CATE BLANCHETT - NOTES ON A SCANDAL AUTHOR SLAMS MOVIE CRITICISM

British novelist ZOE HELLER has dismissed accusations new movie NOTES ON A SCANDAL, which is based on her novel of the same, is "misogynistic". Heller insists the film - which stars CATE BLANCHETT as a teacher who begins an affair with an underage student and DAME JUDI DENCH as a fellow teacher who develops an obsession with Blanchett - is not a generalisation of all lesbians, but just one story. She says, "I've seen a couple of things on the internet saying this is a deeply unpleasant, misogynistic depiction of lesbians. "I'm reluctant to get into this argument because it's fundamentally ludicrous, but I would say that if you write a movie about a dog, you are writing about a particular dog, not dogs in general and there are some malevolent dogs and some very lovely dogs and that applies to men, women and lesbians."