In each of the six novels Jane Austen finished during her abbreviated life—she died in 1817 at age 41 of illness—the young heroine achieves a happy resolution to her romantic problems. Her novels’ endings scarcely resemble Austen’s own romantic experience. Though she received and declined at least two marriage proposals, one a day after accepting, she died a spinster.

If you’re in my line of work, you don’t look forward to August. It’s the time when a large part of the moviegoing audience is preoccupied with getting the most out of the precious days remaining before school resumes. And because they know that attendance will be off until early September, the studios use late August as a time to dump all the movies in which they have no confidence onto the theater screens of America. The reviewer’s only consolation is that at least the studios tend not to screen these movies, figuring (wisely enough) that there’s no sense courting bad reviews.