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.

Miau - Benito Pérez Galdós

Ésta es una novela escrita en un tono divertido (desde el mismo título), y retrata la vida en Madrid sobre 1876. Repasa especialmente la complicada administración de la época con su escalafón de oficiales y jefes (con el cesante Ramón Villaamil de protagonista). Me ha llamado la atención el amplio vocabulario y las expresiones. Algunas que creía más o menos recientes en el idioma resulta que ya se usaban entonces (como quedarse con alguien, por tomarle el pelo).

The Next Three Days - Paul Haggis (2010)

Haggis is here the screenwriter also and the movie is a thriller about an "amour fou", because no less than a crazy love is required to make a school teacher be determined to "rescue" his wife from the county prison. The suspicion about she being guilty or innocent remains till the end. Not as good as his master work "Crash", the story is enjoyable.

Last Night In Twisted River - John Irving

Storytelling this is. Not that I would believe every word, but in the whole the book completes a kind of circle. It's John Irving's reversal life, the things he wouldn't like to happen to him (my fears define me). The main character is named Daniel Baciagalupo and he is a writer who writes all the time about his life, not being supposedly his real life. Well, just as most writers do.