Chatter Of The Squirrel

Stranger Than Fiction

I love fantasies.

But they make too few of them. And even fewer ended up any good.

I enjoyed Stranger Than Fiction a lot. Much more than I expected.

Caught a trailer of the film. Saw the idiot from Bewitched. And almost assumed that it’ll be some awkward and stupid romantic comedy.

But it turned out to be more than that. It’s a bit like Groundhog Day. And maybe even The Truman Show.
Groundhog Day is my favourite Bill Murray picture. Even more so than Ghostbusters, and that’s saying a lot coming from a kid who built an Ecto-Containment Trap out of legos.

Stranger Than Fiction has Will Ferrell as a boring IRS guy. Who starts to hear voices, as of someone narrating his life story. He seeks Dustin Hoffman’s help to find out what kind of story he is in, and finally meets the blocked writer on the verge of killing off her character.

I think I’ld have enjoyed the movie a lot more if I wasn’t half expecting to cringe from a clumsy gag that never came. If I wasn’t under the impression that it’s a comedy, I would have been in a better mindset to thoroughly enjoy the film.

Like I said. It’s a very rare genre of fantasy.

And I adore this kind of Gaiman-esque magic.

Flushed Away

This comes from the people who gave us Wallace And Gromit.

And it’s a LOT better than I had expected.

Read some tepid reviews about the cartoon, so I never paid it much mind, until Moses downloaded it.

But it’s great!

There’s not a dull moment, no long draggy build-up (think Cars), the plot starts moving immediately and the gags keep coming in.

Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet doing the voices were pretty cute.

And the slugs were simply adorable. They repeated the slug gags several times, but it never got old.

Lovely cartoon.

The Departed

It’s the Infernal Affairs, with more expensive actors.

Have to admit that the actors and the director did a good job on this. The casting is magnificent.

I’ld have rooted for this film for the Oscars, if it weren’t for the fact that Scorsese took the story right off the HK film.

As it were, a re-make of a foreign film really shouldn’t even be eligible for the Oscars.

I mean, I’m grateful that Scorsese had put in such an excellent effort to make a great story available to a larger demography. But he did NOT create ART! It’s a remake!

Well, the poor guy is a good director, and had been sidelined by Oscar politics for far too long. My favourite remains The Last Temptation of Christ, with William Dafoe. So, this is the year the Oscar idiots try to make up for it. By crediting him with best picture/director for a film that he didn’t really CREATE.

It’s almost an insult. It’s like complimenting an artist’s snappy fashion sense, while completely ignoring his art.

It’s like how Sean Penn was side-lined all these years, and then be nominated for I Am Sam.

The judges at the Academy can’t seem to appreciate great acting except when they can identify with the characters.

Think Nell. Think Forrest Gump. Think the coke-head Jodie Foster in The Accused.

Maybe next year, George Lucas will finally get his Oscar. For his remake of Ju-On 2.

But back to The Departed. I enjoyed the movie, even when I’ve already seen Infernal Affairs.

But giving it an Oscar is just insulting.