The Rosie Project Jan 2016

A Valentine’s Day Selection. 

This should have been our selection for February 2016 at the Brown Bag Book Club.[1] 

As you can see from the citations below, this won an “unpublished” book award in Australia (?).  The author sold the movie rights {but no movie}.  He did get an Advanced Diploma of Screenwriting in 2013, and when he wrote the sequel, he got, in 2014, a Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing; both from the University of Melborne. [This was not his undergraduate, but his graduate school.]

We all love Canadian R/C novels, but Australian ???  Even Crocodile Dundee wasn’t what I would call romantic.  I can’t recall what prompted me to originally order this book – I actually bought it for a friend.  This is another entry into the genre-world of O/C behavior comedies.  The protagonist is off the charts of “normal” and the reader is encouraged to feel sympathetic as one might to a child with learning disabilities.  Robin or Padma could comment on what variations are being portrayed.  The plot line is a basic boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl  --  a romantic comedy.  It’s funny – it’s romantic – but it’s stupid, and not well developed..

Like Christopher Boone, the 15-year-old narrator of Mark Haddon's 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he's appealing not just despite his eccentricities but because of them.  We read that book in June 2005 (see next page for what I wrote then).

The O/C behavior just spices up an otherwise standard R/C plotline that has been done for as long as I can remember: movies like “It Happened One Night”, or anything with Tracy and Hepburn; stage plays like with Burton and Taylor.  Even the author tries to spice things up with mentions of Billy Crystal and Gregory Peck.  This is the basic essence of writing for social communication – Conflict – Yin and Yang – Opposites Attract – Salt and Pepper.

The predictability of the storyline is only matched by our, the reader’s, capacity to insatiably digest an infinite set of variations on this popular theme.  It’s a fun read.  But the unbelievable plotlines appeared to be even too stupid for Hollywood’s mega$$stars. 

Well, while “Oh, gee,” loveable and sweet, this wouldn’t have made it beyond three episodes as a sit-com.  It appears that there are saccharine limits to even Jen Lawrence’s agent’s taste[2].

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[1] Simsion won the 2012 Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award for his book, The Rosie Project. Text Publishing has sold the rights to the book internationally for over $1.8m. The Rosie Project was published in Australia in January 2014, and has since sold more than a million copies in over forty countries around the world. The screenplay has been optioned to Sony Pictures Entertainment. A sequel to The Rosie Project, titled The Rosie Effect, was published on 24 September 2014 by Text Publishing.

 

[2] Richard Linklater Follows Jennifer Lawrence Off Sony's 'Rosie Project’ by Borys Kit 10/14/2015 10:57am PDT

Sources say Linklater left when Lawrence left on the heels of Jennifer Lawrence dropping out of Tri-Star’s The Rosie Project, The Hollywood Reporter has learned the romantic dramedy's director Richard Linklater has also departed.

Sources say both actress and director left the project Monday.  Lawrence’s departure had to do with scheduling, according to several sources. The actress has been jumping from one movie to another — she went from X-Men: Apocalypse in the spring and summer to currently shooting Passengers— and the studio was hoping to shoot Rosie in the winter. Instead, the Oscar-winner needed a break.  Rosie was developed as a Lawrence vehicle, and Linklater, then making his first move since nabbing six Oscar nominations for his film Boyhood, came on board for a chance to work with the actress.

The studio considers the project a priority and will look for a new filmmaker and star immediately.

 

 

 

Revolt in 2100 by Robert Heinlein

Recently, I downloaded the ebook, "Revolt in 2100 (note the blurb: "the second American Revolution has begun") by Robert Heinlein. Mostly, it includes the "If This Goes On" novella, in which America is taken over by Nehemiah Scudder, the First Prophet, who establishes a tyrannical theocracy. But I was reading the last piece in the book, "Concerning Stories Never Written: Postscript."

Heinlein writes,

"...the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past. It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian.”

"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up,or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith is communism or holy-Rollerism; indeed it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.”

"Nevertheless this business of legislating religious beliefs into law has never been more than sporadically successful in this country -- Sunday closing laws here and there, birth control legislation in spots, the Prohibition experiment, temporary enclaves of theocracy such as Voliva's Zion, Smith's Nauvoo, a few others. ...”

"Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not -- but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday's efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck. Throw in a depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on Earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of "anti-Furriners" in general and anti-intellectual here at home and the results might be something quite frightening... The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed."

He wrote this while living in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1953.

The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant

This is an awesome book – very entertaining – and well-written.  I couldn’t put it down – read it straight through over two days.

It’s a lucky day 4-leaf clover book at the library.

It is a brilliant fictional memoir, which is something Diamant does really well (Red Tent).  The style is a series of vignettes mainly focused on a woman’s early youth, but rapidly spanning years as we head to the present.  She is relaying the story of her life to her 22-year old grand-daughter.  Even with that passage of time, “current” is 1985.  If I didn’t love this book so much, I’d say she simply used the structure of “Red Tent” and rewrote the specific vignettes, updated to three millennia later.

But so what, Robert Parker did that for dozens and dozens of remakes of Spencer novels and I loved every one of them.

Diamant writes about Jewish history and family life.  In this book it is immigrant life at the juncture of the 19^th & 20^th centuries; WW-I and the depression.

 

 

I go through a lot of books each month, but currently I’m distracted and have been skipping reads. 

After the first few pages of this book, however, I was hooked – captivated by her story-telling.