From the previews Stranger Than Fiction looked like another movie in the vein of "The Truman Show," "Bruce Almighty", or "I Heart Huckabees." And since the latter three were all right, so-so, and utter crap, respectively, I wasn't expecting much from this either. Surprisingly, though, STF is the best of metaphysical comedy genre since "Groundhog Day". In fact, its plot and the way it plays out make it more like Gogol's "The Nose" than anything that has come out recently.

But whereas Gogol's story is very much a matter of a literary artist using a fantastic device to send up the conventions and pretentiousness of bureaucratic life, here the roles are reversed. Will Ferrell plays a dull IRS auditor (his favorite word is "integer") who all of a sudden hears a voice inside his head narrating the events of his life in an erudite English accent. When psychiatry fails to cure him, he goes to an English professor (Dustin Hoffman) for advice. The professor attempts to help him by running through all of the conventions of the literary form, in the hope that they can somehow outwit the narrator. In other words, it as if Gogol's nose suddenly stepped back off of the page and sneezed at him.

Movies like this depend almost entirely on their cleverness. STF gets high marks on this score--most of it seems like it was written by someone a lot smarter than the rest of us. Unfortunately, though, the ending is so horrid and overwrought that I can't entirely recommend it.

7/10

"Long" is the operative word: well nigh three hours of family members screaming at each other and then hugging, hugging each other and then screaming. And they stay in that god-awful house the whole time! At one point you are thinking that the setting will finally shift, as they are all going into town for one reason or another, but then . . . the movie jumps ahead, and there they are again in that god-awful house, screaming at each other then hugging. . .

LDJIN shares a single-day alcohol consumption record with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" There are lots of other similarities between the two, but the latter is far superior. For one thing, its characters' vices are more depraved and, well, more entertaining. (If I had heard Mary, Jamie, or little Edmund complain about their father being a cheapskate one more time, I would have gone on a little journey of my own.)

The acting in LDJIN is brilliant, of course, but this is expected since it is an adaptation of a play. Also, its closing sequence, if you can make it that far, is fantastic.

5/10

I watched this again the other day for the first time in 6 or 7 years. My favorite scene is the Godfather and his grandson in the garden, where he pretends to be an ogre and plays hide-and-seek with the kid, then keels over and dies as the kid squirts him with the tomato-sprayer. "Lifetime is a child at play . . . Kingship belongs to the child."


10/10

One of the greatest of all American films I've seen. It doesn't aim to be epic and to capture decades of history, but instead uses a relatively minor event and pretty ordinary characters to hint at larger things (this is usually my favorite sort of movie). 75 minutes long, but says more than Martin Scorcese usually does in 3 hours. Also has one of the finest lines--"if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience?"--I've heard in film or elsewhere.

9/10

7/10