|
| Stranger than fiction |
| Tuesday, November 14, 2006 |
We went to watch Stranger Than Fiction yesterday. I had no clue what the movie was about, before going to the theatre. But as the story unfolded, I started liking it, slightly. I liked Will Ferrell's character, a Tax man with the IRS, who is one of the most methodical, organized men, and hence one of the most boring. For example, he has specific counts of brush strokes he does every day, 76 times to the left, 76 times to the right, 84 times up and 84 times down. Punctual to the second. Does the same thing day in and day out. No life whatsoever.
There is also this famous writer, played by Emma Thompson, in the plot, who writes wonderful books, but kills all her characters in her books, thus making all her books a masterpiece. She is one crazy British woman. Like she does not sit in her office and think about the plot for her book, but goes to places, like top of a building or top of the bridge, to imagine, to describe the exact place and exact moment as real as it can be.
Turns out her last book is about our boring character. He hears this voice in his head, narrating the story of his life. He goes bonkers but tries to live with it. He is pushed to the end of frustration when the voice talks about his 'imminent death'. He realizes that he needs help and visits a psychiatrist, who says he might be schizophrenic. When he denies that, saying that the voice is not telling him what to do, but what he is doing, or has already done, only in much better English, using much better words, she suggests him to go see a literature professor at the University.
There the story unfolds even further, the professor is a funny character with his own quirks and weirdness about himself. In the meantime our hero also meets his heroine (I hated her btw), acts with the usual clumsiness of a numbers only and boring man.
I am not writing to tell the whole story, but its a decent movie, except for the ending. The concept is newly contrived, and the humor was pretty mild, though it was magnified by the fifteen plus of us sitting in the theater all by ourselves on a rainy Monday afternoon.
Can watch once, I suppose, on DVD. |
posted by SK @ 6:47 AM  |
|
|
|
|
|
