A product of postmodernism, Stranger Than Fiction is moreso an excellent example of postmodern literature than postmodern film, although strong arguments could be made for both. Considering the diverse and sometimes quite disparate definitions of postmodernism you come across on the Web, in what ways does the film accomplish the aims of postmodern art?
In light of its postmodern qualities, what is the purpose of the film? In other words, what message does the film aim to communicate to its audience and why?
Finally, why begin a class that takes a narrative medium such as film as its focus of study with this particular film? In what ways can Stranger Than Fiction help us better understand the narrative strategies of both mediums: film and literature?
As you consider these questions, you might want to visit the STF website and review the movie trailer again. As your textbook suggests, the best practice for analyzing film is to view a film multiple times. You might have seen this film prior to our in-class viewing for strictly entertainment purposes. You all watched the film in class with the intention of beginning to analyze its literary and cinematic elements. You should attempt to view the film again in order to deepen that analysis by thinking further and more critically about the judgments you have made.
In light of its postmodern qualities, what is the purpose of the film? In other words, what message does the film aim to communicate to its audience and why?
Finally, why begin a class that takes a narrative medium such as film as its focus of study with this particular film? In what ways can Stranger Than Fiction help us better understand the narrative strategies of both mediums: film and literature?
As you consider these questions, you might want to visit the STF website and review the movie trailer again. As your textbook suggests, the best practice for analyzing film is to view a film multiple times. You might have seen this film prior to our in-class viewing for strictly entertainment purposes. You all watched the film in class with the intention of beginning to analyze its literary and cinematic elements. You should attempt to view the film again in order to deepen that analysis by thinking further and more critically about the judgments you have made.
The purpose of the film is to entertain and get people thinking. The movie has some humor to it to entertain people. Harold Crick lives a life of routine. He counts brush strokes when he’s brushing his teeth, he goes to bed at the same time and he does he counts everything. His life is so bland and he isn’t really living life, he’s just getting through it. He doesn’t do anything out of his routine. The message in the movie is to get people thinking about are you living life or are you just getting through it? Most people just get through life. We get into a rut of doing the same thing every day and we forget to get out of our rut. We need to remember to get out of our rut and do something spontaneous every once in a while. A movie with a narrative medium is a good way to start the class because it is a good type of movie. People can listen to the narration part and the conversation among character parts. The two put together makes the movie go along well. This was a good movie because it used humor to get the point apart. People thought Harold was psychotic because he would talk to the voice. Narration in literature is easier to take, however, because it’s natural. In film, the audience isn’t necessarily used to hearing someone narrate what is happening on the screen. In literature, the narration is natural because every book has it. I don’t think a book would flow well if it was all conversation and no narration. This film made good use of narration because they combined film and literature together. The author is narrating the life of Harold because she is writing a book.
ReplyDeleteAt first Stranger than Fiction seemed just like another humorous comedy by Will Ferrell, but after looking at the film in depth and analyzing the meaning; I believe the film is trying to ask the viewer if they are living their life to the fullest or just walking through life like a zombie. The protagonist, Harold Crick, is an IRS agent who is obsessed with numbers who follows the same routine every day without any change. Through a series of humorous and ironic events, Harold learns that he is going to die from a voice in his head. Postmodern qualities are portrayed in the film by these repeating events, which leads Harold to question why he was put on to the earth and who he is as a person. Harold soon learns that there is so much more to life than counting brush strokes and following the same schedule every day of his life. Through the life of the protagonist, the viewer learns not to be like the old Harold Crick who lived the same, ordinary life, instead you should live, love, and laugh until the day your life stops and you meet your fate.
ReplyDeleteStranger than Fiction was a perfect movie to start out our film class with because as inexperienced film analysts we are not familiar with the ways of studying and interpreting film, but this movie shows us the narrative mediums of both film and literature. The viewer can interpret the film by Harold Crick’s actions or listen to the narrator tell the story as it happens. Even though this film was introducing new concepts to us, it did not come as a shock because we were all familiar with the concept of narration by the author.
