A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of helping to consolidate the academic career of a brilliant young scholar, Pablo Gómez Muñoz, whose excellent volume Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures, Cosmopolitan Concerns (Routledge, 2023), I earnestly recommend. Pablo, who has been working for some years now at the Universidad […]
I started three weeks ago a new MA subject on children in Anglophone cinema, under the umbrella label Gender Studies. This is a continuation of a subject I taught three years ago, which resulted in the publication of the e-book by the students Gender in 21st Century Animated Children’s Cinema (check please my post on […]
[WARNING SPOILERS] I was very much surprised, or rather dismayed, to read about Giórgos ‘Yorgos’ Lanthimos’s new film Poor Things, being a big fan of the novel but not at all of the director. Neither The Lobster (2015) nor The Favourite (2018) are films I have enjoyed and, to be honest, I fail to understand […]
I reported in a post written four weeks ago that Shirley Jackson had taken her inspiration for the mansion in The Haunting of Hill House (1959) from the Crocker House of San Francisco, designed by her great-grandfather Samuel Charles Bugbee. Today I am returning to Jackson’s novel to discuss the role of production design as […]
The X-Files, one of the most important television series ever, was launched 30 years ago today, on 10 September 1993. The series, created by Chris Carter, narrated in 218 episodes broadcast along eleven seasons (1993-2002, 2016, 2018), and two films (1998, 2008), the cases investigated by FBI Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully […]
This post has the same title as the last book I have published, my second monograph in English. It came out a few weeks ago and will be followed this Autumn by my own translation into Spanish, Detrás de la mascara: masculinidades americanas en el documental contemporáneo (U València). Curiously, Anglophone publishers prefer the less […]
My post today is inspired by Daniel Soufi’s article for El País “Salvar el mundo por no jubilarse: los héroes de más de 60 años llenan las pantallas de cine” [Saving the World to Avoid Retirement: Over-60 Heroes Fill the Cinema Screens]. Soufi wonders why ageing male actors are still playing action heroes and names […]
It’s evening, after dinner, time to relax and choose a film to watch from whatever platform you subscribe. This means employing about two hours on consuming a story, leaving aside the fifteen minutes (or more) it may take to select a minimally enticing movie, unless you have preselected and placed some on your list. If […]
NOTE: This post was originally written on 20 December 2021, but it’s published now, months later because of the cyberattack that UAB suffered then and that caused the temporary suspension of this blog I’m borrowing for this post the famous phrase “location, location, location”, coined by Harold Samuel to describe the three things that matter […]
NOTE: This post was originally written on 1 November 2021, but it’s published now, months later because of the cyberattack that UAB suffered then and that caused the temporary suspension of this blog I am not following Netflix’s South Korean mega-hit Squid Game, being currently off the platform, but I have noticed that the series […]