Thinking about Russell Brand's emergence at a time of shifting codes around masculinity. He arrived on the scene in 2004, two years after the word "metrosexual" hit the mainstream, and the same year that Nuts and Zoo magazine were launched in the UK. Lad culture always existed as a reaction to the perceived feminising of male identity by the gay scene and bloody feminists. There was a panic about men losing their masculinity - which endures today in more polarised form. This is from 2005: nytimes.com/2005/06/19/fas…

Today I wish to pay tribute to the time-honoured magazine photoshoot "put hot man in a suit in a pool". The more you think about it the weirder it is?! Andrew Garfield seems to be the latest actor roped into it. I don't know exactly when it started - I could swear I've seen ones of 90s stars like Bradley Pitt etc, but can now not find those on the internet. But the form has claimed so many. Here's another of the spider-men

Of the films released today I've seen two documentaries, THE RESCUE and A COP MOVIE, which offer pretty interesting examples of approaches to the form. The former is pretty classical for all of its tension, & the latter takes enormous pleasure in playing around with performance. I reviewed THE RESCUE here for The Daily Beast: thedailybeast.com/the-rescue-tel…

Hello! Just me being a contrary arsehole again, sorry, but when a journalist @'s the subject of an article into a tweet or an Instagram post about it, do you not see how you are compromising your independence and the quality of your writing? Are you happy just being the machine? Transparently, all you will get is retweets if it gets picked up by the actor/singer whatever, so you are possibly furthering your own brand and gaining traction, but you also cannot possibly be sufficiently disinterested if that is the case. This is PR.

So, something film-related from the weekend that shocked me and which has stayed with me, is that late on Friday night I dipped into the #Cesar2021 hashtag to see who had won prizes at France's top cinema awards, and was greeted by a torrent of reactionary/racist hate towards it. People were annoyed at Fathia Youssouf and Jean-Pascal Zadi, two black actors, winning awards. They were pissed off with Fary, a black comedian. They were gleeful that Camélia Jordana, a French-Algerian actor, hadn't won an award. They were obsessed with Adama Traoré.

Sorry to come back to this, but the issue is not so much whether the individual writer's copy was sexist, but about the conduct of Variety, the publication who employ him. I really think fellow journalists should show solidarity and focus on that. I don't think it's good enough to say that the writer's wording was ambiguous, and that whether he intended to be sexist or not, he gave the appearance of it. His editors assigned him to review the film, received his copy, and ran it as is. Then they made a show of disowning him.

I know I should get over it, but I can't stop getting infuriated about Jacob Rees-Mogg having 6 kids & never changing a nappy. What a shit. He should be done for neglect. That sort of hideous patriarchal bullshit isn't just silly, it's grotesque, harmful, cruel & disrespectful.