The film Stranger Than Fiction is a humorous movie with a very meaningful plot. The story was portrayed in a way to make the audience think whether or not they were living their own lives how they wanted to, or if they were just trying to live to see the next day. The protagonist, Harold Crick, at first simply lived his life in the same boring way, day in and day out. However, he soon believes that the end of his life is coming because of his personal narrator that only he can hear. So, he decided to get out of his normal groove and do things differently, such as learn to play the guitar and even develop a relationship with someone that he shouldn’t be having a relationship with. In this way, it portrays the aims of postmodern art because modern art was more concerned with living your life the same as everyone else.
ReplyDeleteStranger Than Fiction did a good job of connecting the narrative mediums of film and literature. It helped the viewers better understand the narrative strategies by applying both strategies to the film. By making a movie that was acting as a novel we were able to hear what the author was writing, and what the protagonist of the novel, again Harold Crick, was thinking and saying. It was a very good movie to start the semester off with and it was a good movie in general. The movie did a very good job at getting the point across that you should not live your own life the same way every day.
While watching Stranger than Fiction, I first analyzed the protagonist, Harold Crick, as a black and white, plain-Jane character who never left the routine he had been living in. However, I could not have been further from the truth. Had the movie been a piece of modern art it would have simply been a documentary with the death of Harold as a climax. Fortunately this was not the case and the film gave the audience a much more enjoyable work of art. Harold eventually changed the way he was living and desired to change his daily routine, which is where one can see the beginning of postmodernism in the movie. Instead of living a modern lifestyle, Harold lived a meaningful life. At one point in the movie, Harold asks Ana, a character far outside his “league,” on a date. Ana warned that it is against company rules, but Harold that he does not care what the IRS says. I viewed this incident as a moment where Harold used sensible logic, instead of “illogically” responding as the company told him to.
ReplyDeleteThe purpose of the movie is to show viewers that instead of going with the flow, we should be like Harold and live our own life under the law. Harold response, much like ours, should be based on what we believe. Harold was in love, he was tired of fitting in, and he was sick of routine. Often times I find that people live life by others standards instead of living up to their own.
This film was an excellent choice as it took an ordinary citizen, much as ourselves, and made him push the boundaries of our life. Now that perhaps many of us in class have the mindset to push ourselves and speak on our own, may we excel and learn as much as we can for the semester.
The movie Stranger Than Fiction is made for each of us to ask ourselves if we are living life to the fullest or if we are just living day to day with no variation. At first Harold Crick, the protagonist in the film lives his life by his wristwatch. He counts his brush strokes and he knows exactly how many steps there are to the bus stop. He doesn’t seem to think that variation in life is important, but when he begins to hear a woman’s voice (Author Karen Eiffel), he begins to live life a little differently. He hears her say “this will eventually lead to his death” and he begins his search for importance. I
ReplyDeleteHarold’s character is recognized as a Dynamic character. This film is a great choice for a first film because it contains both film and lit. There is narration through out the entire film explaining what Harold is going through. It lets the viewer know his deepest feelings without the view having to guess. When you are reading a book you are narrating it yourself. This movie is almost a transition for book readers to film watchers. With film we can actually see what we are experiencing. It helps us understand both by letting us see both sides. We hear the narrator reading/ telling the story of Harold Crick and then we actually see Harold’s life.
Postmodern art is described on World Wide Art Resources (absolute arts.com) as a movement that encourages the mix of ideas, medias, and forms to promote parody, humor, and irony. In the film Stranger Than Fiction, the Protagonist makes the humor very evident through out the entire film. As for the irony, the film presents a various amount of dramatic irony. One example of this would be when the narrator says “little did he know”. With that being said, it explains that the Protagonist ( Harold Crick) is lacking knowledge about himself. Which also means that the audience is also lacking knowledge.
ReplyDeleteI found this film interesting simply because of the message it aimed toward the audience. At first impression, I seen the film as just another hilarious movie starring Will Farrel. After actually analyzing the film, the message became clear. The moral of the story is Live you life. The protagonist lives a very structured and organized life. So organized that his every move is planned and timed to the very second. The protagonist does not see a problem with the way he is living his life until he is under the impression that he is going to die. It is then realized how much more there is to life, and how much of it he has not lived. As everything starts to unfold, the audience can step by step watch the protagonists eyes begin to open. The protagonist slowly learns what is important in life, and also what can be worth dieing for.
