I just got back from watching the new Will Ferrell movie Stranger Than Fiction with a friend. What a GREAT show! I like Will Ferrell about half the time--he's a good comedian, but I don't go for over-the-top humor. I liked Bewitched and Elf, though, and with the premise of the story being what it was, and on the recommendation of a friend, I went, and it was worth it.

The idea, if you didn't know, is that Harold Crick wakes up one morning to hear Emma Thompson's voice narrating his life. He's an IRS agent, and his life is extremely boring--lives alone, no friends, counts his brushstrokes when brushing his teeth, etc. A few days after he starts hearing the narrator, she says, "Little did he know, [something something about an event] would lead to his imminent death."

There is so much meta-fictional stuff here that my Victorian children's lit teacher in grad school would have had a heyday with. Then again, it would be interesting to compare this movie to Veronica Mars's narration, as well. What an interesting twist on the breaking of the narrator-reader wall. "Slippage" was my Victorian teacher's favorite term, and what slippage was here! But it wasn't the usual kind, the kind that breaks the wall between the reality of the book and the reality of the reader, which was so prevalent in Victorian children's lit. Instead, it broke the boundaries between the narrator and the character, in a very obvious way (a way another friend terms "pretentious," saying that the movie was too self-aware, yet I think was that way on purpose).

Anyway, great movie. Funny and original. Highly recommend it for the lit geek and non-lit geek alike.