A couple of months ago, El Confidencial published an interview with former film director and screenwriter Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón (https://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2018-06-15/manuel-gutierrez-aragon-ojo-cielo-libro_1577791/). The occasion was the publication of his new novel El ojo del cielo, which focuses on four women in his native Cantabria’s Valle del Pas. I saw the interview by mid-July before taking my summer […]
AN EXTREMELY GUILTY PLEASURE: THE GREATEST SHOWMAN I recall from my childhood years how annoyed my father grew every time there was a musical film on TV and the actors burst out singing. I am confused to this day about whether the songs were also dubbed or left in the original English version (with no […]
The students in my Gender Studies class could freely choose the subject of their paper and I have ended up marking five (out of twenty-five) on Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). In parallel, I have been asked to peer-review two articles submitted to journals on the same topic. Even a proposal for a […]
It turns out that ‘anonymization’ is a concept used in the handling of data, to ensure the privacy of the persons providing the information. This is not how I am using the concept here. I refer, instead, to the process by which persons who make important contributions to the fiction we love best, whether as […]
[I’m celebrating today the seventh anniversary of The Joys of Teaching Literature!!! Thank you for reading the blog. Please, find all seven yearly volumes in .pdf here http://ddd.uab.cat/record/116328] It is one of those beautiful coincidences in life that the surname of the couple whose union ended state legislation in the USA against interracial marriages was […]
I have just read Marc Pastor’s novel L’any de la plaga (2010) and this post deals with two matters suggested by comments on this work in GoodReads. Pastor, who works as CSI for the Mossos, the Catalan police, has published so far five novels, of which I absolutely recommend La mala dona (2008). He narrates […]
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 […]
The fiasco following Warren Beatty’s absurd proclamation of La La Land as this year’s Oscar winner instead of Moonlight (despite realizing that he had the wrong envelope in his hands) has already been commented on to exhaustion. I’m really sorry for the public humiliation that the producers of La La Land endured; yet, at the […]
My doctoral student Josie Swarbrick contributed a paper on the film Transcedence (2014) to our recent yearly post-graduate seminar. The film is just average but Jack Paglen’s screenplay is one of the very few attuned to the treatment of the posthuman in current sf. The role of Will Caster, the man who transcends his humanity, […]
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 […]