Fucking "Stranger Than Fiction", the 2006 Will Ferrell vehicle. One of the worst, most poorly written pieces of over-indulgent tripe I've ever seen, and that's including Battlefield Earth. Also, this is going to contain some spoilers, and it might not make sense unless you've already seen the movie, but fuck me, it was so bad. I hate this movie so much, I want to take that trophy on the sidebar and ram it down its ass.

I can't help but think that Will Ferrell's train of thought, going into this movie, was something along the lines of "Well, Jim Carrey made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and fuck that guy, he's a hack! I'm twice the actor that he is, my obnoxiously self-indulgent movie will the twice as good as his!"

There is just so much wrong with this movie, it's angering, though most of the faults are with the incredibly, overwhelmingly poor writing and annoyingly gratuitous cop-out ending. Nobody behaves like actual people, none of the characters act in what could be construed as human behavior.

One of the few good points of the movie is the innovative setup, even though it's not really fleshed out and it raises more questions that it could possibly answer or even provide meaningful insight for. Harold Crick (Will Farrell) is a mild-mannered IRS agent who one day starts hearing voices. Rather, he hears the same voice narrating his life. At one point, the voice foretells of his death and he engages in a race against time to... casually and in a very subdued manner continue his life. The narrator is actually writer Karen Eiffel, who is struggling with writer's block in attempting to write a decent death for Harold Crick, who is also the character she's writing for her latest book, but he's somehow come to life. Or he's always existed but somehow got trapped in the writing. Honestly, it's not very well explained how Crick and Eiffel got entwined. If Crick was just written into existence already mature, like the beginning of the movie seems to suggest, that only opens up crater-sized plot holes - what about his interactions with his colleagues? They are ostensibly real people in the real world, as exemplified by the ending, when she writes that a child rides a bike in front of a bus and Crick saves him. She wrote the child, and the child existed and was noticed by other people. Did she write everybody? Is the entire world literally a figment of Karen Eiffel's imagination? If so, how does she live in it? For that matter, it's implied that Harold, within the context of the book she is writing, at some point either becomes aware that he will die (which in the context of the in-movie "reality", he only found out because he somehow had the power to hear the narration from the book she was writing), or goes through some sort of unexplained phenomena, and attempts to call somebody, with the one from the book and the one from "reality" doing it at the same time; each time she wrote a line like "And the phone rang", her phone rang. Except the phone didn't ring in a way a real phone would ring, which would imply that it rung only because she somehow willed it to ring - she had to write the "phone rang" line three times, and the phone rang three times. If she had only written the line once, would Harold Crick have remained there, in some type of suspended animation for all eternity? Or was Harold a real human being before she started writing her book? Anyway, I went off on an extreme tangent before even beginning to talk about the plot, that's how much this movie makes no sense.

Anyway, after attempting to engage the voice in his head, he goes to a medical professional, who, in my opinion, correctly identifies his condition as schizophrenia. As he's entirely sure he's not sick, he rejects the diagnosis and, this was rich, the psychiatrist not only lets him go without attempting to prescribe any sort of treatment or submitting him to more tests or anything, really, SHE ENGAGES HIM IN HIS GODDAMN PARANOID DELUSIONS! Remember, the narration told of his death, which made him deathly (huehue) afraid of pretty much anything. Anyway, he reasons that it couldn't be schizophrenia because the voice knows too much about him, which would goddamn make sense if the voice would come from inside his own mind, wouldn't it?! Anyway, the shrink tells him that the best way to treat such delusions is to find somebody else to engage him in them, so he goes and seeks out a Professor Hilbert, played by Dustin Hoffman. They go through some hoops to determine whether or not he's living in a work of fiction and in one scene they reach the consensus that he is not a golem. After those delightfully pointless scenes, we move on to the love-interest subplot and, I'll have to admit, it managed to piss me off even worse than the goddamn psychiatrist engaging his delusions. I'm sorry, I don't mean to harp on about this, but it's just so ridiculously stupid, it boggles my mind.

Getting back on track, so as an IRS agent, Harold goes on to audit this lady that owns a bakery. For some reason, she finds his mild-manneredness attractive and she falls prey to his wily charms. In what has to be one of the most creepy scenes in movie history, he manages to woo her by telling her "I want you". To be fair, there is a funny scene where he brings her flours as a gift, since she's a baker, see? Anyway, Anna Pascal's (Maggie Gyllenhaal) sole defining feature is that she hates The Man™ and uses some woefully inept (and hilariously misguided) attempt at liberal-bordering-on-marxist propaganda. She's really annoying, she isn't a character, she's a general outline of one, painted with really broad strokes, down to pointlessly shoehorned tattoos that get focused on for the sole reason of providing characterization for her. Which would have worked, I guess, if this was the goddamn 1950s, but in a movie that came out in 2006, it's pointless and stupid. But, yeah, she finds his bumbling charming, he thinks she has nice boobsteeth, so they fall in love, and no other focus is given to their relationship, which makes it trivial and pointless, and makes it seem like it was added to the film just because Harold had to have a love interest. Sure, you can say that in the grand scheme of things she help or was some sort of catalyst to Harold's change from a shy man with no prospects to a man that "wants to make the world a better place", but what it actually accomplishes is make us think that Harold's life is sad and pathetic before, and now it's just worth living, which is as insulting as it is patronizing, because it implies that Harold's life, before he met her, was not worthy of being lived. How about you stop telling me how to live my life, movie, and let me make my own decisions?

