Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Genre: Drama
Format Viewed: DVD
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
My faith in Will Ferrell has finally been renewed!
Well, sort of, anyways. As I’ve said before, it’s been a hard road for me to follow with Will Ferrell because as much as I can get into his ballsy, over-the-top style of comedy sometimes, too many times have I just found myself left as the credits roll with only one or two memorable scenes from any given movie in his repertoire and I guess I just look for a little more umph than that when I’m sitting down for 90+ minutes at a time. And it’s odd because while I loved him on Saturday Night Live when my friends and I used to gather at each others’ houses to watch each week religiously throughout our high school years, it’s kind of been a downhill ride since then and although I feel that my sense of humor has at least somewhat evolved from what it was during high school, I guess that’s the difference between us…
So that having been said, I was a little concerned going into Stranger Than Fiction that it would turn out to be just another film to fit into the current weird comedy series that he’s been doing lately – Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory – but surprisingly enough, this was entirely different kind of movie for Will Farrell and that might just be why I enjoyed it so much. I think after a while doing the same type of movie year after year, while enjoyable by your core audience who has grown accustomed to that style, can just grow to be a bit cumbersome for the rest of us and merely serves to reinforce that if we didn’t like any of your previous genre-films, the next will probably fit the same mold. That’s why we try some other venues, to prove that Bruce Willis can do more than just battle terrorists and say cool cuss words at the most appropriate of times. This flick proved to me that Will Ferrell’s acting career has, in fact, evolved along with us, even if Ricky Bobby doesn’t show it.
Of course, given the actual theme behind this movie, I suppose it wasn’t all that tough to sell me on it at the end of the day – I’ve always been a sucker for movies that do a halfway decent job of depicting the lives of writers and what writer can honestly say that they’ve never had to cope with the conflict that drives this one … the dreaded writer’s block. In fact, I battled with a little bit of writer’s block just earlier today when I sat down to write this column, however fortunately my end goal wasn’t to kill off any main characters or anything so maybe I just got off easy. And then again, I also got the impression that the writer in the movie was getting paid just a bit more than I’m currently bringing – she did have Queen Latifah working for her, you know! – but that’s ok, I won’t hold a grudge or anything!
Overall this was a great end of the week, need something nice and easy to relax to kind of movie and I was pleasantly surprised at just how well it captivated me throughout. Mind you, finding not too long into the opening that Maggie Gyllenhaal, someone who I’ve really come to love and believe is one of the more underrated ladies in Hollywood these days, would be serving as Farrell’s love interest certainly didn’t hurt, either! The two had very good, very raw chemistry together and it really made it even hard to keep in mind that they weren’t so much real as characters in the author’s latest best seller. I don’t mean this to be anything but complimentary – I hope his next movie follows in these footsteps…
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