Straight Outta Crouch End

Boss: OK Caspar, so, thanks for attending this session to review your performance over the last year. Me: You’re very welcome! Boss: So, comparing your results against the professional goals that you set yourself last year, you stated in your objectives that… Me: No I didn’t! Boss: What? Me: I don’t know who told you that, or where you got this, the, this so-called fact document or whatever! Boss: We went over your objectives in April, it’s on the work intranet. Me: Ask anyone, ask my mum or the guy who works on reception, great guy, phenomenal guy, his name’s Ignacio, or Chavez, I never said that I would or wouldn’t do something, and I’m a man of my word, ask anyone who’s worked with me, bet you haven’t. Boss: Caspar. Please let’s look at the document. You stated that you would implement a new system for the whole team at work to share documents and files more easily. Now, in October you just sent an email round to everyone… Me: Oh OK, here we go, can’t wait to hear...

Alice Munro would not seem to be a perfect fit for Pedro Almodovar, whose new film Julieta is an adaptation of three short stories by Munro. Unlike the work of Sarah Polley, who adapted Munro’s story ‘The Bear Came Over The Mountain’ for her film Away From Her, Almodovar’s oeuvre shares few thematic or stylistic concerns with Munro’s. But Julieta feels in many ways faithful to the source material while staying true to Almodovar himself, and the key differences that exist between the two artists’ versions are revelatory about their approaches. An early scene in Julieta, and in ‘Chance’, the first of the Alice Munro short stories from which it is drawn, sees the young protagonist taking a night train, which is forced to come to a halt after a man throws himself in front of it. The young woman, in the following minutes and hours, recovering from the shock of this death, meets the man who will become her partner and the father to her daughter. Thus far the two accounts of the event are b...