Tuesday, November 24, 2020

A Movie You Might Have Missed #29: Stranger Than Fiction

It's been 10 years since I began this series highlighting movies I wished more people knew about. I'm rerunning it from the beginning because I still think these are movies you might have missed.

This movie is an unexpected delight, as unique and original in its own way as About a Boy was, and that is high praise indeed. It's one of my top ten movies.

 29. Stranger Than Fiction



Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is an IRS auditor with an incredibly dull life. One day he begins hearing a woman's voice narrating his every action. Unbeknownst to Crick, he actually is the protagonist in author Karen Eiffel's (Emma Thompson) latest novel. We are shown dual realities as Ferrell tries to discover why he is hearing the voice and Eiffel investigates method after method of killing off her character. When Ferrell hears the voice mention his impending death the search takes on a new urgency. He  enlists the aid of a literary professor (Dustin Hoffman) and life takes new turns as he begins to incorporate the professor's advice into his life.

This movie tells an original and delightful story while pointing out that things like a warm cookie, the touch of a hand, a hug, or a little act of kindness can transform our lives and make them worth living. It is also part of the genius of this movie, that such hackneyed phrases can take on a new and redemptive life when the viewer is seeing them ... and that is because they are true.

(My full review is here. After you've watched the movie, you may care to hear Scott and me discuss it at A Good Story is Hard to Find.)

2 comments:

  1. We loved this one! One of my daughters saw it first.

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  2. Not a Will Ferrell fan but did see this one on DVD a year or so ago and like it, at least, I really appreciated the central point in the flick.

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