{"id":233,"date":"2006-11-20T23:45:35","date_gmt":"2006-11-21T03:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/archives\/233"},"modified":"2008-09-28T13:53:47","modified_gmt":"2008-09-28T17:53:47","slug":"stranger-than-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/2006\/11\/20\/stranger-than-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Stranger Than Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"4
\nI associate Will Farrell with comedies that are funny but rather dopey; his last movie Talladega Nights<\/em><\/a> is a classic example. However his latest movie<\/a> is different. It’s a low-key fantasy; clever, witty and somewhat dark.
\n
\nFarrell plays Harold Crick, an IRS auditor with a talent for numbers and not much else. He counts things obsessively, can multiply large numbers in his head, lives alone and has no social life. (This sounds a lot like Asperger’s Syndrome, but his speech and demeanor show no obvious symptoms; perhaps a borderline case?)<\/p>\n

One day Harold starts hearing voices–or more specifically, a single female voice narrating the mundane events of his life “with complete accuracy and a better vocabulary”. This is disturbing enough, but he gets even more upset when he hears the voice predict his imminent death.<\/p>\n

Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson) is a reclusive author. She is gruff, unfriendly, very talented and suffering from writer’s block. She has made the classic mistake of coming up with a character without knowing what to do with him. She intends to kill him of course, but for the life of her she can’t figure out how to do it.<\/p>\n

Her character is, of course, the unfortunate Harold Crick.<\/p>\n

Harold has the good sense to seek the help of Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) a renowned expert on English Literature. Hilbert doesn’t quite know what to make of this strange person, but he does offer some sensible advice: If you think that you are a literary character, the first thing you should do is figure out if you are in a tragedy or a comedy.<\/p>\n

But that is not as easy as it sounds. In fact it’s a difficult problem that occupies Harold (and Hilbert and eventually Kay Eiffel) for the rest of the movie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I associate Will Farrell with comedies that are funny but rather dopey; his last movie Talladega Nights is a classic example. However his latest movie is different. It’s a low-key… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[190],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","tag-stranger-than-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1731,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions\/1731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}