So after a while, Professor Hilbert (Hoffman) comes up with a list of writers who might be narrating Harold's life. For some reason, while he's attempting to tell Harold of this, he just happens to be watching a 10 year old interview of Karen Eiffel, who is the narrator to Crick's life. Harold, naturally, recognizes her, but this is bad news - you see, she only writes books in which characters die. Harold is now in a race against time to find her (she hadn't been heard from in over 10 years, apparently) and convince her to not kill him. The writer is your typical "tortured artistic soul", as you can tell from her chain-smoking and oh-so-subtle "I don't believe in God." almost off-hand line thrown in an unrelated interview; she's tortured because she's a genius, you see, but completely inept at social situations, at one point, just so she can come up with a way to kill the character, going to a hospital and asking the nurse to show her the really dying people, not just the injured and horribly maimed ones. Who acts like this?! No reasonable, sane human being, that's who. So after some trials and tribulations, he manages to meet her face-to-face and attempts to make her write some other ending. She says that she's already written the ending in which he dies, and gives the pages to him.

In one of the most callously... I can't even call it "evil", just incredibly mean, pointlessly, senselessly stupid scenes I've ever seen, Harold, having in his possession the writing which will detail his death (which he finds hard to read for no properly explained reason), gives it to Dustin Hoffman's character to read and tell him what he should avoid in order to stay alive. But then, in what can only be described as stone-dead-stupidity, Hoffman puts it aside, and Ferrell just kind of... saunters off and the scene ends. Next scene, Ferrell is back home, sitting in his bed, unable to sleep. To say that this progression makes no sense is an understatement - one would think that when faced with their imminent death, yet having the possibility of finding out what it is, they'd want to find out as quickly as possible. What if his death was to occur the minute Farrell left Hoffman's office? Hoffman('s character's) decision to just throw the document aside is one of the stupidest, most ridiculous decisions I've ever seen. And this is including the psychlo's decision to train man-animals to fly space ships and then leave them unsupervised for a few hours.

Anyway, the Hilbert manages to read the whole thing in one night, and the next day Ferrell goes back to his office. In what is possibly the most baffling scene in a movie full of baffling scenes, the prof. tells him he has to die, because it makes a great ending to the book in the way it was written. Excuse me, fucking what? Harold Crick was a real human being, the entire point of the film was to demonstrate that Harold was real, he had real feelings, real experiences, real... everything. To have somebody so callously giving him a death sentence for a goddamn book is one of the most pointlessly sociopathic moments in what was already a callous movie. Eiffel and Hilbert were at that point condemning him to die for some work of fiction. Not even a religious sort of writing, no, just a goddamn shitty novel that would be wasted in the bargain bin at Barnes & Noble within a month.

The ending is the most annoying part. After making Harold Crick go through existential torment, and finally literally hitting him with a bus, the writer's copout ending to the book was that he lived and that "everything would be alright". Karen Eiffel, the writer, had the power to literally render the world unto her will, and she uses it to crack his skull, break 3 ribs, fracture both his arms and legs, yet leave him alive, thereby undermining the entire message of the movie. She doesn't even write that he gets his house back (in an earlier scene, his apartment almost got bulldozed because of some error, which is also incredibly stupid - you'd think there would be some sort of foreman on the site, to make sure the people that drive the bulldozers don't do exactly that; but no, these things are left to people who literally cannot read and distinguish one address for another), or that he wins the lottery or, really, anything. Just that "it's gonna' be alright, I guess. THE END". What the fuck! If I were Crick, I'd be fucking pissed off; she literally hit him with a truck, left him bed-ridden for months, made him have to go through incredibly painful and difficult physical recuperation and all she had for him was some vague assurance that "it's gonna' be alright"? He should be happy that she, at least, left him alive? Fuck that shit, all she had to do, ALL SHE HAD TO DO WAS STOP WRITING THE BOOK. Sure, the point can be made that she had already written some form of ending, but she herself said it was just an outline. And if she rewrote the original ending (in which he died) to the new one (in which he lived, possibly maimed and crippled for life), couldn't she have written an ending in which he isn't hit by the bus at all?! Fuck, not even that! At one point, she says she's going back to rewrite other parts of the book, why the fuck couldn't she have written a better ending than "he's hit by a bus, but he'll be alright, I guess"?! If she's such a genius, like Hilbert claims, she could have come up with a believable way of ending the book with a happy ending for poor doormat Harold Crick. The ending is so bad that it retroactively makes the rest of the movie worse, because it invalidates all the things that happened to Harold until that point. If she's rewriting the entire book, then all the choices Harold made are invalidated, because he didn't really make most of them - he just followed the narrator's hints and whatnot.

Still, while almost entirely derivative and incredibly poorly written, it's not completely unenjoyable; it has some funny moments, and Will Ferrell's acting was refreshingly subdued, though when the best thing the main character can say about the love interest is "you have very straight teeth", you should probably look to recast... All-in-all, though, it's one of the most overly-indulgent, insultingly preachy, self-important pieces of tripe I've ever seen. I think this might be my least favorite movie ever. I'm pretty sure nobody will ever read all this through, but I just had to get it off my chest. I hate this fucking movie.