For about three days of class, we watched the movie Jane Austen's Book Club. Personally, I didn't particularly enjoy the film considering I'm not one who particularly enjoys books and also thought the movie was pretty boring.Some of its strengths were that it showed how books can be used to express ones emotions through the constant quoting during the film, and the fact that books can be a way of meeting new people and bringing people together. The whole plot of the movie revolved around the idea of relating to and discussing Austen's books which can be considered both a strength and a weakness in my opinion. On one hand, people who have read the books can easily relate to their ideas and on the other hand, people who have never read the books are left clueless.  In the movie, each character was supposed to represent the main character of the books they were reading, however, we had never actually read anything by Jane Austen. I can't really take much from this movie either way because not only did I not understand what they were talking about, I also wasn't able to watch most of the second half of it either.

During the movie, there were some points where each character stepped out of their comfort zones in order to expand their horizons. One person who displayed this attribute from the start of the film was Grigg, the lone man in the book club. For starters, he chose to join the book club that was all about a genre of book that he knew nothing about. He was invited to the club by Jocelyn and was brave enough to read an out of comfort zone book as well as try to be in an all girl club. In Grigg's case, he ended up thoroughly enjoying the new genre and really was enjoying the book club and spending time with the girls. Another time that Grigg stepped out of his comfort zone was when he gave Sylvia a chance at going on a date. Unlike the other time he stepped out of his comfort zone, this lead to Sylvia actually going back to her ex-husband and Jocelyn ended up falling for Grigg in the process.
This movie expresses the power of books and their ability to help people and bring them together. One example of books helping people through their lives would be when Sylvia ends up trying to make her marriage work with her ex-husband again because she read the book Mansfield Park in which the main character is tempted in falling in love with another person but ends up staying true to her heart and marrying the person she originally loved. This book club also manages to bring together six unlikely friends together to get to know each other and discuss ideas about not only books, but about their lives as well.