Mamma Mia!

3/5 I mean, it's not good, exactly, is it?

I'm not a one to be especially deterred by social stigma. If anything, I'm more inclined to refuse to follow certain patterns out of sheer bloody mindedness. That being the case, I usually avoid popular films until well after the hype has worn away; I only recently got round to watching Slumdog Millionaire and concluded that the hype was justified after all.

Tiny Furniture

4/5 Not ground-breaking, but funny, charming and not pretentious

Depending on your patience for low-budget films, Tiny Furniture will watch either as a contemporary gem or a pretentious mess. I have read arguments as to the latter and must admit I have not had much patience for them; it seems to me a disease of the decade to ascribe allegations of pretension to any fiction that tries any technique differing from the standard norm.

Triview: Life on Mars (UK) vs Ashes to Ashes

Ashes to Ashes was in trouble the moment the title was first conceived. Like Life on Mars (the UK version), Ashes to Ashes takes its name from a David Bowie song released in the exact year that the series is set and provides the backdrop for that time period. I don’t know that David Bowie was still such a strong influence in the 80s that one of his songs had to be used again, but this choice is indicative of everything that follows in Ashes to Ashes; whereas Life on Mars made sense in context as the title for a police drama about a detective of the 21^st century inexplicably sent back in time to 1973 following a near fatal accident (“It’s like I’ve landed on a different planet”), Ashes to Ashes does not relate to any of this, despite being the exact same story all over again in 1981 with the same cast of hard-hitting, change averse detectives fightin’ crime, retro style.

Blarticle: The Mysteries of Online Dating

It’s a funny old thing, this dating malarkey. It was funny when it was physical, with all that holding hands and feeling awkward and trying to figure out if the whole experience is worth repeating; and it’s even funnier now that all that stuff has been taken out of it and replaced with tap tap tapping on the keyboard.

I’ve nothing against cyber dating. It’s as good a way as any to get to know someone, although it’s worth being aware that people are quite different online to real life – it’s not that they aren’t being themselves, it’s just that they’re being a different version of themselves and the transition can be difficult to get used to. No, the really odd things are dating sites and dating profiles.

Blarticle: Stranger than Fiction?

It would be foolish and downright unreasonable of me to insist on total reality when watching a film. One of the things I enjoy about fiction is its ability to be, you know, not real. One of my biggest frustrations is when people read my fiction and automatically assume it’s a Personal Story – I can’t help but feel a little insulted by the implication that I lack the imagination to make something up off the top of my head.

Smarticle: Media Snobbery

A great many things drive me batty. The way people use expressions that we’ve all heard a million times before as if they themselves have just thought them up; how some people use the same 60 words to express themselves and then look at you like you’re the weird one for using a word they’ve never heard before; the general overuse (and drastic misuse) of words like “pretentious” and “ironic”… But more than all of that, there’s media snobbery.

Smarticle: Asexuality and Virginity

The social importance of virginity has long been a subject of some confusion for me. It remains the only term in our everyday language to describe a person who has not yet performed an act; there is no term for someone who has never drunk alcohol, no term for one who has never smoked a cigarette. Sex is so socially important, that the concept of one who has not partaken of it is met with surprise, intrigue and sometimes scorn or pity.

In history, a "virtuous" or chaste woman was considered to be a higher ranking citizen than a ruined woman or someone who had committed the sin of having (and presumably enjoying) sex outside of marriage. But even then, the concept of an "old maid" was met with pity and marginal disgust, as it suggested that the woman was so undesirable, no man wanted to touch her (we now know, of course, that just because you aren't fucking men, doesn't mean you aren't fucking).

These days, the pressure is on both men and women to have sex as soon as possible. Here in the UK, our sex education is woefully lacking and everything we learn about sex comes from our alcohol-ridden peers - then we wonder why he have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe.