My now beloved Panasonic W2 ultralight has a built in DVD and lately I have taken to renting movies to view while traveling on airplanes. Yesterday, I decided to try Movielink, a service that lets you download movies for a fee of $3 to $5, which are then stored on your hard drive for up to 30 days. When you open it, you can watch is as often as you like for a period of 24 hours, after which it is then automatically deleted from your hard drive. No need to return the film to the rental store, and my guess is that it drains less battery than spinning a DVD. You do need a broadband connection to download the compressed file (each film took about 90 – 120 minutes in my hotel room), but the screen quality is remarkably good?close enough to a DVD on my laptop that the only time I noticed a lack of resolution was viewing smaller type in the credits.
So I had to choose a film and I saw that Alex and Emma (with Kate Hudson & Luke Wilson) was available. I had seen the previews for this film before, but I have been a little too busy lately to catch many films in the theater. Though it had looked like it had potential, when I watched the previews again (you can view trailers for films before selecting them?a very useful feature that you don?t get in the video store), I had second thoughts. It looked like it might be a little silly. But I downloaded it anyhow and am very glad I did.
Despite what the critics said, I found it to be a charming romance, set in Boston and filmed on location, about a novelist with a huge gambling debt and writer?s block to match. He has to write a novel in 30 days to receive his advance and hires Kate Hudson to be his stenographer. Don?t worry about why. All this is just a silly plot device to set up the essential element of the plot: the writer must dictate his novel to a reader, only the reader can and does object to various twists and turns of the love story, while the relationship develops between them, as it develops between Alex and Emma and the characters of the period story within a story as also depicted by Hudson, Wilson, & Sophie Marceau. (Yes, it is a love triangle.) What makes all this work and worthwhile is the writing itself. Insightful writing about the process of writing and some very witty and charming dialogue between the fictional characters. I won?t say anything more, except to note that the pace of the film is much more relaxed than the preview, so do not judge the film by the trailer. If you enjoy a romance that is not kooky and crazy, but nice and warm and, yes, honest in a stylized unrealistic sort of way?and especially if you write for school, work or pleasure?rent this movie on DVD, or try Movielink and see what you think.
PS: The other movie I rented was Johnny English, a sort of English version of Inspector Clouseau (which the critics also hated). At the risk of blowing the credibility of my previous recommendation, I thought it was pretty funny. Very silly of course, but so was A Shot in the Dark, and The Pink Panther. All right, so this was definitely not the original Pink Panther, but I found it more entertaining than all the later entries in that series.
UPDATE: Davis King, a sharp-eyed reader, writes to tell me that the “silly” plot device of Alex hiring Emma to dictate his novel was based on the true story of how Dostoevsky met his wife while dictating The Gambler. The writers of Alex & Emma then combined fact with fiction by making Alex a self-destructive compulsive gambler like Dostoevsky’s character. (For a great, but depressing, movie based on The Gambler starring James Caan in his Sonny Corleone days click here.) The reader also provided a link to an online biography of Dostoevsky:
In October of 1866, Dostoevsky found himself running behind on a contract to produce a novel. Failure to produce the novel on time would have dire financial consequences, as Dostoevsky had promised to deliver to his publisher, free of charge, anything he would write in the next nine years should he fail to meet his contract. He had but a few weeks to produce the novel, and he had not yet written a word. He went to a good friend of his to ask what he should do, and the friend suggested that Dostoevsky hire a stenographer in order to speed up the writing process. Two days later, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina appeared, ready for work. Together, the two of them managed to produce the novel in question (The Gambler) before the deadline. Despite their age differences (she was twenty, he was forty-four) they also managed to fall in love. Dostoevsky asked her to marry him before the novel had been entirely dictated.
Naturally the fictional character in Alex’s novel with whom his alter ego Adam falls in love is named . . . Anna. See what you learn by blogging?
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