Stranger Than Fiction, An Early Review

Director Marc Forster’s newest film, Stranger Than Fiction, tells the parallel tales of lonely IRS agent, Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), moving through his banal existence, and a writer’s block stricken author, Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), who is on the brink of finally finishing her masterpiece after a decade of developing it to perfection. What neither knows is that their lives are about to intersect. How? Well, one day Harold begins hearing a voice, a narrator to be precise.

 At first the voice is harmless, although rather irksome for both Harold as well as the audience, continuously describing Harold’s every action in meticulous detail, with a sophisticated eloquence and a rich repertoire of words. Then one day it indicates that he’s going to die. This worries Harold and send him to the office of  shrink, then a literature professor, played by Dustin Hoffman.

In the other story, Karen’s publisher has sent an assistant to make sure the final draft of her great opus is   not delayed any further by reveries of suicide, daydreams of tragic car accidents, or the occasional trip to the emergency room to watch people suffer and search for those about to die.

Back in Harold’s world, he and his new companion are trying to decipher whether his life is meant to be comic or tragic. To aim for comic, the literary professor suggests Harold try to ignite a romance with a woman who can’t stand him. After an initial failed attempt, Harold’s told to try just living each day as if it were his last. He does so. And for the first time he begins to enjoy life. He even wins the heart of a quirky, young woman who used to hate him. Things are going well, until he hears Karen on the news. As his literary  companion informs him, Karen only writes tragedies. To make things worse, after tracking Karen down and getting a copy of her unpublished manuscript, Harold realizes that the death she has in store for him is the most poetic death one could hope for. Should he accept his fate, or should he try to take control of his own life? That he the question he must face.

Now if this seems like an interesting premise to you, I cannot disagree. The script has a Charlie Kaufman type feel to it along with Charlie Kaufman-esque philosophical questions. The cast and the director are first rate. And the potential for dark humor is endless. But, there’s a problem. The film doesn’t take full advantage of its dark potential. For the first hour or so of the film, we primarily only see Ferrell doing a toned down Will Ferrell romantic comedy routine (think Bewitched) occasionally interrupted by a much funnier, much darker, much more interesting character storyline involving a perpetually depressed, death obsessed genius. After the first hour, I must say the film does improve, and once the worlds collide we get some truly great scenes in which we see an author meet one of her characters and several people weighing the meaningless life of one man against what may be the perfect tragic end that will not only give meaning to that man’s life, but also give the perfect ending to what just may be the greatest novel of our time. Will Ferrell even proves that he can be taken seriously as an actor in these scenes (not quite the Oscar nomination worthy performance I am convinced he will before the end of the decade, but another step in the write direction). The only problem now is that the film failed to consistently play from the darker side from the beginning.

Rating:***

Film Review: Lady in the Water

A quick trip over to Rotten Tomatoes reveals just how poor the critics think M. Night Shyamalan’s new film really is. They call it self-conscious, ludicrous, and lacking in subtlety. They’re exactly right; and that’s exactly what makes Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water not only the best film of the summer, but possibly the best Shyamalan film to date.

In Lady in the Water, Shyamalan has created a fairytale incarnate–an intentionally far-fetched bed-time story that tells itself beautifully. The story begins when a stuttering apartment caretaker named Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) apprehends a mysterious woman, Story, swimming in the complex’s pool after hours. Cleveland learns that Story is a messenger from the so-called Blue World, sent to inspire a young writer (Shyamalan) to create his masterpiece. He also soon discovers that a deviant creature is bent on stopping her.

While the story’s plot does indeed become progressively fantastical, it’s exactly the fantasy that gives the film more substance than anything else in theatres this summer. A winning (and often dichotomous) combination of humorous moments, beautiful camerawork, and the suspense for which Shyamalan is known best ensures the delivery of exactly what every good fairytale must have: a pertinent moral, in this case one that the story’s audience just might not want to hear. Add in brilliant performances by Giamatti and Shyamalan, a poignant score, and some striking social commentary, and the film is easily palatable to anybody with the imagination to remember the uneasy pathos of childhood innocence.

The Last Time I Checked, The World Was Still Round

Maybe I was just being Naïve. Coming to India this summer, I expected things to be different. All I had been hearing is how fast India was becoming the next China.

When I was here six years ago, I was amazed at the high level of poverty and corruption that existed throughout the country. Going from city to city, it was all the same. The basic necessities like food, water, and electricity were scarce. In many of the smaller towns, trash collection was non-existent. My most vivid memory of that trip was visiting the village where my grandfather grew up. He showed me the tree next to the lake he used to sit under to keep cool in the summer. Since then, the tree had been cut down and the lake had dried up and been turned into a landfill.

So you can understand why I would think things would be better, given the country’s impressive 8 % annual GDP growth rate.

Engineering Feat of the Day: Water Bridge

This water bridge/canal now crosses over the River Elbe in a small city near Berlin called Magdeburg. The project was completed to aid in the transport of passengers and freight between East and West Germany, as part of the reuinification effort between the two regions. One question though: Did the bridge’s design consider the additional weight of ship and barge traffic, or just the weight of the water?

