Whenever my hubby, the Geek, goes out of town, the kids and I spend the evenings watching movies I don’t think the Geek would watch. This past week, it was all Jane Austen all the time. (Don’t get me worry, the Geek has a pretty high tolerance for Jane Austen, but we are about fifteen years into my love of Jane Austen movies, and he’s had to watch a lot of Jane Austen. I mean, a lot.)
First on our list was something I’d ordered up from Netflix, Lost in Austen. It was a miniseries from BBC.
It has a great premise: a modern British woman, Amanda, discovers that there’s a door in her flat that leads into the attic of the Bennet household. Lizzie Bennet steps through into modern London and Amanda into Regency England. Without Lizzie there, Amanda pretends to be a friend of Lizzie’s there for a visit. She must find a way to fit into Pride and Prejudice without mucking up the story. Unfortunately, she messes up everything.
The movie was completely delightful. Not only was it just darn good, but it managed to bring new insights to the characters. To me, that’s completely amazing. I’ve always said, I’d watched Pride and Prejuidice if my daughter did it in sock puppets. And that’s completely true. But as familiar as I am with the story, for the writers to bring something new to the table … well, that’s really special. In short, I loved the movie.
So you’re homework for the next week, find Lost in Austen at a Netflix near you and enjoy!
And here’s my totally random observation for the week: We always watched Short Circuit (remember the robot movie from the ’80′s?). In that movie, Fisher Stevens (yes, the white guy) plays an Indian. Bad Apu accent and everything. Very weird. Ah … the world before PC.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Lost in Austen, just loved it, watched it as the TV series here in the UK, never understood the Colin Firth thing, but Elliot Cowan in a wet shirt, the perfect Darcy. I have that particular scene bookmarked on on youtube.
I’ve been following your workshop on character plotting over on the Harlequin, thank you, your explanations are easy to understand and incredibly useful. I’ve already had two manuscripts rejected but I’m still trying.
Karen
Thanks for commenting! I just loved that movie. In fact I was thinking about seeing if I could stream it from NetFlix and watch it again tonight. But I may have to just work instead.
Glad you’re enjoying the workshop on eharlequin! I had at least that many rejections from harlequin (more, I think) before I sold. And that’s not counting rejections from other houses. All you can do is keep writing and submitting. Sometimes it’s a long process, but you can’t give up on your dream.