A Child's Garden of Poetry (2011)

People are so much deeper and far more extraordinary than what gender they were assigned at birth.

Dramatic Horror!!! Wait, what?? Did you say "dramatic horror"?? IS there such a thing?? I mean, TRULY. Well, if San Francisco-based, Pakistani-born independent filmmaker Dr. Hassan Zee and this film critic have anything to say about it, there IS such a beast as experienced through the director's newest feature film set to officially debut October 4th in the City by the Bay. Folks, indie film will always be a bastion of experimentation and originality, and this film for me fits that bill.

If you've watched 'Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles', you are either someone who believes “nothing happens” in this three and half-hour film or you’re like me who believes everything happens.

Portraying how easy it is to be an ally heavily benefits the majority audience. The more we encourage it, normalize it, and give people the tools to become one, the sooner we can co-exist peacefully.

'Easy A' is emblematic of a world that liked to sarcastically pretend it was progressive but wasn’t actually ready for that change, making it pretty anti-sex.

Netflix’s Shadow and Bone has a complicated relationship with race. It has a diverse cast, but not without its problems. Based on Leigh Bardugo’s two book series, the show features characters from the Shadow and Bone trilogy, which is very straight and white, and the Six of Crows duology, which is much more diverse. When bringing together a cast and writing about these characters, the team behind the show expanded upon some of the representation missing from the first trilogy, then seemed to take away representation from the duology. Shadow and Bone seems to play a bit of a push and pull game when it comes to portraying diversity onscreen.