Wordswoman

It's rare to find a science fiction movie with no special effects, no monsters, no aliens, no spaceships, no laboratories or mad scientists. Rarer still to find a movie--any movie--that features nothing but a group of people talking, yet manages to fascinate and captivate.

The Man From Earth is all of that, and despite its shoestring budget and flaws (poor lighting, wooden acting in places, certain plot/plausibility holes), I enjoyed it more than any big-budget production I've seen in years.

The premise is simple: A group of college professors gather in a rustic cabin to bid farewell to their friend, John Oldman, a popular tenured professor who abruptly resigned his position. When they press John for an explanation, he admits his great secret: He's a caveman. He's walked the Earth for 14,000 years, always forced to move on when people begin to notice that he's not aging.

Is he a madman, a liar, or a genetic freak? As the evening wears on his friends move through various stages of belief and disbelief, each drawing on his or her own specialty--biology, paleontology, religion, history--to try to challenge John's story. The script, the final work of the late, acclaimed science fiction writer/screenwriter Jerome Bixby, has a few groaner moments but overall it's intelligent, compelling, and thought-provoking.

Highly recommended. It's available on DVD or through Netflix's "Instant Watch" feature.

A date movie for writers--how often do those come along?

Despite a mutual dislike of Will Ferrell, my husband and I went to see Stranger Than Fiction last night. We came home smiling. This charming fantasy centers on stuffy IRS agent Harold Crick (Ferrell), who suddenly starts hearing a woman's voice narrating his joyless, regimented life. Narrating? She's writing his life, and her voiceover reveals that Harold is destined to die--soon.

Favorite bits:

• Harold consulting an English professor (played by Dustin Hoffman), who tries to identify the genre of book Harold is starring in.
  
• Harold keeping a meticulous tally of events to determine if he's living a comedy or a tragedy.
• The shy, bumbling, yet ecstatic romance that blooms between Harold and a free-spirited baker he's supposed to be auditing.
• "You're never too old for Space Camp."
  

It wasn't a perfect movie. I could've done without the anthropomorphized wristwatch, for one thing (it could've served the same function without a personality), and I never quite believed that the writer (played by Emma Thompson) was the exalted literary figure she was purported to be, given the often syrupy nature of her narration and plot twists. Nor did I believe that the ending she concocted for Harold's story deserved the worshipful awe given to it by the movie's characters. The "masterpiece" ending, supposedly too brilliant to change even though it might cost the real Harold his life, looked dopey and contrived as hell to me.

But those quibbles didn't spoil the movie for me. It's sweet, smart, good-hearted and lovable--the perfect escape if NaNoWriMo is making you crazy.

If you love science fiction & fantasy, it will be nearly impossible for you to watch The Lake House without screaming. My advice? Go, but have a couple of stiff drinks first. You don't just need to suspend your disbelief for this movie; you need to suspend it over a bottomless pit.

It's not that I don't recommend the movie--in fact I do, because it has an unabashedly corny sweetness and old-fashioned charm that makes it a welcome antidote to Hollywood's steady diet of blood-in-the-streets action/adventure movies. And since the movie industry's only "romantic" offering at the moment is The Breakup (hey, look, it's the viciousness of War of the Roses recycled for a whole new generation!), it's nice to have a date movie where nobody wants to kill each other.

But if you read speculative fiction, and especially if you also write it, you recognize that it must have internal rules. The mark of a bad storyline in this genre is not one with improbable rules (that's actually par for the course), it's one that violates its own rules.The Lake House violates its own rules in such an egregious way that I wanted to throw my cup of overpriced cola at the screen. Even though it resulted in the "right" ending, I didn't approve of the route they took to get there.

To give a non-spoiler example of this: The character Kate (in 2006) writes wistfully that she misses the trees at the lake house. The character Alex (who receives her letter in his own time, 2004, via their magic mailbox) promptly packs a tree in the back of his pickup, drives to where Kate's condo building is still being constructed, and plants a tree near the front doors. Meanwhile, Kate arrives home...and sees the tree appear where it had never been before.

Um, no. The mailbox at the lake house was previously established as having astounding time-spanning powers; Kate's urban condo was not. If Alex planted a tree in 2004, Kate would have seen it there the first day she moved into the building in 2006. It would not have been missing when she wrote her letter, then magically appear afterward. Blatant violation of the movie's own rules. As is the ending, which I will not describe here.

I still enjoyed the movie; I'm a hopeless romantic sap. But the rule violations kept me from ever lapsing into a completely happy state of willing disbelief. Again and again, in small ways and large, the movie jolted me out of the story with its "Hey, wait a minute--!" moments. That's a cheat to the viewer (or in a story, the reader). The Time Traveler's Wife plays straight and fair with the audience; The Lake House does not.