Austen

No, not AusTIN, AusTEN. Jane Austen, that is.

Being snowed in so much has meant we are watching quite a few movies on DVD and on television. Somehow we seem to have fallen into a pattern of watching a series of dramatizations of Jane Austen novels on PBS. A couple of weeks ago we watched Mansfield Park, last week it was Sense and Sensibility and tonight Pride and Prejudice. They are very well done and fairly faithful to the books. Of course, they are all about the same thing in a way -- families with limited resources scheming to marry off their daughters, one of whom usually has more sense than everyone around her. (I know all Jane Austen fanatics would despise that synopsis, but that's what it seems like to a non-expert like me.)

I have seen a BBC production of Pride and Prejudice before, and a 2005 movie version garnered lots of Academy Award nominations. The one we are watching is the first two hours of a six-hour 1995 mini-series.

Lest you worry that this is all way too highbrow, Friday night we watched Brendan Fraser's The Mummy. David and Rebecca gave me a three-DVD set -- The Mummy, The Mummy Returns and The Scorpion King -- for Christmas (or maybe it was for Hanukkah). Rebecca admitted they gave it to me because they wanted to watch it while they were here for the holidays. Tom had never seen it, so we watched the first one Friday and will probably see the next two during the ongoing winter lockdown. After that we may have to finish watching all the Agatha Christie/Hercule Poirot videos.