S/he Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Doc review – Throbbing Gristle’s gender-challenging tabloid-baiter

Sympathetic docu-biography centres on the conceptual artist deemed ‘too shocking for punk’ who inadvertently spawned the industrial music genre Genesis P-Orridge was the performance artist, shaman and lead singer of Throbbing Gristle who was born as Neil Megson in Manchester in 1950, but from the 90s lived in the US. P-Orridge challenged gender identity but it is clear from the interviewees that there were no wrong answers when it came to pronouns: “he”, “she” and “they” are all used. This is a sympathetic and amiable official docu-biography in which the subject comes across as a mix of Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson and Screaming Lord Sutch. The “P-Orridge” surname makes me suspect that Spike Milligan might have been an indirect influence, although there’s also a bit of Klaus Kinski in there as well. Genesis P-Orridge, known to friends and family as Gen, started as a radical conceptual artist, rule-breaker, consciousness-expander and tabloid-baiter who with Throbbing Gristle influ...

Kensuke’s Kingdom review – Michael Morpurgo’s desert island boy’s own adventure

Morpurgo’s yarn about a kid on a round the world voyage is adapted by Frank Cottrell-Boyce and attractively packaged as a family-friendly animation

Michael Morpurgo’s children’s story is a boy’s-own desert island adventure, closer in spirit to The Coral Island than Lord of the Flies, and here attractively presented as a family animated feature, adapted by the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce. The story itself makes clear that the action must be happening around the time of the original novel’s publication in 1999, and not really the present day.

Michael (voiced by Aaron MacGregor) is a moody, lonely boy on a round-the-world sailing trip with his family, but his immaturity and unreliability exasperate his older teen sister (Raffey Cassidy) and parents (Sally Hawkins and Cillian Murphy). Unbeknownst to any of them, Michael has smuggled his beloved dog Stella aboard and when their craft hits stormy seas, Michael and Stella get washed up on a remote island which he soon discovers is in fact the private kingdom of an elderly Japanese second world war veteran, Kensuke (Ken Watanabe) whose own story is a poignant and awe-inspiring contrast to Michael’s.

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