I saw the movie Stranger Than Fiction on TV over the Xmas period. I'd already seen it on DVD a couple of years ago, but I made a point of seeing it again because I really enjoyed it the first time. It's a Will Ferrell movie but don't expect another Blades of Glory. This is his attempt at branching out of his stereotype much like Jim Carrey's The Truman Show and Adam Sandler's Punch-Drunk Love, and he possibly does a better job of it than either of those two.
He plays a serious tax auditor called Harold Crick, who leads a boring and routine life. However one day he starts hearing a narrator describing everything he does down to the number of times he brushes each tooth and whether he'll miss the bus or not that morning. As you can imagine this is extremely disturbing for Harold, especially when the narrator predicts things that haven't even happened to him yet. But then he hears the narrator say that he's going to die and his whole life is thrown into turmoil. He starts meeting English professor Dustin Hoffman to find out what sort of story his life is and if there's anything he can do to avert his fate. Meanwhile we find out that the narrator is actually a reclused writer played by Emma Thompson. She always ends her books by killing off the main character, but she can't bring herself to do it to Harold, so Queen Latifah is sent in by the publisher's to help her clear her writer's block and finish Harold off.
Rating: 8 out of 10 - Very surreal, but if you can suspend disbelief you'll enjoy a very original and moving story.
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