Douglas Sirk, now fully recognized as an influential filmmaker, was considered a successful but uninteresting director in the 1950s. His melodramas were considered bland and subsequently ignored because they focused on female-centric concerns. In the following decades, he started to be considered as an auteur that not only had an impeccable and vibrant mise-en-scène, but also a unique ability to deliver movies that might seem superficial on a surface level but were able to sneak in some subtle and revolutionary criticism about American society. The aim of this paper is to analyse the most rebellious and subversive aspects of Sirk’s classic All that Heaven Allows (1955) from a gender perspective and how Todd Haynes’s tribute Far from Heaven (2002) added new challenges by touching upon thorny subjects that already existed in Sirk’s time but were deemed taboo for mass audiences.

After decades of improving language learning methods, English as a Foreign Language (hereafter EFL) still makes Spanish and Japanese learners struggle with the correct pronunciation. Each country focused on its own lack of phonemes in relation to the target language and, despite years, of research the problem is as present as ever. This article approaches this border-crossing problem by means of the moderate version of the contrastive analysis hypothesis (henceforth CAH) and compares and analyses the phonetic problems of both languages against the target language, English. By expanding the focus, the resulting data could serve as a starting point for further studies that down the way could facilitate EFL learning all around the world.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. Charles DickensThese immortal words describe better than I ever could my almost 6 years of doctoral studies. Intense is an adjective that should be up there too. And emotional rollercoaster. And a few others, but Dickens did not add them, because he knew his prose better than me. He was also writing about culturally uprising London and crisis-stricken Paris, both subjects more harmless than writing about phonology. These 6 strenuous years certainly took a toll on my health, more concretely my weight. It jumped in all directions: from my initial "I'm happy with myself" 85kg, I ballooned up to "maybe I should eat less" 102kg. Thanks to a good nutritionist, I lived for a while without carbs and regained a healthy 78kg. Good things do not last though, and as the stress and the workload rose, so did my weight, again. This time it even went to "we need to seriously talk about this" 110 kg. Back to eating healthy food (aka algae and alfalfa), and leaving again the morbidly obese section…only to fall once again into the pit traps. 112 kg this time. I guess my health problems will not come to an end until this thesis is definitely a V thing of the distant past. If this research kills me, I hope my epitaph reads: It was worth the weight.Jokes aside, it was an arduous time indeed. Years of reading up, writing notes, preparing articles, rehearsing presentations, and, above all, countless sleepless nights. Nights full of doubts and writer's block. That blinking vertical line on a white page, waiting for words on my end, is scarier than that abyss staring back at you, that Nietzsche was so afraid of. It really is more terrifying, because it shows your limitations: either time or your own capabilities.But there would be another unpleasant surprise at store, a deadly pandemic that would change everything we knew, everything we thought. Things we took for granted were taken from us, things we never thought of became talking points. We lost too many, and we had to give up a lot in order to protect the ones we love. At the moment we are still trying to hold on, despite the infinite sadness and the additional toll this crisis is taking on our physical and mental health. Time was cut short, depression was spreading like the mind-killer it is and many people aged more in a few months than they ever did before.The common people are giving their best to survive, while hoping every night to get back to a time that seems so distant now. I am hopeful that we will prevail. I am hopeful because difficult times create strong people, and strong people create good times. Humanity faced hardships before, and thanks to the work of these...