Carolina Miranda
Appearances
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
Sarah Hussain hasn't committed a crime. But perhaps she was flagged because she dreamt about it. Or because of the heated argument she'd had with a crackpot on social media. Or maybe it was the images of early 20th century Moroccan rebel fighters she'd been posting to the Internet.
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Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
Whatever the cause, Sarah now finds herself incarcerated in the California desert because an algorithm has determined she's an imminent risk. What exactly that risk may be and when and under what conditions she might be released is anybody's guess. This is the dystopian premise of Leila Lalami's gripping new novel, The Dream Hotel.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
In this unsettling vision of the future, a company called DreamCloud makes brain implants that give insomniacs like Sarah a better night's rest while also harvesting valuable data from their dreams. The blandly titled Risk Assessment Administration assigns individuals a score that determines how likely a person might be to commit a violent crime, but how that score is calculated is confidential.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
And the places where high-risk individuals are held for observation, called retention centers, are run by a private company called Safex that contracts out detainees as cheap labor to corporations. Into the crosshairs of these overlapping systems steps Sarah, a busy 30-something mother of twins who works as a museum archivist in Los Angeles.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
She's in the process of returning from a conference in London when an elevated risk score, based partly on data taken from her dreams, gets her dinged for retention at LAX. The Dream Hotel has been compared to Philip K. Dick's 1956 science fiction novella, The Minority Report.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
That story imagined a society in which police arrest people for the crimes they have not yet committed based on data produced by a trio of humans with predictive powers. But the minority report, with its snappy gumshoe dialogue, is told from the perspective of the police.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
Lalami instead sends us down the psychological rabbit hole of what it means to be incarcerated without due process in a world where your fate is decided by algorithms. The narrative is propulsive, but what makes the novel so absorbing are the ways the author makes this near-future world come to life.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
Much of the story is presented as an omniscient third-person narrative, but in between, Lalamie inserts fragments of emails, corporate reports, and bits of a procedural manual, all of which give insight into the systems that keep people like Sarah indefinitely detained. Ultimately, it is Sarah who is the beating heart of this remarkable story.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
And Lalamie gives us a character that isn't simply an archetype, but a real human being full of ambition and ambivalence. Sarah is a scholar of post-colonial African history who works at the Getty Museum. She's also a woman who dwells on her insecurities and on petty annoyances like the mundane squabbles she has with her husband. Occasionally, she's betrayed by her own irritability.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
The novel credibly conveys her harrowing sense of disorientation as the wide world she once inhabited is reduced to a cell. Sarah's most relatable trait is the struggle she faces trying to contain the rage that she feels over her situation, rage that, if expressed, will only worsen her circumstances. As the narrator tells us, compliance begins in the body.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
The trick is to hide any flicker of personality or hint of difference. It's a condition that isn't specific to her incarceration. As a woman of color, Sarah's of Moroccan descent, she's not the kind of person who is generally afforded the benefit of expressing anger.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
To inhabit Sarah's story is to hear the echoes of real people who are held in private immigration detention centers, who have no legal recourse and no timeline for when they might get released. Her book also paints a grim picture about the ways in which our data can betray us.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
Lalami was inspired to write the novel after receiving a notification from her smartphone giving her the travel time to a yoga class. But she had never set such a reminder. Her phone was simply keeping track of her personal habits. The Dream Hotel is a suspenseful novel. The book's simmering tension is whether Sarah will be able to find a way out of this trap.
Fresh Air
Ryan Coogler Paid A Steep Price For The Films He Made
This ordinary woman who has plotted through life has to figure out how to undermine a system that has overtaken her mind and her body.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
Pedro Baramo is not the sort of novel that's easy to turn into a movie. The plot, what there is of it, meanders constantly. Perspectives shift. The narrative jumps back and forth in time. Strange things happen. And as you sink into the story, it can be impossible to tell what's waking life and what might be a dream. The novel is also hard to make into a movie because it's iconic.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
Practically every school kid in Mexico reads it, and every student of Latin American literature has wrestled with its ruminations on betrayal, power, and death. Rodrigo Prieto, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer from Mexico whose past projects include Killers of the Flower Moon, has bravely chosen Pedro Paramo as the subject of his first feature film.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
The story kicks off as Juan Preciado arrives in the village of Comala to look for his father, a prominent landowner. In the film's opening scene, a camera plunges the viewer into a hole in the earth as we hear Preciado deliver the novel's opening lines. Lines so famous, many Spanish speakers can recite them by heart.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
I came to Comala, he says, because I was told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Paramo. But as Preciado enters Comala, he discovers that the lush settlement his mother had once described no longer exists. The town is abandoned, its crumbling adobe houses occupied by the ghosts of his father's ruthless past.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
In the role of Preciado is Tenoch Huerta, best known for playing the ocean-dwelling Namor in the Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever. His performance in Pedro Páramo is far more restrained. As his character is led by one ghost and then another ever deeper into Comala, Preciado learns about his father's casual brutality as well as the other children he'd fathered and even loved.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
The actor conveys these painful discoveries in flashes of quiet hurt and bewilderment. As in the novel, about midway through the film, the narrative shifts its primary focus from son to father, charting Paramo's rise as a landowner during the years of the Mexican Revolution. Paramo murders his adversaries and takes their land. He treats the town's women like a personal harem.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
He knows he can disobey the law because in this corner of Mexico, he is the law.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
Starring as Páramo is Manuel García Rulfo, a Mexican actor known for playing the title role on the Netflix series The Lincoln Lawyer. Born in Guadalajara, García Rulfo also happens to be a distant relative of the book's author. And to the character, he brings the spoken cadences of Western Mexico, where the novel is set.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
But the actor's approachable good looks don't always jibe with the merciless rancher described in the book. The bigger challenge facing any director who tackles Pedro Paramo is constructing a believable world. To read the novel is to get the sensation that you are being told a story by ghosts, as if you're hearing voices fade in and out.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
The author conveys these strange and terrible events in matter-of-fact ways. He doesn't sensationalize or overdo the suspense. Capturing the sensibility on film, however, can be difficult, and it's why it's been a challenge to translate Pedro Paramo, as well as other novels by magical realists, into movie form. The literature has a very restrained approach to the extraordinary.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
On screen, however, things like violence can come off as lurid and apparitions can feel hokey. Prieto's film, for the most part, presents a convincing world. His transitions between past and present and life and death are seamless. Bleak scenes are portrayed with otherworldly beauty. And sound, which Rulfo describes with great care in the novel, is used in interesting ways.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
At one moment, we hear the world through the partially deaf ears of an old mule driver. In another, we're immersed in the echoes of Comala's empty streets. The movie, however, has its awkward moments. A scene that involves a woman who turns into mud feels like an intrusion of CGI in early 20th century Mexico.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
And the same goes for a key death scene, of which I won't say more so as not to give away plot. Prieto's film is one of several inspired by Rulfo's novel. A version from 1967 was more melodramatic. Another, released in 1977, had a stripped-down spaghetti western vibe. Prieto's version adheres most closely to Rulfo's text, and that can hamper the film's pacing.
