mantilo: a miscellany

I went to watch “Stranger than Fiction” this weekend. It reminded me that it was the first movie I’ve gone out to see since…August. Damn you, Netflix!

Admittedly, my ardor for Will Ferrell has cooled considerably since “Anchorman;” I didn’t see his last few movies because they looked pretty bad. But Emma Thompson as writer Kay Eiffel and Queen Latifa as assistant Penny Escher were in this so I thought to give it a try (I hate to admit it, but I watched “Last Holiday” and felt it was a nice feel-good candy movie!).

The premise of the movie is Harold Crick, a very methodical and uninspired IRS agent working in Chicago. His life is orderly but lonely, and one day begins to hear someone with a British accent narrating his life. It spooks him  but what frightens him the most is when the body-less narrator says, “Little did he know that events had been sent in motion that would lead to his imminent death…” This of course, sets his life in a new direction.

Dustin Hoffman plays a literature professor who helps him discover this mystery narrator. He did a great job in this, and had a great line: “I’m teaching five classes this term, advising two doctoral students, and I’m the faculty lifeguard.” For some reason, the idea of volunteering for lifeguard duties as a professor is reason enough for me to want to be a professor. So I can do non-professor things.

Both he and Emma Thompson fufilled their roles as, respectively, semi-crazy literature professor and crazy recluse writer. They entertained a lot of strange idiosyncracies, like drinking a lot of coffee or detesting umbrellas. One moment I’ve kept in mind is the sight of Emma talking to Harold, while nervously clutching a tissue that’s been twisted into a thin, uneven cone. It’s a touching visual although I wonder if as a viewer I’m supposed to be noticing these types of things.

Maggie Gyllenhaal also appears as an anarchist baker. I liked her fake tattoo - although it seemed they were trying too hard to convey a sort of wild, rule-breaking woman - but I did not like her relationship to Harold all that much. It was very conventional in a movie that was trying to be willfully unconventional; a beautiful young girl with an older, funny-looking man is a familiar trope. To this same effort, some scenes are strained, particularly of those with Harold shouting into the air to his invisible narrator.

I was also hoping for more meta in this movie. The ending alluded to some in a clever way that enhanced its predictability, but I wanted to see this kind of device used throughout the rest of the movie. This is not to say that “Stranger than Fiction” is a bad movie and should be avoided. Overall it is a pleasant movie to watch with few slow moments that make me question whether directors even bother with trying to edit out pleasing but tedious scenes. Hello, you could put those in the DVD extras and have an even tighter, better film! The soundtracks is also pretty good.

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