Change Your Image
lesleysaphin
Reviews
60 Days on the Estates (2023)
Thought provoking and very sad
It's appalling to see the conditions that people are being forced to live in in the 21st century and you'd have to be callous not to feel for the people covered. They all need help but some also need to take responsibility for their situations and stop playing the victim .
Living in overcrowded situations and choosing to have another 4-children is a personal choice. Sadly, all that is represented in the film is "poor me, someone must help me". I wish that structures could be put in place to help people before they become desperate but this can only work if people take responsibility for their own actions.
Even more horrific is the casual criminality that has become normalised in these areas. I wonder if some affirmative actions could be arranged to repair the relationship between residents and the police so that the criminals could be identified and dealt with.
Finally, many of the buildings covered in these programmes were the post war replacement of slum areas. Has anyone investigated why slums seem to have been replaced with other slums? It would seem prudent to investigate this before replacing the housing again so that the replacement properties will be fit for purpose for the long term.
A Perfect 14 (2018)
Disappointing and limited
I'm a great believer in inclusivity and showing clothes on real people with lumps and bumps. Healthy people come in a variety of shapes and no one should be made to feel that they should have to conform to an unrealistic fashion driven shape at the cost of their long term health.
Being underweight is dangerous to health and the fashion industry is trying to address this by banning models with a BMI of under 18.5 in most runway shows. This would seem to be a great step forward, but having a BMI of over 30 is also very dangerous to heath and (in my opinion) would also warrant being banned to avoid impressionable people being driven to a similarly unhealthy body goal.
Sadly this documentary seems rather exploitative of the body positive movement. Most of these models are undoubtedly in the healthy weight zone so why not draw that out?
Everybody's Child (2014)
Disappointing
Nicely made and tackles a difficult reality of life behind the tourist side of Edinburgh.
I really want to like this film but it was spoiled for me by the fact that while he wants to face his past, he is unable to accept the truths told to him and still wants to believe that it's "not his fault". I truly hope that he has continued to look at why his life went wrong and faced his own part in his failure to thrive.
Kinky Boots (2005)
Only one flaw in this film
I saw this film just south of Glasgow (in a hard bitten, two handed drinking town) shortly after release and even the locals were hooked in spite of the drag queen/transsexual content. The only negative is that the drag queen/gay/transsexual issue of the co-lead should have been addressed rather than sidelined