Room for Improvement

Rating: 7/10 (9 December 2006)

Stranger than Fiction could have been sensational rather than okay. There was something low budgetly cult, to use John Water's phrase, about this movie. Putting two characters in a room and having them talk is cheap and not particularly cinematic. It produces a very static feeling in the audience, which should be mistaken for a deep feelings among the characters in the story. Save for the bovine Queen Latifah, the actors were excellent. After Cecil B. Demented, I hoped Maggie Gyllenhaal would be in a part like this. Will Ferrell's less than leading man's features gives us all hope because Maggie is stuff. Emma Thompson was also beautiful and engaging but her scenes reminded me of those photos of George Foreman with a cow on his shoulders. Dustin Hoffman seems to be doing a variation of his role in I heart Huckabees, and in middle-age is starting to look creepily like my dad. And I'm sure everyone knows what he looked like. It is making me identify with the Jason and Will characters for reasons that only affect me. The music was singularly intrusive and misguiding. It is indicative of what went wrong. If another mood was struck for the movie, possibly, brighter and with a lighter touch, this could have outshone the geek who did Human Nature, Being John Malkovich, etc.