Movie Review: Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction: Torgo approves

Rainster just did a nice job with pros and cons in a movie review. Let me try that.

Pros:
1) In the "Eternal Sunshine," "I Heart Huckabees" mold, this movie is whimsical, offbeat, and not bound by any apparent rules.

2) Dustin Hoffman. I've said it before but it's worth repeating. He keeps taking fun roles and being interesting in them. His first scene here, he's going from one coffee cup to the next, drinking coffee while peeing, etc. It's subtle and hilarious.

3) The foreshadowing is restrained. You can begin to see where it's heading, especially with the random clips of two seeming non-characters. But it's not overdone.

4) Will Ferrell. He's good. Having heard there was buzz about big award nominations for him, well, I don't see that. But he is good.

Cons:
1) Maggie Gyllenhaal's character is, like the women in too many movies I've seen recently, a strong-willed, free-thinking woman who quickly crumbles and falls for a guy with little more going for him than a crush on her. This irks me. I mean, he's a boring IRS agent who's auditing her. She's a left-leaning hippie who owns her own business.

2) Queen Latifah. She irks me. I just don't think she can act. Granted, she doesn't have a role to play. Her dialogue is wooden on the page. But she brings nothing to it. I think she drags Emma Thompson down and I used to be smitten with Emma Thompson (up until around "Sense and Sensibility").

3) (don't read this if you haven't seen it) I don't buy it that Will Ferrell would say it's ok that he gets killed. I'm a writer. I love literature. I get sucked into stories when I already know how they end. Every time I read Romeo and Juliet I had idiotic hope that maybe this time they wouldn't both die in the end. But:

4) This isn't that good of a book. What's it about? Ok, we don't know. But we know the main character is this IRS agent with an incredibly boring life. Based on what happens in the movie (which is presumably near the end of the book), it's not that great.

Perhaps I'd have been more forgiving if we hadn't watched one of my favorite movies (The Big Lebowski) and one of M-N's favorites (Love and Basketball) over the weekend. They set a high bar. But I liked this movie.