"I may already be dead..., just not typed."

Rating: 7/10 (21 July 2012)

There's a reason I largely pass on films featuring Saturday Night Live alumni. They usually capitalize on obnoxious behavior that passes for humor while appealing to the lowest common denominator. One such example would be Will Ferrell as a business executive showing up at a board meeting wearing nothing but his underwear. I don't consider myself a prude, but I have better things to do at midnight on a Saturday.
This was something a bit different. Ferrell wasn't behaving badly, in fact for a good part of the picture, his character Harold Crick was pretty much boring. But the larger story seemed compelling enough to hold one's attention, knowing that somehow, some way, Harold Crick couldn't die, and it would take the sheer will of author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) to make it happen, or not happen, or, well you know what I mean.
Apart from their more than obvious age disparity, the romantic angle between Ferrell's character and the bakery lady (Maggie Gyllenhaal) generally worked well enough to carry the story forward. The cookie routine was kind of sweet, and played well to the date movie crowd that this seemed to be aimed at. The larger theme of making the life you've always wanted gets kind of lost in pictures like this, but there was a semblance of it here if you were willing to look for it. On a grander scale, the hero may die so the story can live forever, but come on, this is a Will Ferrell movie so it can only get so deep.
Say, did anyone else notice that Dustin Hoffman was barefoot when he counseled Will Ferrell?