The Company Men - John Wells (2010)

We keep on chatting about the crisis here. Ben Affleck is the human hero in an american tale where one can always appeal to the family. Life is more than ever a war with defeats, some victories now and then and casualties always. Good acting and pleasant to watch. The future may be, as they say here, to come back to the times when men made real things, as houses or ships.

The Inside Job - Charles Ferguson (2010)

This documentary film won the oscar last year, a circunstance few people care about, I guess. It's peculiar that the structure is that of a fiction movie. The songs, the sceneries, the characters neatly divided in good and bad guys. The bad guys either declined to appear in the film or, if they do, stutter miserably. Curiously one of the good guys is Strauss-Kahn, now in disgrace. The story is the financial crisis, how it came to happen and how, incredibly, a few greedy executives took the money (a lot of) and run.

Un sueño fugaz - Iván Thays

Thays es peruano, a pesar del apellido, y ha escrito bastante sin que nos enteráramos mucho a este lado del mar. Sin que me enterara yo, quiero decir. Aquí habla de varios personajes con el interés común de triunfar en la literatura. Tiene sus buenos momentos de estilo chispeante y un par de situaciones bien narradas concernientes a la derrota a la que estamos todos abocados más pronto que tarde. Otros momentos me han resultado confusos; puede que incluya guiños que se me escapan.

Cartas a un joven novelista - Mario Vargas Llosa

Se trata de un pequeño ensayo sobre el arte de escribir novelas. Un sencillo análisis con ejemplos de grandes escritores. Lo de que sean cartas a un presunto joven novelista es sólo un mínimo ardid para darle forma narrativa. Cumple su función.