Stranger Than Fiction is the perfect film to start a narrative film class with. This movie is a complex mixture of narrative literature, and narrative film. The audiences get a detailed view from both angles. The audience gets the narrative literature while watching the narrative film. This entire film is constructed around an unfinished narrated book that is in the process of reaching a conclusion, and that is what makes Stranger than Fiction supportive towards both literary work and film.
Stranger than Fiction is about a man Harold Crick, (the protagonist) and his encounter with what many would call destiny. He is a man who is dull, repetitive and as Karen Eiffel would say, lived a life of solitude. Karen Eiffel in the film is an author who suddenly throws a wrench into Harold’s mundane life. Harold begins to realize that his fate does not rest in his own hands but in Karen Eiffel’s.
ReplyDeleteStranger than Fiction makes the viewer thinks about his or her own like in a somewhat new perspective. Harold Crick faces a common yet general question that most people ask themselves when their “watch” of life starts to spin. What am I doing with my life? Suddenly, he starts to do the uncommon, gets courage to talk Anna, brush his teeth without counting the strokes, illegally hacks into his office computer to find an address and even starts playing the guitar. Harold starts to control his own destiny, gets out of is normal routine and beings to simply enjoy life.
This film offers the audience two different perspective that can be easily ignored. It helps us better understand the movie as a piece of literature because of author Karen Eiffel’s narrating Harold’s life and at the same time writing the book. In some films is it hard to know exactly what the story is about and the audience has to apply critical thinking. In this film it was the oppose because she filled in the blanks with what we would of normally been left to the imagination. As a narrative film and literature it does a good job of combining both.
If you are looking for a typical Will Ferrel comedy, this is not one that you add to your netflix account. This movie shows more of the serious side of acting abilities. This is a movie that is not a stranger... to other major names, like Dennis Hoffman and Queen Latifia to name a few. This is movie that is showing the human nature can never be predicted. Will Ferrel plays an IRS auitor named Harold Crick, that lives a normal life that is in a routine. Then one day everything in his life changes, when he is hearing a voice that is tacking his every move. He suffers this problem and he doesnt realize how this will effect the way that he lives his life for forever. These actions keep him from the norm and gets him into experiecing life. During a audit he is doing he meets a woman named Ana that dislikes Harold and doesnt want anything to do with him, and puts him through as much grief as possible. Little does Harold know, that Ana will change his loife for the better. This is not a movie that I would personally recccomend, but it maybe the one movie that you are looking for in your life.
ReplyDeletePostmodernism is a result of disapproval of the experimental and avante garde ways of modernism. While modernism is considered to be abstract in content, postmodernism returns to the simplicity and somewhat philosophical themes. This film accomplishes the aim of postmodern art in that the content is a philosophical one. The protagonist in the film is confronted with the reality that he will soon die. Although his story is very real and somewhat believable the audience is inclined to believe that he can indeed here the authors voice and that it alone decides his fate. i find this part of the film to be more of a modern or abstract concept, but the film in its entirety suggests it to be similar to that of the postmodern movement. The purpose of the film was evident early on in the movie as the viewer is introduced to Harold Crick via his wristwatch. Like the wristwatch, Harold's life is predictable and unlikely to change any time in the near future. As the plot unfolds, the audience is soon to realize that even the most predictable of things can be altered by the simplicity of life's everday events. STF is an appropriate choice to open the class. The complex plot, use of the style of the director, and the setting the appropriate mood through audio and video stimulation confirm this to be true. The variety of characters allow the students the opportunity to define each different type that the text suggests. The film's theme defines itself through plot, mood character,style, and texture. It is also an excellent choice to convey the difference between film and film as literature. In literature the theme is merely the central idea or message. In this particular film there were several supporting themes but STF's main focus is that of a common theme in life. The most seemingly unimportant event can drastically alter life, and that nothing is ever truly "written" and that one should live his life to the fullest because life is short.
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