Michael Lee's Train of Thought

I went to see Stranger Than Fiction this evening. It's an odd film, and is to Will Ferrell what something like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Truman Show are to Jim Carrey. I don't think this is as good as either of those two films -- and I think this is a movie that would fall apart if you poked at it too much, but it's still got some interesting elements and is worth seeing.

But the biggest surprise for me was that I thought there was some Douglas Adams-like influence in the film. There's one point that I think is obvious once you see it -- and I won't mention it for spoiler reasons. And there's an unusual interest in wrist watches, much like Adams. And in one scene, Harold Crick goes to see Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, an obviously similar connection, and Python loved having sequences with auditors and accountants, sometimes making fools of themselves, and other times showing how they want to get out of their desperate life.

I don't think this is a huge influence on the film -- and I really don't see the whole plot of the film as something particularly Douglas Adams (and the whole plot isn't Charlie Kaufman either). It's not quite in that league, in my mind -- but it is a film worth looking at.

Labels: movies