It has come to my attention recently that there is a bit of a Jane Austen fetish rampant alike amongst contemporary novelists and Hollywood producers insistent on creating an audience out of dedicated readers of the authoress' fiction. In one of the hundreds of contemporary novels out there that deal with Austen’s books or characters, there is one in which a book club consisting of five women and one man read “all Jane Austen, all the time,” and quite expectedly, they end up using the Austen tomes as somewhat of a guide to life. Three years after this Karen Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club was published and made its bestseller lists, a film was made.

In May 2004 The History Boys debuted at the National Theatre in London’s West End. The play was such a commercial and critical success--it won awards from renowned sources within the London theatre community--that the play was published in proper book format by the end of the year and brought to Broadway in 2006, where it won a Tony Award. Two years later, the film was released, with the original stage director Nicholas Hytner at its helm and with the original stage cast also on board.

I saw the play in the fall of 2004 at the National as part of a British Drama Studies class. It was by far the class' favorite, even more so than the Royal Shakespeare Company’s exquisite rendering of Hamlet. The class was supposed to read the play before going to see it, but all of the local bookstores were sold out of it…not a single copy was found by any member of the class. Having recently located it at my local library, I decided to do that now older assignment.

Oi. Alan Bennett's script as it is published has virtually no set design instruction or stage direction. All I can say is, if those actors and crewmembers had only that to work with, Bravo! I had trouble following the action of the play because of the lack of stage direction and assume that I would have been doubly lost had I not seen the play and the film by that time. Also, the scene that takes place entirely in French in the film and is not translated is similarly not translated in the play, and there are, as per usual, virtually no stage directions to help you along. So, if you don’t parle francais, you will be quite lost as to what is happening in that scene.

I could say quite simply, concisely and professionally that, "Due to various constraints on the editorial staff, the magazine will now run biweekly." I could say that.

Yet beneath the statement is a truth that in our society's general zest for optimism, we often fail to recognize. It's this, that a certain unshakable exhaustion has settled deep into my bones, a certain weariness with passion, a certain lack of inspiration. These aren't, we're socialized to believe, of any consequence to a journalist.

I've never been and never will be a decent liar. And so, simply stated, I'm tired.

I've been taught not to say that, not to say what I'm really feeling. Journalists, we're socialized to believe, are immune to real feeling. Critique, impassioned critique, yes! Real feeling, why no. No, we leave that to the people we interview.

When I first started watching Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I didn’t like it at all. Released around this time last fall, the Oscar-nominated film, originally published as the critically acclaimed, best-selling memoir Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, is Elle Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jean-Dominique Bauby’s story of the hope he held and the full life he lived despite being paralyzed completely, with only his left eyelid with which to communicate.

The memoir is, understandably, quite short. What I loved about it from the first chapter is that Jean-Do (as he'll affectionately be called for the remainder of this column) does not mince words; he says what he wants to say with a minimum yet describes things in detail when the occasion calls for it. My favorite chapters tended to be the shortest, because his economy for words never affected the point that each chapter was trying to make, and the shortest chapters often had the most meaning despite having the fewest words. The novel was a quick read, two sittings at the most, but I fell absolutely in love with it.

In a complete departure from the book, but with the intention of allowing the viewer to experience what Jean-Do went through, the movie opens with the author coming out of the coma and finding out that he is paralyzed. I would not have minded this departure so much (in fact, I first thought it was a neat way to open the film) if it had not gone on for nearly 40 minutes before it began to incorporate elements of the book. Had the film billed itself as the story of Jean-Do and included the writing of the memoir within it, the intro would have made sense. But, to call the film by the same name as the book, one does not expect that the first third of the film will not follow the writing and will, moreover, set the wrong tone. That first third of the film is uncomfortable and depressing; Jean-Do is not inspiring--he is angry. The grand point of his novel was that he was not angry about his condition, and it takes the rest of the film to recover that point.

Once the tone of the film shifted, and Schnabel began to draw directly from the memoir chapters, the film took on an ethereal, artistic quality. This is where the film shines, and this is doubtless what garnered the film the Oscar noms. The film divides its time between Jean-Do inert and Jean-Do healthy, both before and after his accident, the before being real situations from Jean-Do’s life, and the after being his mind meanderings of his former self traipsing throughout the world. These bright, beautiful images of healthy Jean-Do then interspersed with hospital-bound Jean-Do progressing in his communication and eventual dictation of the memoir completely bring the tone of the film back to where it ought to be, dreamy and hopeful despite glaring obstacles that cannot entirely be overcome. Janusz Kaminski's cinematography is also at its best here, going from the hyper-theatrical of the mind wanderings to the stark nature of the hospital. By the end, the film has completely redeemed itself for its horrid beginning and transformed itself into a cinematographic masterpiece.