Esta nueva propuesta de trabajo consiste en intentar traducir, por equipos de 2-3 alumnos, el siguiente artículo en inglés. No es tan difícil como pueda parecer a primera vista, y hay punto extra para quienes lo consigan, con corrección ortográfica y gramatical, claro. No valen chapucillas.

Si queréis, podéis utilizar como diccionario on line una herramienta muy útil que ofrece Google:

Una vez en Herramientas del idioma, podéis buscar la traducción de la palabra elegida:

¿A que es fácil y muy útil? (ojo: no intentéis traducir el texto entero con esta herramienta, porque os saldrá un auténtido disparate). Ánimo, que hay una nota extra en juego. Tenéis de plazo hasta el martes 24 de marzo.

ALMODÓVAR'S MADRID

With his latest movie Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) poised to hit cinemas on 18 March, Jessica Plautz examines master filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar's enduring love affair with the Spanish capital

While New York has Woody Allen, and Rome had Fellini, Madrid has Pedro Almodóvar. Indeed perhaps no other filmmaker has had such a close relationship with a single city as Almodóvar has had with the Spanish capital. The two have been intertwined since they first met, with the director casting it in every one of the 17 features he's made over his 30-year career.
But it wasn't love at first sight. In 1967, when the 17-year-old Almodóvar first came to Madrid to follow his dreams, the city was far from the cosmopolitan ideal he had grown up imagining. As a child, he had spent hours looking through shiny El Corte Inglés catalogues and hearing his mother describe it. The city quickly became the place where he decided he would one day escape the pueblo in which he grew up, but what he saw as he first entered Madrid along the Paseo de Extremadura in the late 60s was anything but a dream. "It was nothing like how I had imagined it; the landscape was colourless, grimy and unwelcoming," he would later say. Even today, the Paseo offers an uninspiring approach to the city. Blocks of indistinguishable apartments lead up to the construction-ridden dirt pit that's supposed to be a river. It does little to inspire the imagination.
On top of this he also discovered the bad smell of the metro and the lack of stars in the night sky, but nevertheless he decided to stay. The repressive policies of the Franco regime may have prevented Madrid from modernising in step with other Western European cities after World War II, but it enjoyed a vibrant, clandestine cultural scene, which more than suited him. Lacking money to attend university, he first supported himself by selling odd items at the Rastro, and then spent 12 years working for Telefónica. "From nine to five, I worked as an administrator and in the evenings I was something else entirely," he told Frederic Strauss in Almodóvar on Almodóvar.

Super start

Almodóvar began making Super 8 films using the gritty, unsophisticated urban landscape of Madrid as a backdrop and showing them in nightclubs and bars. After years doing this, his actors, including long-time lead Carmen Maura, helped raise money for him to make his first full feature. This would eventually become Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón), set in the block-style apartment buildings that fill most of the city's outer barrios. It was 1980, and with the movida madrileña getting going, Madrid was dirty, drug-filled and immature-just like the characters in the film. Almodóvar premiered the movie at the famous Alphaville cinema, now the Golem by Plaza de España.
Next came 1982's Labyrinth of Passion (Laberinto de pasiones) and the following year's Dark Habits (Entre tinieblas), which he part-filmed at a convent on Calle de Fuencarral in Chueca. While Almodóvar avoids making overt political statements, the actions of his characters often reveal the underside of the political and cultural state of the city. At the time Chueca was one of the most rundown areas of the city, home to the rejects of mainstream society, and the film showed the contradiction of a strongly religious society and the reality of life within it by depicting nuns seeking to live like the local ‘lowlifes' and ‘scum' they want to help. The seedy side of the barrio also features in 1987's Law of Desire (La ley de deseo) and 1990's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (¡Átame!)-in the scene where Antonio Banderas heads out to buy drugs.
In his fourth feature What Have I Done to Deserve This? (¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto?), Almodóvar used the location of a huge apartment building along the M-30 to examine working-class life. The lead character, played convincingly by Carmen Maura, is a housewife struggling in the traditional role of wife and mother. "When I used to work at the phone company I'd go past these housing estates on the freeway and the vision of these vast buildings would stay with me for the rest of the day," he's said. Even more than in his other films, the location is a character in itself. "The buildings represent the idea of the upper class supplying the proletariat with comfort. But they're unliveable places; people call them beehives." The ominous buildings are the prison guards holding Carmen Maura in a domestic hell.

Tourist traps

You can still see these apartment buildings today, right next to Las Ventas bullring and looking as ominous as ever. In Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, however, you can see the bullring itself if you keep your eyes open. On the whole, Almodóvar tends to avoid filming the city's major landmarks-but there are a few other notable exceptions. In High Heels (Tacones lejanos) a character tap dances in the Plaza Mayor at night and Talk to Her (Habla con ella) features the Cine Doré in Antón Martín. In Live Flesh (Carne trémula) the opening credits show the Puerta de Alcalá, while Calle Arenal-including its Christmas decorations-is the setting for both the beginning and end of the film. For a final scene, Almodóvar hid a camera inside a van across from the Museo del Jamón and filmed extras mingling with pedestrians. To his annoyance, though, a man in glasses began waiting at the door for all of the shots-he's visible for a brief moment at the end of the film.
But it's the way Almodóvar blends his locations with city life that make his films so special. They capture familiar city experiences and feelings such as the light timing out in the stairwell in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! or, in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios), Carmen Maura's character asking a street cleaner to hose her down on a hot night-an urge anyone who has experienced Madrid's sweltering summer heat has probably experienced at one time or another. In the same film Maura's character lives in a modish attic apartment on Calle Montalbán near Retiro, but the chic location is undermined by the fact she raises chickens on the roof. It's contradictions like these that define Almodóvar's city, and such contrasts are widespread in his work.

Forever Madrid

The only one of Almodóvar's features filmed almost entirely outside of Madrid is All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre), which was shot mostly in Barcelona-though it does in fact begin at Madrid's Atocha train station. During his early years making Super 8 films, Almodóvar became famous on the underground circuit for his live film presentations, having much more success in Barcelona than in Madrid, where he said the culture was years behind. Even so, he has always returned. He said he felt like he was betraying the city when he was filming All About My Mother and made sure his next film, Talk to Her, was set back there.
That said, the place is not entirely perfect. "It's very difficult to shoot in Madrid. My ideal would be to be able to shoot in locations which I could rearrange in my way. One must always improve on reality." That may be so, but it's led him to create a more truthful representation of the city that provides a fascinating record of the changes it's undergone. Indeed Almodóvar and Madrid seem to have matured in tandem over the decades. In the same way he has evolved from his crude early features to his eloquent modern films, Madrid has evolved from a culturally backward urban sprawl to a major international city. "I grew up, had fun, suffered, put on weight and matured in Madrid. Many of those things I did at the same rate as the city itself," he's remarked.
Now approaching his 60th birthday, it's no surprise his latest films have found him in reflective mood. 2006's Volver demonstrated how far he had come, self-consciously interspersing scenes set in modern Madrid with others back in the kind of sleepy Castilian town in which he grew up. Meanwhile, his new feature, Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos), out on 18 March and, like Volver, also starring recent Oscar-winner Penélope Cruz, is set in both Lanzarote and Madrid and shot in the style of a 50s film noir. Exactly how the city will look in it, we don't yet know. But we can't wait to find out.

FUENTE: IN MADRID