Flop Eared Mule A Country Music Death Beast and Worker in the Dylan Industrial Complex | Sydney, Australia | Est. 2004

Instead of assembling furniture, shelving the hundreds of books still in my bathroom, washing up, improving myself in myriad ways, exercising or writing a thesis I got a cask and watched The Jane Austen Book Club which looked like the least loud and obnoxious film Foxtel was pushing on me.

I enjoyed it muchly!

I LOL'd!

I ;-('d!

I only rolled my eyes once or twice.

I like a well made, vaguely amusing and distracting romantic comedy. They are few and far between. I don't require it to rewrite the boundaries of the genre or challenge my preconceptions or strike a blow for any kind of -ism, I merely wish it to be moderately well written and acted, presented in good faith and with as few scenes as possible that use the word "pubes." All I ask is that, no matter how forgettable, it is aimed at humans over, say, 25 rather than ... well, rather than whomever the hell watches Judd Apatow movies voluntarily. I think TJABC is somewhat more than moderately well done and worth 106 minutes when you're in the mood. It's not as sharp perhaps as it might have been, but it has enough moments.

There is a whole Ursula Le Guin subplot for the SFinistas! Like seriously, Ursula Le Motherfracking Le Guin gets a subplot!

I did love that reading books was a given, a good and a whole frame for life which it is amongst pretty much everyone I know. There are long slabs of dialogue about specific Austen plots which since I haven't actually read any of them this millennium (and have mostly managed to avoid the various Firthian iterations) I mostly struggled to recall, but the lines are given such warmth in delivery and with enough larger narrative tension, you can appreciate it anyway. It probably had me at the opening sequence, a montage of the main characters enduring the minor irritations of modern life than rang true and made me laugh.

It gets a 65% at Rotten Tomatoes but those 35% are stinky boys so we can discard their views. The genuine Austen mavens over at The Austen Blog seem well disposed. (Bonus hiarious wot abut teh menz?? in comments. Let it be known teh menz fair a great deal better in this than teh wimmenz in ... oh, practically anything else.) I don't know what the La Trobe students at Rethinking Jane Austen say, but I wouldn't mind knowing.

And you know, romance. But whatevs. I don't care about that. Not at all. *sniff*

The trailer on YouTube.

Keeping on topic, here is Johnny Cash singing " Austin Prison." As you see in the trailer one of the lines is about Austin being the capital of Texas. It's curious isn't it that despite Ausin's place in the country musical firmament there are not more songs about it? Maybe I just can't think of them right now.
10 Austin Prison.mp3