Private Indian Healthcare – Not Your Father’s Third World Hospital

The one thing I fear most about travelling in a developing country is getting sick. The image of musty overcrowded waiting rooms and dirty needles stuck in my mind all of last week as I became increasingly ill. What I found, however, was quite unexpected.

Walking into the hospital lobby, I wondered if I was hallucinating. The place looked like the Ritz! Marble floors, large glass windows, and a beautiful receptionist with a big smile greeted me at the front desk. The whole experience was totally painless. Within one hour I had visited the doctor, had a blood test done, picked up my medication in the in-house pharmacy, and was out the door. And the best part? The whole bill (not just the co-pay) for the checkup, blood test, and drugs was under $30!

Semantic Traveller: Jayson in India

Hey Everyone,

I’m sorry it took me so long to get an email out. I havn’t had internet access for the past week and a half, and I finally found an internet cafe. Thanks for everyone who wrote me, and I’m sorry I don’t have time to write individual responses.

First off, I would just like to say, IT IS HOT. It gets over 100 degrees and it is humid! Right now I am in a small town called Auroville on the coast of southern India. The town was developed about 45 years ago by the UN and the Indian government to try to create a place “free of national boundaries”. The whole idea is that the city belongs to no country and that they can make their own rules. I’ll write my own impressions on it later, but for now I’ll just say that it is definitely a cool place to be. I am taking this two week course on arches, vaults, and domes with this crazy french architect who is obsessed with vaults. I sleep in a vault, I eat in a vault, and I take classes in a vault. The man’s house is even a vault! There are about 20 students in the class, most of whom are Indian. There is 1 other American, 2 Canadians, and 2 Frenchmen. The class itself has been amazing. The work is challanging but fun, and a lot more engineering and math intensive than I expected, considering that almost everyone here is an architect. The first week was all theory, and we each designed our own free-standing vault. (I never knew so much went into designing a vault – It took me three full days!) This week we have been actually building arches and domes. Today we went to the site of one of the buildings that the architect has designed. It is a temple right on the beach. The previous temple had been destroyed in the Tsunami, so it was pretty amazing to go out there and see it.

Travel Green…With Google Maps?

Google is appealing to the ever-growing trend in eco-tourism and environmental consciousness in the United States by joining the Earth Day Network to create entirely "green" trip itineraries for anyone who inquires. With growing concern over the United States' contribution to Global Warming and Climate Change, an entire low-carbon tourism industry is developing. Google is known for starting trends. We'll see how long this one lasts.

President Designates New National Monument

June 15, 2006: Today President Bush designates the Western Hawaiian Islands, a marine area near the size of California, as a national monument. This is the president’s second use of the National Antiquities Act; the first being the designation of the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan. The area west of Hawaii now protected will be completely off-limits to any commercial activity. It is about 140,000 square-miles in area and contains over 7,000 species of marine wildlife. This is the largest use of the National Antiquities Act in United States history, since it was created nearly 100 years ago.

Modern McCarthyism: Democracy Under Siege

 

Many of us aren't old enough to remember the period in the early fifties when Senator Joseph McCarthy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and their cronies engaged in a series of witch-hunts, suspending the rights of countless Americans who they accused of communism. For those who can’t quite remember that section of our nation's history class from high school, I can only suggest you read up on it. Those of us who are familiar with McCarthyism, even minimally through films like Goodnight, and Goodluck, however, can't help but recognize similarities between the actions of our government's intelligence agencies then and those of their modern counterparts.

A Letter to 9/11 Conspiracy-Lovers

READ THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK: Uncle Sam is peering over your shoulder! You’ve been warned:

I asked my dad about World Trade 7 and its collapse. He was working on search and recovery at the base of the building (the North Tower’s debris pile was at 7’s lobby). World Trade 7 held a civilian evacuation before any collapses at WTC occured (as did the Millenium Hotel, the World Financial Center, the Deutsch Bank Building, and the other auxillary buildings of the World Trade Center Complex). Smoke was heavy, he said, as fires from the north tower ignited fuel tanks near 7’s basement. The basement was inaccessible from the outside, so the fires continually burned until the structure’s collapse (and then continued on for days, under the rubble). About a 1/2 hour before the building came down, a structural engineering team advised search and rescue to evacuate; the building was deemed structurally unsound and under risk of collapse. Sure enough, the structure collapsed 1/2 an hour later. A team of engineers was on site within an hour of the first plane hitting the WTC. This is why Mayor Rudy Guiliani’s command headquarters was moved from Vessey Street prior to collapse, and how he survived. The engineers predicted a collapse and advised the mayor’s team to evacuate. They also advised search and rescue for months during the cleanup as debris shifted and as other collapses occured. During the 12-hour shift that my father was at ground zero, he said he witnessed near 6 collapses of auxillary structures and of remnants of other buildings at the site.