Spending halfway of your life halfway insane isn’t a bad way to live– reality has a way of knowing who can handle the weirder stuff and you end up with a greater amount of bizarre experiences than most. The downside is that, very occasionally, you’ll do something that really does qualify as nuts.
Letters can be read symbolically or as words– i.e., one can see words and recognize them from their shape as an identifiable symbol, or read them and gleam their meaning from context; I confess that I often slip into the former, especially when looking at a glance, so when I saw the words “Jane Austen” on the marquee of my local crap movie theatre, I was fairly interested– I’d heard good things about this movie, a biopic starring Anne Hathaway as the famed author. So I go and buy a ticket for the “Jane Austen movie.” I sit myself down and suddenly I’m getting this weird vibe off the rest of the audience– I’m the only male and everyone’s over 50. But that’s fine, I think, who else is going to go see a movie about Jane Austen?
Trailers and advertisements roll. The film begins.
“How odd to use a sans-serif typeface for the credits,” thinks I. “But perhaps this is the way of things.”
The first shot rolls and it is clear, very very clear, that the narrative is not in the Romantic Era; good lord, it’s not even Edwardian. It’s 21st Century Southern California. What the hell has happened?
I’ve bought a ticket for The Jane Austen Book Club thinking it was Becoming Jane.
Like I said. Crazy.
