Pick this flick 4-Stranger than fiction

Do you live by the clock? Do u set alarms even for your 10 minute coffee break? Then, pick this flick and be prepared to be shocked. 'Stranger than fiction' is a 2006 film directed by Marc Forster and starring Will Ferrel in the lead role. But the real star of the film is the sreenplay written by Zach Helm.

Harold Crick(Will Ferrel) is obsessed with numbers. He can't keep himself from counting. He counts even the number of brush strokes he makes in the morning. And naturally, he lives by the clock. One day, suddenly he starts to hear an unknown voice. Its a lady's voice narrating events in his life in realtime, and that too accurately and cleverly. He goes crazy trying to find the origin of this voice. One day, while walking through the road, his watch stops working. Then he hears the narrator uttering the following words-"Little did he know, that this simple, seemingly innocuous act, would result in his imminent death." Thats when the film takes off.

Fearing that he will die soon, he starts to enjoy his life. He rekindles his passion of playing the guitar and falls in love with a baker. Parallely, we get to see the story of a writer Kay Eiffel (Emma Thompson) who's experiencing writer's block. A speciality of her novels are that she kills off her heroes in the climax right when everything seems to go right in their life. But, with her current novel, she's confused on how to kill off her main protagonist Harold Crick. Does that name ring a bell? Yeah, he's our movie's hero. Am not telling anything more about the story as it may spoil the experience of watching it.

The name of the movie attracted me to it. And I was amazed to see such ingenuity in a film. This movie is a perfect example of the term "original screenplay". First 10 minutes is a laugh riot with scenes of Harold's obsession with numbers. Then we get to see the intelligent side of the writer as he delves deep into the mind of the character. The narration and the visuals make you think. Will Ferrel plays the role o utmost perfection. His dialogue with the professor(played by Dustin Hoffman) to findout the mysterious narrator is interesting. Another brilliant scene is the one in which the phone in Kay's room rings as soon as she finishes writing "The phone rang". Let the phone ring. Go watch this film.

I'll leave you with this opening narration by Kay-
"Kay Eiffel: [narrating] This is a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch. Harold Crick was a man of infinite numbers, endless calculations, and remarkably few words. And his wristwatch said even less. Every weekday, for twelve years, Harold would brush each of his thirty-two teeth seventy-six times. Thirty-eight times back and forth, thirty-eight times up and down. Every weekday, for twelve years, Harold would tie his tie in a single Windsor knot instead of the double, thereby saving up to forty-three seconds. His wristwatch thought the single Windsor made his neck look fat, but said nothing. "[courtesy-IMDB]

your crusader Praveen