A film well worth seeing and savoring.
Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
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Reviews Counted:36
Fresh:25
Rotten:11
Average Rating:6.8/10
Consensus: A fun, whimsical tale about about an office drone trying to save his life from his narrator. The cast obviously is having a blast with the script, but Stranger Than Fiction's tidy lessons make this metaphysical movie feel like Charlie Kaufman-lite.
Rated: PG-13 [See Full Rating] for some disturbing images, sexuality, brief language and nudity.
Runtime: 1 hr 53 mins
Genre: Comedies
Theatrical Release:Nov 10, 2006 Wide
Box Office: $40,137,776
Synopsis: One morning, a seemingly average and generally solitary IRS agent named Harold Crick begins to hear a female voice narrating his every action, thought and feeling in alarmingly precise detail.... One morning, a seemingly average and generally solitary IRS agent named Harold Crick begins to hear a female voice narrating his every action, thought and feeling in alarmingly precise detail. Harold's carefully controlled life is turned upside down by this narration only he can hear, and when the voice declares that Harold Crick is facing imminent death, he realizes he must find out who is writing his story and persuade her to change the ending. The voice in Harold's head turns out to be the once celebrated, but now nearly forgotten, novelist Karen "Kay" Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who is struggling to find an ending for what might be her best book. Her only remaining challenge is to figure out a way to kill her main character, but little does she know that Harold Crick is alive and well and inexplicably aware of her words and her plans for him. To make matters worse, Kay's publisher has dispatched a hard-nosed "assistant," Penny Escher (Queen Latifah), to force Kay to finish her novel and finish off Harold Crick. Desperate to take control of his destiny and avoid an untimely demise, Harold seeks help from a literary theorist named Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), who suggests that Harold might be able to change his fate by turning his story from a tragedy into a comedy. Professor Hilbert suggests that Harold try to follow one of comedy's most elemental formulas: a love story between two people who hate each other. His suggestion leads Harold to initiate an unlikely romance with a free-spirited baker named Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal). As Harold experiences true love and true life for the first time, he becomes convinced that he has escaped his fate, as his story seems to be taking on all the trappings of a comedy in which he will not, and cannot, die. But Harold is unaware that in a Karen Eiffel tragedy, the lead characters always die at exactly the moment when they have the most to live for. Harold and Kay find themselves in unexplored territory as each must weigh the value of a single human existence against what might just be an immortal work of art: a novel about life and death -- and taxes. --© Sony Pictures [More]
Starring: Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman
Starring: Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Tony Hale, Queen Latifah, Kristin Chenoweth
Director: Marc Forster
Director: Marc Forster
Producer: Lindsay Doran, Aubrey Henderson, Jim Miller, Brittany Daniel
Studio: Sony Pictures Entertainment
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Reviews for Stranger Than Fiction
Stranger Than Fiction seems like an old episode of the Twilight Zone, and the idea would have worked better as one of Rod Serling's half-hour epistles on human foibles.
It doesn't coast on its premise but follows where it leads, which is into some serious territory. What might have been a joke with a tagged-on sentimental ending becomes instead a sensitive movie that affirms the value of life.
It seems like the screenwriter may have suffered a shortage of ideas and remedied the problem by watching Charlie Kaufman films.
With its musings on free will and God, the story may not be original, but caring about its hero is automatic for the audience. That's more than most movies can say.
It has a nifty premise and outstanding performances from Ferrell, as the protagonist-in-progress, and Emma Thompson, as his blocked creator.
Stranger Than Fiction might be film, but it moves like a novel: a literate, unhurried tale marked by softly wrought reflections on the self-made life.
So, in lieu of the usual cookie-cutter movie, we at least get the cookie itself, a nice-light treat.
A wondrously funny modern fairy tale, Stranger than Fiction manages to blend romance, satire and fantasy into a story that's both fully satisfying and patently absurd.
[Director Marc] Forster's sweetly engaging concoction bends our minds without too much strain, and even those moments that feel mildly familiar never breed anything close to contempt.
Will Ferrell delivers a moving and surprisingly delicate -- though not so surprisingly funny -- turn as the lonesome bureaucrat bedeviled by a voice only he hears.
Stranger Than Fiction is uptight. [Writer Zach] Helm is clearly pro-love and happy endings, but he's short on loose, fresh ideas.
Besides being inventive and witty, Stranger Than Fiction is a tribute to the power of literature. But art is not its only domain. It also delves into the world of ultimate certainties: death and taxes.
While Stranger Than Fiction traffics in a bit of darkly funny existential anxiety, it also finds room for romantic fantasy and sentimental uplift.
Take a cool premise, a smart director and a top-flight cast, then throw an ex-TV sketch comedy knucklehead into the mix - and voila, a thinking person's dramedy that grapples with issues of fate and free will, love and liberation. Look out, Oscars.
If Stranger Than Fiction has a central flaw, it's overly sentimental. Although the story would work better as a tragedy, Forster and Helm can't resist tacking on a mushy love story, involving Crick and combative tax cheat Ana Pascal.
Stranger Than Fiction is a meditation on life, art and romance, and on the kinds of responsibility we have. Such an uncommonly intelligent film does not often get made.
For all of the film's narrative intricacies, it's love in bloom that carries the day.
The picture is an overworked trifle: There's so much going on in it that it becomes hard to care about anything that's going on in it.
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