Review – Stranger than Fiction

I’m genuinely surprised this didn’t get nominated for a screenwriting Oscar. It’s the sort of laboriously script-intensive effort the Academy usually goes for in a big way. The premise – man discovers that he’s a character in a novel – is of course tailor-made for such a film. Beyond the writing, this is yet another production that demands a little too loudly to be taken seriously. The cast is crammed with important-movie thespians (with the exception of Will Ferrell, who I’m guessing hoped this production would do for him what Punch Drunk Love did for Adam Sandler). And the few funny, touching or in any other way genuinely human moments to be found are swiftly smothered under a thick blanket of artifice. This might have been a much better movie if it had been made for audiences rather than for critics. Mildly amusing