Stranger than Fiction

After a thrilling afternoon of playing Whac-a-Mole and building a highly unstable tinker toy lighthouse with the noisy boys, I really needed to get out of the house tonight. So I called a friend, and off we went to the movie theater. Not the big, flashy one a mile from my house, but the $3 theater on the other side of town. I love it there. Free refills on slushees and popcorn, plus a mint when you leave. And if you go as infrequently as I do, it doesn’t really matter how long the movie has been out, or even which movie you see, as long as it doesn’t have the word “flush” in the title, it’s all good.

Stranger than Fiction is, well, strange. I had heard from several people that this was a pretty good movie, so I suppose my expectations were slightly out of line. I was expecting GREAT, maybe even FUNNY, and while it had its great and humorous moments, as a whole I would not describe it as either.

And what’s with the whole “writer as misfit” thing? Does that get on anyone else’s nerves? Why does the writer character always have to be a maladjusted, quite possibly suicidal, chain smoking alcoholic in a crisp white shirt? Why not a middle-aged, slightly overweight stay-at-home Mom who scribbles down stories on napkins at McDonalds while her children play? And, of course, these crisp-white-shirt writers would never publish said stories in some obscure journal that nobody reads in exchange for a few copies; no, it’s always a big, fancy publishing house. Or even better—the writer is rich and lives in a beautiful mountain cabin, writing the day away. She never has to do laundry or fix supper; it’s brought to her on a silver tray, presumably purchased with the vast sums of money she’s made on her first novel. Right.

The popcorn was good, the company stellar, and I don’t have to put anyone to bed except myself. And I’m complaining about…what exactly?