Sense and Sensibility

I read effectively nothing yesterday. As reported, lunch was busy, evening was busy. I went with my wife to see a "mystery movie" where they sometimes show an early movie that hasn't been released yet, but you don't know what it is until you see it. However, because they give at least a mostly accurate runtime and rating, which they kind of have to do, you can usually pretty accurately predict what it will be if you take the time to, and my wife was quite sure that it was going to be the new Sense and Sensibility... which it was.

Now, a lot of people like me who are ... y'know, dudes, who like dude lit like Robert E. Howard, J. R. R. Tolkien, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc take a pretty dim view of chick lit like Jane Austen, and I totally get it. That's what I thought for many years too. My wife, very early in our marriage, convinced me to watch the 1995 Pride & Prejudice with Colin Firth—the role that made him a star, essentially—and I was suitably impressed in spite of it being literally the prototype for every chick lit book that followed, that it Austen was both an astute observer of human nature and a writer of extreme cleverness. Around that same time while I was still in college, I was in an English lit class and had to read Emma, another Austen book, and the basis for the charming 90s teen comedy Clueless (the movie that made Paul Rudd a star) which had also come out in 1995. I probably saw them both in 1996 or so. Ever since, I've been a confirmed Jane Austen fan. I have a rule that I literally will not read a woman writer that I don't already know or have recommended to me by a highly trusted recommender because I've been burned by so many crypto-romances, but even so, Jane Austen is a legitimate master of English literature, and anyone who comes from an ango-sphere culture; England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and of course America—barring the fake anglo-sphere foreigners living among us—cannot call themselves properly educated in our culture without having read at least one of her books. I've actually only read two; Emma and Pride and Prejudice, but I own a nice Flame Tree copy of the latter and read it every few years or so. It's up there with the three authors mentioned above (and H. P. Lovecraft) as one of my favorites that I come back to and revisit fairly frequently. I can probably make a few guilty pleasure authors make the cut too, like the Riftwar books by Raymond Feist and the Icewind Dale trilogy by R. A. Salvatore, but I have no pretentions about them being serious literature that will still be remembered in decades. 

So my wife is to "blame" for me being a Jane Austen fan, and she's only read (by which I mean audiobook) Pride and Prejudice but of course since they are perennially popular, they have been adapted to the screen many times (it helps that it's relatively inexpensive to make them. You just need some Regency costumes and sets and maybe a few location shots at some nice old houses in England). Her favorite adaptation of any of them had been Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility (also came out in 1995, curiously), which is star-studded, to be sure, but in my opinion badly cast. Emma Thompson was too old to play a 19 year old Elinor Dashwood (she was 35, but looks closer to 40), and honestly, Kate Winslet didn't look like a 16 year old either. Curiously, the youngest sister looked too young. And Alan Rickman looked closer to 50 than 35, making his interest in Marianne seem kind of creepy, and while Hugh Grant did a credible job, I never liked him in the role as Edward Ferrars. He's better in a more self-deprecatory role, like he has in Notting Hill, which is the Hugh Grantiest Hugh Grant movie ever made. So, I actually hoped and expected to like the new one better than the "original" one... which of course isn't really original, but it was kind of the gold standard for many years. In spite of the fact that it didn't quite work for me.

So, I was curious how the younger looking cast was going to fare, and if it would be, as with the Pride and Prejudice comparison of the BBC miniseries (1995) to the Keira Knightley movie (2005); the newer one was shorter and more abbreviated, but what it did was more emotional and dramatic, and ultimately, mostly more fun. Sense and Sensibility is one theatrical release movie vs another, so I didn't expect a significant length difference (136 vs 132 minutes) but I did expect it to maybe be a little broader, less subtle, and ultimately more entertaining. And I expected it to be cast in such a way that it felt... more authentic, if you will. Both of those were true. I actually rather liked it. I'm not going to say that I loved it, but I liked it quite a bit, I'll almost certainly buy a copy (for my wife, in theory) and I'll almost certainly watch it more frequently than she does.

There is another Pride and Prejudice adaptation coming out at the end of the year as a miniseries, so I'll have another one to watch with her too.

Anyway, I don't know that I'll read much if anything today either, as we have a busy evening. Thursday is D&D. I don't know what I'm going to be able to read until the weekend, so my aggressive reading prognostication over the weekend will probably not come true.

UPDATE: Quick update. On reddit, where I sometimes spend a few minutes, I look at a lot of D&D AI images based on subreddits that are dedicated to specifically that purpose. There's some good stuff there, but three things immediately get a thumbs down from me, and they come up a lot. 1) super butch girlbosses, 2) lesbian lovers, 3) weird anime or animal people characters.

What in the world happened to fantasy? Who should I blame? A generation who grew up on Pokemon? I don't know, but it sucks.

UPDATE II: And this, interestingly.

Did USAID really make rap music more popular than it organically would have been? I wonder. I wouldn't be surprised, but that's an odd one to put first. I mean, I know that it's not meant to be super serious, but that one is actually one that I see tossed around quite a bit.