I met my late partner almost three years ago. she’s been dead for about two now. when we first started dating, one of the biggest conversations we had was about our respective eating disorders. I had struggled with not eating for significant periods of time. mixed with a lot of exercise, it meant that I lost a fair bit of weight and was extremely thin for a long time. she had struggled with bulimia in the past and it affected her badly, she had once been hospitalised because of it and some of the things that she described doing to her body then will remain private between the two of us forever. she made me feel better about talking about…

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'Simple Jack' for Aronofsky heads, or maybe his Norbit. Darren's latest case in miserabilism is an a24-produced theatrical adaptation that functions as both a saccharine weepie for people who use the #brendanissance hashtag and those who wish that 'my 600 pound life' somehow had less artistic integrity. This is a classic example of a movie being so unbearably full of itself that it, intermittently, transforms into a pretty funny parody of the very film it's attempting to succeed as. If you're looking to wallow in dimly-lit images of fat-suit Brendan Fraser as the camera gawks at his eating habits (I especially liked his mix of pizza and grape jelly), or listen to Rob Simonsen's overbearing original score as our…

Less concerned with the conversation around "fatphobia" (though certainly there is some tragic body-horror gawking like cranking that ridiculous music over him eating that probably qualifies, other people can have fun writing about that) than I am with how offensively artificial and allegorical this is. There are plenty of worthwhile melodramatic ideas here about our relationship to our body, sexuality, family, and religion wrapped up in feelings of shame/self-punishment, etc. but beyond surface manipulation, you don't really feel them. I can't personally speak to whether this was true of the material being adapted as well but the writerly, locked-in construction that organizes all these ideas is so ruthlessly underlined and suffocating and literal that by the time Aronofsky navigates his…