BECOMING JANE
STATUS: Glad I don’t live in Idaho.
I saw the film Becoming Jane recently and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. I loved so many things about it, one of them being that I’m happy to see Anne Hathaway act in a role where she’s not bumbling and stuttering. I loved the Princess Diaries, Ella Enchanted, and The Devil Wears Prada, but boy howdy, I began to feel like if she had one more line that began with “I – I –I…” then I was going to Invoke the right to Indent her head. Not really, but I was annoyed.
Anyway, one of the great things about the movie (and about Austen for that matter) is that it showed good people suffering, and bad people getting ahead. It’s a theme that’s pretty real: crappy people get promoted, book deals or film opportunities happen to people who suck, bad guys do come out on top. By the same token, “happily ever after” doesn’t always happen to good people. Decent, upstanding folks can have a hard go of it in life.
So what does that mean? Well, in my writing I’d like to explore more of this – I’d like to really flesh out some good characters who maybe don’t come out on top, or a bad guy who never gets punished for being a total jerkface. And in my personal life, I want to strive to always write the best books I can, believing, as Austen did, that “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
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