Stranger Than Fiction

This is a movie I’ve wanted to see for a while now. I have to admit, I’m not a big Will Ferrell fan, but I heard this movie was really good so I figured I could endure him for one performance. I’m so glad I did.

Stranger Than Fiction is about a very dull man named Harold Crick who starts hearing a woman’s voice narrating his life. And through this narration he learns that his life is quickly drawing to an end. We watch as a very confused Harold tries desperately to figure out what is going on while rather dissolved author Karen Eiffel tries to figure out how to off him.

Harold Crick is a fabulous character. He’s incredibly simple for someone with such a complex mind. He goes to work, he files papers, he goes home and he goes to bed day after day after day until the voice starts. He counts the strokes of his toothbrush and the steps to the bus and multiplies large numbers in his head in seconds. All in all, he’s a pretty dull person. And that’s part of his charm. He’s so socially awkward it’s adorable. It’s incredibly amusing to watch him try flirt with his love interest and say things like “I want you” over and over for lack of any better reason to be there. He’s cute when he finally loosens up. He’s extremely polite to everyone and can even be intentionally funny when he wants to be. Over all he’s one of my favorite fictional characters, which is really saying something considering he’s not in a fantasy movie.

Karen Eiffel on the other hand is a creatively blocked fiction writer whose social skills suffer from too much time spent at her typewriter. We watch her die several times as she tries to figure out the best way to kill of Harold Crick. While these parts aren’t particularly amusing, the way she goes about imagining them rather is. She goes around a hospital at one point asking if she could see the people who are dying. I feel bad for her assistant Penny who gets dragged along with her as she searches for inspiration.

While I enjoyed the story, there is one thing that I was constantly wondering about. What story was Karen Eiffel writing? I mean she didn’t know Harold could hear her narration, and I’m pretty sure her story wasn’t about a man hearing narration in his head. So in her story, why does he go through his change? What story is she writing? She also says at the end that she’s going to go back and fix it, but if what she wrote is essentially Harold’s life. So how does that work? I’m probably grossly over thinking the whole thing but it kind of bugged me.

But overall it was a good movie and I really enjoyed it. It had a lot of really touching parts and a very cute romance in there as well. Until next week. ~

Television: The Drug of the Nation

Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation. You remember when TV was the big drug? When you learned that watching TV was bad for you and would melt your brain or make your eyes go square? Yup those were the days. I remember growing up with less than twenty channels to choose from. See, I grew up without cable. That means I didn’t watch Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon or anything like that. The only times I got to see those shows were on vacation and at my cousin’s house.

I’ve never really been a big TV person. Yeah, there were shows we would watch every night, mostly CSI, CSI: NY, NCIS, and the like. Crime shows were big and really, there wasn’t much else to watch. Sometimes we would watch Survivor, but that really only lasted one or two seasons. It wasn’t like the 90s when there were tons of good shows running around. However, TV was still a huge part of my childhood and the childhoods of many.

Then the internet came. It started with a computer, some simple little games, mostly educational, and dial-up. You remember dial-up, don’t you? But we’re not talking about that. With the internet came less television, but not much. Living in a house with one computer sporting internet access turns had to be taken. This left me with plenty of time still with my TV, when my brother wasn’t playing whatever game system he had at the time. This also left me a plenty of time for outdoor activities and most importantly, reading.

The TV habit got worse when we traded dial-up for Comcast my ninth-grade year. It was for my sister’s cyber schooling originally but it made life so much easier. Not only did we have unlimited internet access, with wireless, I might add, we also had all those channels I missed out on as a kid. We were, naturally, still pretty far behind most modern families but that’s the way we’ve always been so I was okay with that. I could watch cartoons at any time during the day. I could watch MythBusters and Gilmore Girls and Scrubs as well. It brought out a whole new form of television addiction.

And then two things changed. I got a laptop, and we got Netflix. Television is now little more than a device on which I enjoy my video games, when they aren’t on an emulator. The addiction has moved from the physical TV to the computer screen. I can watch entire seasons on my lap top while lying in bed. And you know what? This is worse than the television age. While it is true that people began forgoing physical activity for television, as well as drifting away from personal communication with the family, the television age did not separate us from the people in our households. The computer, however, does. It is a solitary device used by one person at a time. A family does not gather around a computer to watch their favorite shows. The family goes into separate rooms and watches them on their own personal computer.

This is, however, still a television addiction. I spent all day watching Bones on Netflix. This is not healthy in anyway, but oh so entertaining. I did take a two hour break to watch a movie with my sister, but it was in the same place, in my bed. This is not healthy, people. Not healthy at all.