Emily Paull

I read this script in about two hours last night. As far as screenplays go, this was a super readable one, but I would not recommend tackling it without seeing the movie first. I found myself remembering the scenes and imagining the actors in their roles and things. Isn't it funny how you associate a particular movie with the first time you watched it? Isn't it even funnier when you think back to that day and feel nothing; no nostalgia, no sense of lost. Looking back on watching that film with a boy I used to date, I realise that I am a different person now. That girl in the memory reel I am watching is not me, but she sort of looks like me. I digress. I like Tarantino films because they deliberately fly in the face of taboo. Adultery, drugs, sex, gangsters etc. all feature in Pulp Fiction in a round about sort of way and yet it manages to remain remarkably kitsch, rather than deep and meaningful. I remember when I was small, seeing the movie poster framed in someone...

Just a quick post... I must say that I am growing somewhat tired of blogging about Uni stuff all the time. On Friday, I did try to work on the Compound, but I was so incredibly tired and brain-sore that I only managed to write about one hundred words about Winston's first shower on the ship that rescues him. Well, no actually, I managed to write a bit more than that but I suddenly realised the impracticality of writing about a warm shower... it would have been a fairly cold one probably. I will try to finish off that chapter this week though because my lack of writing is fairly ridiculous. Anyways, on to our main event. Poirot. What comes to mind when I say that name? He's one of Agatha Christie's most famous creations, the 1930's detective from Belgium with the adorable curliqued moustache. And I must say that reading his last adventure was much like playing a game of Cluedo. Or Clue, if you happen to be American, I suppose. We are given a series of old murders...

I had been dreading reading this one. Drama? Gag me. (And yet ironically I have somehow ended up friendly with a lot of people who LOVE drama. Weird.) And then weird, freaky, shock you to your senses until you fall out of your socks kind of drama? Double gag me. But Sarah Kane is fortunate that I was being made to read her book for uni, because I actually really enjoyed it. I don't know if you remember, but I read the Monkey's Mask for Australian Literature and Film last semester, and I really liked that. It was great because it was so precise, all these pretty images/ not so pleasant ideas were put forth in a lovely, concise, understandable way, and I was able to just read and read and read... 4.48 Psychosis was like that. I'm definitely going to need another read of it to get my head around some of the core ideas but as a work of art, it just really spoke to me. My interpretation is probably wrong, mind you. But what I got from it was a sad, lost, lonely person...

It's really, really hard not to think of the movie instead of the book version of this, but the book came first. Bridget probably was never supposed to look like Renee Zellweger, and it was a bit of laugh to have Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy no doubt, but as is the case with novel adaptations which enjoy considerable success, the sad fact is that most people now can't separate the two. There's a rule I tend to respect, which was (I think) probably taught to me by my Grandpa: If you see the move first, you hate the book and vice versa. I'm going to keep this short and sweet. Bridget Jones' Diary is basically Pride and Prejudice and I cannot believe that I never noticed that before. I think it's probably because Bridget is infinitely LESS likeable than Elizabeth Bennett. (Seriously, chain smoker, obsessed with dieting and appearance, believes perfect boyfriend will mean ultimate life happines... what kind of a role model is she trying to be?) Yet despite this I h...

I do not speak French. Well. I do not speak much French. Like most of my generation, I know the lyrics to Art vs. Science's 'Parlez vous Francais' and also that bit from 'Lady Marmalade' but those sorts of phrases are hardly the sorts of things that you can walk up to a normal French person and say without either being slapped or lead into an inappropriate situation. Nor do I speach Czech. (I actually don't even know what language they speak in the Czech republic...) One person who would definitely speak both of those languages is Milan Kundera, prolific writer of modern literary fiction. And for my World Writing Today course, I have been asked to read a little novella of his called "Slowness." First, an overview. Milan Kundera and his wife soujourn to a chateau (see I can use French words)in the French countryside which has seen two instances of... shall we say corporeal expressions of spontaneous love. Each of these events is one hundred years ...

I think I probably owe Georgette Heyer a bit of an apology. The other day I was at work, sitting in my boss's comfy chair and eating some lunch while reading Devil's Cub and our Jeweller asked me what I was reading. I said "The kind of novel you buy for five dollars at an airport and then throw out when you reach your destination." You see, in my head, the works of Georgette Heyer were much akin to Mills and Boon novels. I think this largely comes from an earlier reading of a book called The Fiction Class , in which the main character has been named after a Heyer book by her vapid mother. Well. At the time of making those comments, I was fairly sure I was right. I'd only read the book a chapter at a time and it seemed to be all heaving chests and duels. And then of course, I started to like it. I found that I really connected with Mary Challoner, being the older, less... popular sister, and even though I could predict the ending, I wanted to watch it all...