ON THE DECLINE OF CINEMA (WITH SOME MUSINGS ABOUT THE 1980s)

This post is a mixed bag of ideas about cinema. Some are suggested by reading this weekend the Spanish version of Hadley Freeman’s pop essay Time of my Life (2015), a book about the pleasures of 1980s movies. Other ideas spring from the controversy at the Cannes Film Festival (which closed yesterday) on whether Netflix […]

HEARING VOICES (IN ROGUE ONE): WHY DUBBING SHOULD BE ABANDONED

The debate on the need to maintain dubbing for audiovisual media in Spain is old and tiresome. I’m probably preaching to the converted here but I’d like to contribute (or stress) arguments which are not often considered. Funnily, the inspiration for both lines of thought comes from recent articles on Rogue One, the exciting prequel […]

CINEMA NEEDS WRITING!: WHY IS IT SO HARD TO SEE?

Here is a simple question: why is it so hard to understand that film directors are not responsible for the plot of their works? Unless, that is, they have also written the script. Actually, there is a second question: why is so easy to ignore the source when a film adaptation is reviewed? My irritation […]

PRESIDENT RAJOY AND THE STARSHIP THAT FAILED TO LAND ON NOU CAMP: ‘ESPERPENTO’, LOW SELF-ESTEEM AND CERVANTES

My doctoral student Josie Swarbrick, who is working on the representation of monstrous masculinity in SF cinema, visited last week my SF class to offer a presentation based on one of her dissertation’s chapters, the one on District 9. In that film a massive alien starship reaches Johannesburg carrying thousands of refugees who have nowhere […]

100 YEARS, 100 FILMS: AN EDUCATION IN CINEMA HISTORY

A while ago a colleague told me it would be nice to have a list of films for our students and for any interested colleague to educate themselves in cinema History. More than 100 years after the brothers Lumière set the foundations for the birth of a new art, cinema is not yet an integral […]

MAY THE FORCE (NOT) BE WITH YOU: WHY WE CARE ABOUT STAR WARS

Yes, I finally saw yesterday Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It has been very hard to avoid the spoilers for a couple of weeks (yet I must also marvel at the conspiracy of silence to conceal some major plot turns!). Harder to miss were the tepid reactions of most professional reviewers. Given their warnings, I […]

REMEMBERING DAVID BELASCO: BROADWAY BEFORE MODERN HOLLYWOOD

One month ago I published a post on Pablo Iglesias Simón’s monograph De las tablas al celuloide (2007). Iglesias devotes a good deal of his volume to Henry Irving (British) and David Belasco (American), both great stage-managers who shaped their local theatrical practice. Irving was, of course, also a star; for Belasco (1853-1931), in contrast, […]