As to 'Mansfield Park', this was a 2007 ITV production. Billie Piper's Fanny Price bounces and romps and chortles through the whole production, and although she is clearly of marriageable age, her hair is loose and dishevelled and looks as if it has never seen a hairbrush. If you love Billie Piper you will probably love this, if you love Jane Austen and know anything at all about upperclass manners of the period - probably not.
I've never seen this movie, but regardless of the costume & hair -- to have Fanny Price bouncing, romping, and chortling through the movie is already totally out of character!
Not to mention, her heaving bosom is enough to put even the most well-endowed barmaid to shame!
I was reading a romance novel - I think it was a Nora Roberts one, set in Alaska.
They had the heroine up in a plane, looking at a herd of moose. I howled. Moose are very solitary creatures. Calves stick with mom and twins might hang out together for a while their first year or two away from mom but otherwise, they are on their own. I figured out that she meant caribou, which would herd and would be much more prevalent than moose in Alaska, if there are even moose in Alaska at all.
I have read a lot of Nora Roberts novels, and one thing I have noticed is that stuff like this happens pretty regularly. For such a prolific author, she's actually not bad at research. Perhaps more importantly, she's pretty good at sounding like she knows what she's talking about, at least when her readers more or less don't.
But when she does get something wrong (or even just kind of off), and you do know better, it's awfully jarring. I can't remember which book it was, but I can never forget a scene where some character put a Mozart CD on and she described it as "weeping violins." I know Nora Roberts loves her some weeping violins, but I can assure you, violins playing Mozart do not weep. They trip happily along like so much bubbly froth. There is no weeping in any Mozart I've ever heard or played, not from any instrument.
Actually, on the subject of music, I think I've determined that Nora Roberts really loves that type of music that you can see in those displays at the bookstore. You know, where you have the option to demo like 20 different instrumental CDs, and they're all calming, relaxing music with names like "Forest Meadows" or some such. Whenever she actually describes music, it's flutes and harps or weeping violins. I found it annoying at one point, but now I am mostly just amused by the mental image.
