but I only received full confirmation of it when I got an undeniably good mark in my French baccalaureate, the sort of mark that could not be written off as a fluke. I’d always felt I might be ‘clever’ - in the sense of being ‘a bit of a ‘clever-dick’, ‘good with words’, and other deprecatory British phrases meant to avoid buffing a child’s ego. I had shown promise in primary school: top of the class until the age of 7, then somewhere near it until the age of 11 or so. At this point a hilarious crash-and-burn began to take place, as I found that I just could not keep up, particularly in the sciences. In French and English and languages, I fared tolerably, but I began to get bogged down, and struggled with the work rate. This continue...

How does the voice of a singer speak to you? What is it in their phrasing, their control of volume, the timbre of their voice, their register, that occasions something in you? I listen to Aretha and I hear a voice that seems to be striving for something, a voice that feels as if it is somehow reaching upwards - and in her phrasing, in her repetitions, the way she runs up to a particular stretch of melody, or tackles it in a different way from one chorus to the next, I get the sense of someone giving all her fervour to her music. These notes, when Aretha hits her stride and unleashes peals of melisma, and joyous near-shrieks that flirt with the top of her register, cause a kind of high inside me, an uplift, an astonishing sense of soaring that I don't feel to the same degree with any other vocalist. Think about the beautiful run up the notes on "for me - there - is - no - one" in the bridge of I Say A Little Prayer, which she has a stab at twice and which only becomes ...

(This piece contains a whopping spoiler) Daniel Kokotajlo's Apostasy is surprising, subverting our expectations and pulling a rug from under our feet on so many occasions: it's this brilliance in his storytelling, abetted by a total formal mastery, that makes his tale of women struggling with their faith so compelling and powerful. I'd like to talk about some of the shocks and surprises along the way, and how Kokotajlo creates them through a highly effective shot selection and by playing on received ideas and genre tropes. A key theme of Apostasy is displacement: it's there in the way the film is at pains to guide our looks in one direction (namely, towards the initial protagonist, Alex), so that we are startled and overwhelmed when the focus moves on, half-way through the film, when Alex dies. Kokotajlo takes pleasing liberties with perspective, showing Alex in the centre of the frame, and her sister, Luisa, often displaced to the fringes, sometimes in blurred ou...

Sometimes I find myself hungering to write about nothing - no, that isn't right. Hungering, rather, to write about not something, about a not-topic or an anti-story:   to write as an exercise, a stretching of my limbs, or as you might crack out a pretty and insignificant tune on a piano, on a hot summer's afternoon, while waiting for everyone else to get changed into their swimming things so you can set off to the sea in a succession of sun-baked cars. Wanting to write as you gargle water, swilling words around, getting pleasure from their swoosh and flavour, making them bubble, roiling them into a song. When I was little I used to drink in a funny way, shunting the liquid around my mouth at every gulp before I swallowed, rather than simply sending it straight down like other people do. My grandfather took my brother and sister and me to his Saturday art class once - a parochial affair in a little village hall by a field with a swing and a slide and a roundabout - where a wom...

Purple Man Bi-Curious An arch-villain from the MCU, seen in the popular Jessica Jones series, Purple Man will be getting his own spin-off in 2019, and there are plans afoot to have him look at a man in episode 4. Aryal Landers Agender Aryal is set to be an important secondary or tertiary character in the developing Alien franchise, with five crucial lines spoken to Michael Fassbender's David in the final act. A representative for 20th Century Fox stated: "It's important to us to represent all of the different possibilities for people out in space, and Aryal is a fantastic character who we see in many scenes in the film." Swamp Thing Polysexual A popular character from DC Comics, Swamp Thing will integrate the next effort by the studio. Voiced by Michael C. Hall, the humanoid/plant creature's many humorous one-liners about things it wants to fuck, whose inclusion in the completed movie are subject to positive test screenings, are sure to delight all audie...

This is the text of a talk I gave as part of the BFI's Hot Take event on masculinity onscreen. Please note: the audience were instructed beforehand to read out in a monotonous, robotic voice the signs that I held up at various intervals in the talk.  The most invidious episode of the new series of Queer Eye – in which five cis-men who aren’t queer remake straight men so that they can earn more money and get their dicks wet – isn’t the Bobby Van Camp episode. To jog your memory, Bobby Van Camp is the smug and sanctimonious father of nine who gets remade by the so-called Fab Five to look exactly like Karl from Neighbours. That episode misses the boat by offering nothing but the merest, most feeble rejoinder to Bobby’s ostensibly gay-hating religion, as our five hosts gratefully and tearfully accept Bobby’s smug and self-regarding speechifying on the topic of “gays: you’re just humans like me.” Audience: SLAY The worst episode of Queer Eye isn’t even the one which invokes rac...

Swagger is a title you earn - and if Olivier Babinet's documentary, about children in an underprivileged  cité just outside Paris, amply deserves its name, it's less for the attitude on display amongst the kids themselves, and more for the reckless, thrilling, way over-board filmmaking that Babinet chucks at his otherwise minor project. This is a film that cocks about town, strutting, preening, feeling itself . It's a film to make you chuckle with its chutzpah, its brazenness. There's a great deal of sensitivity and delicacy here too, but it's vastly outdanced by the fun-size wallop of Babinet's aesthetic - and there is something beguiling, unerringly touching, at the idea of bringing such big means to a small documentary about the dreams, hopes, loves and sadness of disadvantaged children.  Babinet worked with the children on a filmmaking workshop for a year, as part of a project to teach them about cinema. He also interviewed them - and the film is compos...

"A Fantastic Woman" is a terrible title. In Spanish, where the phrase is much more idiomatic, the title apparently plays - certainly more clearly than it does in English - on the idea of the fantastic al woman, and of the fanta sised woman. Both notions are interesting, and key to understanding the film, which, in its brash and expressionist mode, riffs on those concepts in an endearingly head-on, mulish way. In so doing, the movie offers up a bracing, heroic portrayal of a transwoman in combat, but it also ends up fetishising her gender identity, making for an ambivalent depiction. The film centres - quite literally so, in the sense that it places Daniela Vega wham-bam in the middle of its frame - on Marina Vidal, a transwoman whose older cis-male partner, Orlando, dies suddenly one night, leaving her homeless, without any legal claims to mourn him, and at odds with his transphobic family. Throughout the film, as Marina fights to get her dog back, attend her lover'...

Two scenes show you the mettle of Lady Bird, display exactly what the film is made of. In the first of these, Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) wakes on her birthday, to find her father bringing her a cupcake with a candle in it. Greta Gerwig's camera - grainy and companionable - pulls in, right up close to the central character, drawing morning heat from Lady Bird's just interrupted slumber, delighting in the texture of her undone hair, and dwelling with a measure of sweetness on her blotchy adolescent skin. Such a scene would pass without comment were it not for how unusual it is in a cinema industry where young women routinely wake up with a face full of slap, arching their sexy backs, etc etc. But Gerwig knows her character so well, is so kind and honest in the view she trains on her, and brings such sensitivity to bear on this hopelessly questing girl, that it feels of a piece with the film. A second, fleeting moment that drew my attention: in New York, having finally evaded t...