For the first half hour or so, I thought I understood what The Lobster was trying to be about. It's set in a society where bachelor-hood is illegal and unmarried men of a certain age have to find a mate within establishment society inside of 45 days or they will be turned into animals of their choice; our hero has chosen to be a lobster, maybe because lobsters have hard shells and big claws to defend themselves against attackers. The fact that they are customarily boiled alive for food didn't

I am mystified by the continual popularity of Jane Austen, whose neoclassicism seems to me as outside modern aesthetics as my own. The audience I watched Love and Friendship with laughed a lot more often than I did. But the stiff formality of Austen's times kept the characters speaking in a conversational manner with hands hanging at their sides until they sounded too much the same, and their grammatically pure sentences sounded too literary.