Synoptis/review

Rating: 8/10 (6 November 2008)

Stranger than Fiction Film Review Stranger than Fiction is extremely well thought out and clever how it connects the life of Harold Crick to the life of Emma Thompson (who narrates Harold Crick's life), and also how it all comes together in the end. His wristwatch and numbers dictate Harold's life. He has to do everything the same way as he did it the day before for the same amount of time. He gets out of bed at 7:15 every morning, he brushes his teeth exactly 76 times, and he always JUST gets to the bus in time. Harold goes about his usual business, making calculations and constantly glancing at his watch, when one day, a woman's voice sounds in his head, narrating him. His extremely organized life suddenly falls apart. He forgets to brush his teeth exactly 76 times, he misses his bus, and he meets a beautiful baker who he is auditing. This, little does he know, is because his narrator has overcome her writers' block. Emma Thompson is a psychologically troubled writer, who smokes and drinks way too much for her own good. She writes tragedies. All of her main characters die, and all of them die tragically. She has hit a brick wall on how to kill Harold Crick, so her publishers send her a secretary to get her moving. As Emma Writes, Harold lives. If she writes that Harold gets with the baker, Harold gets with the baker and so on. As Harold learns to accept the voice in his head, and starts to fall for the baker, his watch goes ballistic, so he turns it off, resets his time, and then the voice narrates "little did he know that this simple seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death." This simple sentence gets Harold working. He goes to a psychologist, but that is a dead end, so he then goes to an English teacher. This all leads up to the climax. When in the English teachers office, he recognizes the woman's voice on the television. This is where is all gets weird. I, along with most of my classmates, believed that Harold crick lived in a fictional world, controlled by Emma Thompson, but Harold finds Emma in real life, and pleads with her not to make him die. She reconsiders her intentions of drastically killing Harold, shocked and disgusted at herself that she has killed so many people in all of her books, and instead writes that he sacrifices his wellbeing to save a little boy on a bike from being hit by a bus, and gets put into hospital. A small compromise. All in all I give this movie an 8/10