Just watched the trailer for Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10). It’s basically about Will Ferrell as an IRS agent named Harold Crick hearing his life being narrated by a woman’s voice as he lives it, and the narrator turning out to be an actual writer named Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) working on a story about Crick’s life. Zack Helm‘s script is a variation on an idea floated in Woody Allen‘s The Purple Rose of Cairo, which is that characters have wills of their own that argue with the plot decisions made by the writers who’ve created them. If you’ve ever worked on a screenplay you know how true this can be. At a certain point the characters tell you what they would do, and not vice versa. The costars are Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Tony Hale and Kristin Chenoweth.
…thoughts?