On 5 January this year I published here a post on a new Swedish system to rate films according to their feminist interest. In this post I mentioned in passing Frozen, noting that, although this Disney film exalts sisterly love, after seeing it my two Madrid nieces didn’t hug each other but remained “mesmerised,” poor […]
I spent a rich afternoon yesterday reviewing Xavier Aldana Reyes’s excellent volume Body Gothic: Corporal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014). As happens, despite the 2,000 words I wrote, I’m not done yet; there’s still a matter to address: the limits of my own tolerance to the shocking […]
In 2006 I published a monographic volume on The X-Files, entitled Expediente X: En honor a la verdad. I am practically certain that I was the first person in Spain to attempt to cover a whole TV series in a book with the intention of offering an in-depth analysis (accessible to the general readership) rather […]
When I included the film adaptation of Harry Potter as a topic for my course I intended to consider how the movies betray or enhance the text –yes, the old-fashioned fidelity criterion. Also, I wanted to examine the very British cast. However, I ended transforming the two planned lectures into far more active sessions on, […]
Time does fly… I first read about the new Swedish film rating system against sexism back in November, made a note to discuss it here but then other topics caught my attention. I don’t understand Swedish and I’ll have to rely, therefore, on English-language media for an explanation of how the rating system works. Have […]
I’m writing this post in answer to Sophia McDougall’s juicy article for the New Statesman, “I hate Strong Female Characters” (15 August, http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/i-hate-strong-female-characters). Basically she complains that while male characters get pinned on them a variety of adjectives (see her list for Sherlock Holmes), female characters in recent audiovisual fiction “get to be Strong.” McDougall […]
I love documentaries. Not nature documentaries, whether they are of the cute, cheesy variety or of the ultra realistic kind –which, for some reason or other, always include grisly scenes of bigger animals killing smaller animals. I mean culture documentary films. My second dream job after university teacher, is ‘documentary film maker’. (Actually this is […]
I’m a big Kathryn Bigelow fan, which means that my personal impression about the very high quality of her newest film, Zero Dark Thirty, is totally unreliable. I don’t wish to review it formally here but I’ll say that it’s 160 minutes are thrilling, even though every one knows how they end. Bigelow’s film is […]
I’m reading Teresa De Lauretis already ancient collection Technologies of Gender (1987!) and I stumble onto her post-Mulvey cry for a truly feminist cinema. By this she means, as it is well-known, not just a cinema by, about and for women, dealing with issues concerning women, but a cinema using specifically female narrative and aesthetic […]