All right, this kid is a spoiled brat. I never once had a reaction like this at Christmas–my parents would never have allowed me to spit in the faces of their presents. But also, this kid’s attitude toward books makes me sad.

Besides, I keep begging everyone to give me books for Christmas, and no one listens!

Merry Christmas, Word Pirates.

Did you know that Jane Austen pretty much lived out Pride and Prejudice in real life, only she didn’t get married at the end? Neither did I, but that is what Hollywood wants you to believe in its biopic “Becoming Jane.” Anne Hathaway plays Jane Austen in a film where she undergoes the events that would later become her memoir–oops, I mean novel–Pride and Prejudice.

Jane Austen, in the film, is very smart. You can tell she is smart because she does not smile as much as the other characters. In Hollywood shorthand, one of the ways you can tell that a character is a genius is by how few smiles that person gives. To illustrate, behold this graph I made:

As you can see, few-to-no smiles correlates with a higher level of intelligence, as perfectly performed by Jesse Eisenberg, who does not smile even once while playing Mark Zuckerberg the boy-genius of Facebook in “The Social Network.” (To be clear, I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg is a genius, but that’s the popular view of him because he is rich.) On the other end of the scale is Ashton Kutcher’s character in “Dude, Where’s My Car?” where he smiles constantly to indicate his character’s stoned-out state. Anne Hathaway’s Jane Austen is on the Mark Zuckerberg end of the scale, but is not quite as extreme because she is a girl.

Although she does not smile, Jane Austen does mumble what are supposed to be wry English witticisms. At least, I assume so. I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying because of the loud musical score that overwhelms the movie. To be fair, Anne Hathaway is charming and lovely to look at, which is accurate casting because everyone knows Jane Austen was a beauty.

When the movie opens, we get one of my favorite cliché images of writing: the writer scratching with a quill on a piece of paper while muttering to herself. (Incidentally, this is my third favorite kind of cliché writing scene, the second being woman writer in a nightgown typing on a typewriter and the first being the writer scribbling something down and then crumpling the paper up and throwing it in a trashcan.) Then we are introduced to characters whom we are supposed to believe Jane Austen based Pride and Prejudice on. There is a Mister Collins. There is a Lady Catherine de Bourgh. There is Elizabeth Bennett’s mother and father and sister. And of course there is a Mr. Darcy as well as a George Wickham. People say lines from Pride and Prejudice to Jane. They insult her like they do in scenes of the novel. Really, you could just see one of the many movie adaptations of “Pride and Prejudice” and skip this film altogether.

Eventually one of several love interests enter the scene, including the leading man, Tom Lefroy. He and Jane instantly hate each other. They bicker in a forest. She snubs him at a ball. Then at another ball, they say English witticisms to each other while dancing, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying because of the loud score problem.

Tom Lefroy challenges Jane. He gives her Tom Jones by Henry Fielding to read, which I don’t remember being racy but Jane Austen finds it so. He rocks her world by doing things people in the 19th Century would never do, such as run from a mixed-gender cricket match while stripping off his clothes so he can jump naked into a lake. Also, he takes her to a boxing match and gets beat up. Jane Austen falls in love with him.

But: conflict: there is another man who wants to marry Jane and he is rich. Jane loves Tom Lefroy, but he is poor. Jane is torn. Should she marry this rich guy and secure her financial position? Should she make-out with Tom Lefroy by a lake? Should she just try to be a writer, even though that is not sexy and she is a woman? At yet another ball, she finds herself dancing with both of her suitors at the same time, and at each turn, she thinks, Money? Love? Money? Love? What will she do??

Sometimes I wonder if Jane Austen’s sister did her a favor by burning all Jane’s letters after she died. This act made the real Jane Austen a permanent mystery, forcing us to always return to her work for clues into who she was and what she thought. On the other hand, that mystery seems to make people want to fictionalize her. Thus Jane Austen is forced to solve mysteries and to act out the plot of her own novels on the big screen. This never happens to Shakespeare. Well, not usually.

In real life, Jane Austen did have two suitors, one based on affection and the other based on position, but they certainly didn’t happen at the same time and they certainly weren’t as fabulous as the movie suggests. When those relationships didn’t work out, she didn’t “live by her pen,” as the movie says. Because women didn’t write books in those days, she was turned down by publishers and was dependent on her brother’s financial mercy until finally, at the end of her life, she started publishing her books. She gained a modicum of fame and then died at age 41 from an unknown disease, probably cancer.

This movie strays so completely from Jane Austen’s life story that it seems indifferent to who she was as a person and as a writer. Instead of allowing the audience to hear Austen’s brilliant prose—which after 200 years surely must be out of copyright—we get montages and overlaid images of Hathaway mumbling under violin music. Fictionalizing happens in every biopic, but this movie seems so uninterested in its subject that it just comes off as a cynical attempt to cash in on the Jane Austen craze.

As such, it widdles her life down to this: Jane Austen didn’t get married, so she lived out the circumstances of her courtship over and over again in her novels. And even assuming that’s so (it’s not), then surely there’s no point in watching this movie when her books are readily available.

I enjoyed reading Dan Baum’s tweets about why he got fired from the New Yorker after working there as a staff writer (more of a contributing freelancer). He dishes how much he got paid and why he thinks they let him go from his contract. I especially liked this part:

I must say, though, the office itself is a little creepy. I didn’t work there. I live in Colorado. But I’d visit 3-4X a year.

Everybody whispers.

It’s not exactly like being in a library; it’s more like being in a hospital room where somebody is dying.

Like someone’s dying, and everybody feels a little guilty about it.

There’s a weird tension to the place. If you raise your voice to normal level, heads pop up from cubicles.

And from around the stacks of review copies that lie everywhere like a graveyard of writers’ aspirations.

It always seemed strange. Making it to the New Yorker is an achievement. It is vastly prestigious, of course.

And the work is truly satisfying. Imagine putting out that magazine every week!

Yet nobody at the office seems very happy. The atmosphere is vastly strained.

This is not an environment I would thrive in.