Fresh Air
Saoirse Ronan Says Being A Child Actor Shaped Her — For The Better
The frequent jumps between time periods, which give the book its sense of disorientation, become repetitive and extra confusing on screen. Though, ultimately, being confused is part of grappling with Juan Rulfo's masterwork, a story about love, corruption, dominance, and the ways in which death comes for us all in the end.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
Pedro Baramo is not the sort of novel that's easy to turn into a movie. The plot, what there is of it, meanders constantly. Perspectives shift. The narrative jumps back and forth in time. Strange things happen. And as you sink into the story, it can be impossible to tell what's waking life and what might be a dream. The novel is also hard to make into a movie because it's iconic.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
Practically every school kid in Mexico reads it, and every student of Latin American literature has wrestled with its ruminations on betrayal, power, and death. Rodrigo Prieto, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer from Mexico whose past projects include Killers of the Flower Moon, has bravely chosen Pedro Paramo as the subject of his first feature film.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
The story kicks off as Juan Preciado arrives in the village of Comala to look for his father, a prominent landowner. In the film's opening scene, a camera plunges the viewer into a hole in the earth as we hear Preciado deliver the novel's opening lines. Lines so famous, many Spanish speakers can recite them by heart.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
I came to Comala, he says, because I was told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Paramo. But as Preciado enters Comala, he discovers that the lush settlement his mother had once described no longer exists. The town is abandoned, its crumbling adobe houses occupied by the ghosts of his father's ruthless past.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
In the role of Preciado is Tenoch Huerta, best known for playing the ocean-dwelling Namor in the Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever. His performance in Pedro Páramo is far more restrained. As his character is led by one ghost and then another ever deeper into Comala, Preciado learns about his father's casual brutality as well as the other children he'd fathered and even loved.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
The actor conveys these painful discoveries in flashes of quiet hurt and bewilderment. As in the novel, about midway through the film, the narrative shifts its primary focus from son to father, charting Paramo's rise as a landowner during the years of the Mexican Revolution. Paramo murders his adversaries and takes their land. He treats the town's women like a personal harem.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
He knows he can disobey the law because in this corner of Mexico, he is the law.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
Starring as Páramo is Manuel García Rulfo, a Mexican actor known for playing the title role on the Netflix series The Lincoln Lawyer. Born in Guadalajara, García Rulfo also happens to be a distant relative of the book's author, and to the character he brings the spoken cadences of western Mexico, where the novel is set.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
But the actor's approachable good looks don't always jibe with the merciless rancher described in the book. The bigger challenge facing any director who tackles Pedro Paramo is constructing a believable world. To read the novel is to get the sensation that you are being told a story by ghosts, as if you're hearing voices fade in and out.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
The author conveys these strange and terrible events in matter-of-fact ways. He doesn't sensationalize or overdo the suspense. Capturing the sensibility on film, however, can be difficult, and it's why it's been a challenge to translate Pedro Paramo, as well as other novels by magical realists, into movie form. The literature has a very restrained approach to the extraordinary.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
On screen, however, things like violence can come off as lurid and apparitions can feel hokey. Brieto's film, for the most part, presents a convincing world. His transitions between past and present and life and death are seamless. Bleak scenes are portrayed with otherworldly beauty. And sound, which Rulfo describes with great care in the novel, is used in interesting ways.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
At one moment, we hear the world through the partially deaf ears of an old mule driver. In another, we're immersed in the echoes of Komala's empty streets. The movie, however, has its awkward moments. A scene that involves a woman who turns into mud feels like an intrusion of CGI in early 20th century Mexico.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
And the same goes for a key death scene, of which I won't say more so as not to give away plot. Prieto's film is one of several inspired by Rulfo's novel. A version from 1967 was more melodramatic. Another, released in 1977, had a stripped-down spaghetti western vibe. Prieto's version adheres most closely to Rulfo's text, and that can hamper the film's pacing.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Alex Van Halen / Painter Titus Kaphar
The frequent jumps between time periods, which give the book its sense of disorientation, become repetitive and extra confusing on screen. Though, ultimately, being confused is part of grappling with Juan Rulfo's masterwork, a story about love, corruption, dominance, and the ways in which death comes for us all in the end.