Fumarama

There is a problem with visual entertainment about "great writers." If said brilliant writer is going to share her writing, the writing does indeed have to be brilliant. I can't remember which episode exactly, but I remember at some point is the college episodes of Dawson's Creek, Joey now wanted to be a writer (she wanted to be an artist first, remember? I wish the show had stuck with that), and so one of the episodes is narrarated as if she is writing it, and I remember getting kind of uncomfortable. "Wow, Joey Potter is actually awful. Are all her writing profs seduced by pretty?"

This was of-course also one of the biggest problems with Studio 60. All these writers were supposed to be so unbelievably funny. And Sorkin insisted on spending an absurd amount of time telling us how funny they were. And sadly, their skits were so very terrible.

So Stranger than Fiction (there are spoilers stop reading here if you don't want to know), the plot is that this guy one day wakes up to have his life narrarated by a British author. The author only writes tragedies, and in one line of the narration she says "little did he know..." that the fact that his watch stopped working and he had to get the time from a stranger "would lead to his imminent death." The watch was ineffectively trying to tell him that his love interest was across the street. Anyway, the knowledge of his imminent death drives the story since he changes his life, and tries to find the writer. Eventually, he does and she gives him the ending. Basically, his watch is set so that he always gets to the bus stop right in time to catch the bus, but because the stranger gave him the wrong time, his watch was a few minutes fast. Thus, he is at the bus stop in advance and is there when a boy rides his bike in front of the bus. He runs in front of the bus to save the boy and dies. Except the British author can no longer kill him because Harold has read the book and was willing to sacrifice himself for literature. So instead, Harold is just severely injured. The movies ends with a passage narrated from Emma Thompson's book about we are all connected or something. I can't remember. As my friend pointed out, it was really terrible writing.

But it was not the bad narration at the end that bothered me, my god, you should hear the narration on One Tree Hill (even I don't watch that show). It was the structure of the story within the story. The moment that drives the whole story, the one that leads to his imminent death...in terms of the movie plot it is perfect, since it is the catalyst for everything else. But for the underlying story...the fact that his watch goes nuts does not drive the author's story. It is this innocuous moment, as she says herself. Yes, he is a man obsessed with exact numbers, and yes his watch was trying to tell him something about his love interest, but for a moment to be followed by a line like this drove his imminent death, something far more important to the story of Howard Crick has to be happening at the moment. In the underlying novel (unlike the movie), the watch is not the catalyst for change. The watch does not set off the series of events that lead to his death. It just ends up killing him. Anyway, my point is that the fact that his watch kills him is not sufficiently ironic to merit it being a particularly interesting ending to the book. The movie failed not in writing necessarily, but in actually having its writer/protagonist write a good story.