DVD review: Stranger than Fiction

I grew up with film. Earning that thirty five or fifty cents (! shows you how OLD I am) during the week by running errands for elderly neighbors to be able to go see a weekend double feature, well that was at the top of my priority list when I was still a child. Later I worked for nearly a decade for a cinema chain. Just at the time all the self-censorship fell, and things that had never been said before were suddenly ok. An amazing time. Which is only to say, anyone who has seen as many as I have has the right to make some judgement about what they find good or bad.

And most films nowadays tend to bore me.

I saw that 'Stranger Than Fiction' was out the other day, and remembered some good buzz about it about being Oscar worthy. But it didn't make it. It stars Will Ferrell, whom I had never heard of, and Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, and Emma Thompson. I bought it because Emma Thompson is in it and it is a comedy, and I know she can be very funny.

It is about a pure cypher of a man. Harold Crick. No personality, none whatsoever, a robot, of sorts. And one day he wakes up and begins hearing a voice in his head, narrating his life. Every banal detail of his boring life. It is very very funny. Of course everyone around him thinks he is schizophrenic, but he is sure that someone is steering his life, because what the narrator is relating is changing his life in reality. The narrator turns out to be Emma Thompson, who plays an authoress with severe writer's block, because she can't figure out how to kill her main character, which is something she has always done before. Totally! just totally neurotic, chain smoking, out to lunch in her head. Her publishers send her the no-nonsense, ever exasperated Queen Latifah to help her. The chemistry between them is so wonderful, I ended up laughing and holding my sides. Of course, the main character, Harold, gets a take on what she plans to do to him, and panic is the order of the day. Psychiatrists can't help, so he turns to a literature professor, (Hoffman) to help him find who is writing this stuff. He does find her, and begs her not to kill him. That scene had me on the floor, laughing. Beautiful stuff, hey. Just the look on Thompson's face when the man she thinks she's imagined walks into her apartment is worth the price of admission, oh yes! I did not like the ending. Too Hollywood. Too comedic. But right up to that, it is one of the most original and best movies I've seen in a very long time.

If I had written something like that, it would have ended with him remaining dead, then a shot to her free of the writing block, and cheerfully starting anew, with some other guy starting to hear her in his head..... It would have been snark, but it also would have remained comedic.

Good thing no one has ever unleashed me on the world.....

My lover Peter used to be very involved with actors in Germany in his salad days. And he knew many of the best of his generation. And they have a wonderful word for a certain technique, 'outrage' french pronunciation. (ooo tragsch) Exaggerating to the point of making a figure somewhat, but not quite, a cartoon, a caricature. It can be a high art. Ms Thompson is a master
of that technique.

So as a film, recommend it highly. Unusual, fresh, very very funny, it is 108 minutes of your life you won't regret having spent watching a film.