The premise of this movie is fantastic – man starts to hear woman narrating his life, and then one morning she explains that his death is imminent – but it’s sort of surprising how quickly it gets old, and it’s almost as if the screenwriter got bored too, because for a good half hour in the middle of the whole thing, the whole narrator idea seems to get put on the back burner entirely. The movie is definitely too long, even if the scenes in question play well in themselves thanks to the acting talent involved.

A lot of people have compared the movie infavourably to the work of Charlie Kaufman, but I found it closer to Andrew Niccol’s The Truman Show than anything. When Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson finally meet, the movie finally pulls itself back together and delivers the best ending possible, though, as Dustin Hoffman’s literary expert explains, “it’s good, not great”. Ferrell and Thompson are brilliant, though, and of course, Maggie Gyllenhaal always makes me happy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 7:12 pm in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.