Day: December 7, 2014

Slice of Life Sunday: Movie Review-Authors Anonymous

I reserved the movie Authors Anonymous from my library after someone recommended it. The plot sounded amusing. I’m in a writing group. I’m always looking for a good flick.

The story started out cute, a mock-umentary of sorts, and I thought I would enjoy the movie. But almost immediately, the alleged heroine wasn’t likable. She never went to college. I don’t see that as a problem. But she couldn’t name a favorite author. She couldn’t name any author. Throughout the entire movie. She’d never read a book, yet she was a writer and became extremely successful during the course of the story. She’d never even heard of Fitzgerald or Hemingway. Because she’d never been to college.

EXCEPT: I read Fitzgerald and Hemingway in high school. I went to a small, rural public school, not a posh, private school for exceptional students. We read The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, and several other books/authors mentioned in the movie.

I really didn’t like the portrayal of successful authors as ignorant. Authors read other authors. Even the prolific Nora Roberts says, “I don’t think you can write — at least not well — if you don’t love stories, love the written word. One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.”

The other female in the writing group couldn’t pronounce anyone’s name.  She was trying to come off as smarter than she was, and it didn’t work for her.

The only redeeming quality in the movie was the realistic portrayal of vanity publishing.

This movie may have been directed by a woman, but the underlying misogyny of the writer and his jealousy of the romance genre were first and forefront.

One star.

Ghost Doors

I am sometimes awakened by the sound of doors slamming. The doors, however, are not on this plane of existence. There is a certain echoing quality to the sound that alerts me to the fact that I am not quite awake, and the slamming doors aren’t real. Nor am I dreaming, but lost somewhere between dream and wakefulness.

Lately, however, I’ve been encountering an identical sound while participating in conference calls. The exact sound. It’s not the heavy teletype sound when we can hear someone typing over the speaker phone (which is odd in and of itself–I’m probably the only person in the whole company for which I work who knows the heavy sound of typing on a teletype machine, or even what a teletype machine is). I wonder if ghosts are listening in and laughing at us.

I wish I knew if my slamming doors indicated coming or going. Probably going.

Do you ever have visitors from another plane?