Net Worth

‘Stranger Way of Life’ Director Reveals Little Sneak Peek

Net Worth Staff on December 12, 2022

Image commercially licensed from: Unsplash

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Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar offers a new sneak peak of the upcoming queer western, Stranger Way of Life.

In a recent episode of Dua Lipa’s podcast, At Your Service, the filmmaker said the 30-minute short has “the kind of dialogue that I don’t think a Western film has ever captured between two men.” 

“This is a queer Western in the sense that there are two men, and they love each other,” Almodóvar elaborated in an interview with Lipa. “And they behave in that situation in an opposite way.” 

The film follows two men who reunite after 25 years of not seeing each other. Also starring Ethan Hawke as Sheriff Jake and Pedro Pascal as Gunslinger Silva.

“One of them travels through the desert to find the other,” Almodóvar said in a June interview with IndieWire. “There will be a showdown between them. But really, the story is very intimate.” 

Stranger Way of Life also explores some of the genre’s key tropes.

“It’s about masculinity in that deep sense because the Western is a male genre,” Almodóvar stated on the podcast. “It has the gunslinger. It has the ranch. And it has the sheriff. It has the town. It has the showdown.” 

Although the genre has long had a queer subtext, it is only recently that Westerns have gained prominence. This genre consists of movies such as Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Power of the Dog (2021).

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Stranger Way of Life: Genre and Key Tropes

However, both films drew criticism from particularly aged cowboys. For example, Sam Elliot openly criticized Jane Champion’s The Power of the Dog for its homoerotic scenes. However, he later apologized for his statements.

Almodóvar shared that he’ll uncover the final work at the Cannes Film Festival in May. The film is still in the process of editing. 

“It’s something very different,” he shared with Lipa. “I mean, it’s another genre that I’ve never done before.” 

Furthermore, he said Pascal and Hawke served as the perfect cowboys for the film. 

“I’m very happy with both of them,” he said. 

Stranger Way of Life also stars Manu Rios, Jose Condessa, Jason Fernandez, Sara Salamo, Erenice Lohan, Pedro Casablanca, and George Steane. 

In August 2022, principal photography happened in Southern Spain – in the Tabernas Desert section of Almeria. Almodóvar filmed the movie in his own production company El Deseo in collaboration with Saint Laurent. 

Moreover, SL head designer Anthony Vaccarello served as associate producer and costume designer. 

Additionally, the film’s title is the same as an old Portuguese fado tune by Amalia Rodrigues.

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The University of Texas Creates Literary Course for Taylor Swift Songs

Net Worth Staff on October 13, 2022

Image commercially licensed from: Unsplash

Swifties, I think you need to move to Texas.

The University of Texas at Austin offers students the opportunity to study Taylor Swift’s songs alongside works by literary legends such as Shakespeare, John Keats, and Robert Frost.

Currently, the school offers an undergraduate course called The Taylor Swift Songbook, which will be offered this fall as part of the liberal arts honors program. This comes after the singer delivered remarks at a commencement exercise at New York University last spring following a Swift-themed class at the school.

UK professor Elizabeth Scala told CNN that she chose Swift because the pop star writes her own music and the lyrics emphasize the same techniques in classical poetry.

“This is a course on her songs as literary writing and the ways a popular and award-winning writer uses the same literary devices, figures, and tropes of traditional poetry in her work,” she stated. “It is not about celebrity or fame.”

Students learn about Swift’s songs along with the writings of Western literary icons.

“They’ll be asked to analyze and contextualize common practices and problems across the centuries,” Scala stated.

Scala, a self-proclaimed Swiftie (as Swift fans call themselves), says her goal is to use a modern lens to educate students about literary traditions.

“I want to take what Swift fans can already do at a sophisticated level, tease it out for them a bit with a different vocabulary, and then show them how, in fact, Swift draws on richer literary traditions in her songwriting, both topically but also formally in terms of how she uses references, metaphors, and clever manipulations of words,” Scala stated.

“I’ll be showing students that these operations and interpretative moves one makes when reading her songs are appropriate to all forms of writing.”

Read also: Taylor Swift Receives Honorary Degree at NYU, Delivers Speech to Graduating Class 2022

Taylor Swift: A Literary Legend

And being contemporary, Scala has made an Instagram for the class where she uploads Swift trivia and asks questions to fans.

The class will mainly center on songs from Swift’s more recent albums. However, students are allowed to discuss older songs, according to Scala.

She added that nearly all the music is posted online, and the songs are accessible on Apple Music and Spotify, so students don’t have to spend money for the music.

The course will discuss gender, authenticity, fans’ influence on artists and writers, and how language history and linguistic traditions enhance the reading experience, per Scala.

“I think it’s important to connect the curriculum to the present, but I’m not willing to cede the past. This is my way of sneaking the older material back in with relevance,” she said.

This is not the university’s first introduced celebrity-themed class. In 2015, UT Austin made a class titled “Beyonce Feminism, Rihanna Womanism” to navigate Black feminism.

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