Just Plain Bad.

I've formulated another paranoid theory: the "suits" in charge of the arts and entertainment industry are intentionally bombarding the cultural landscape with garbage in order to lower people's expectations. Once those expectations are lowered, they no longer have to pay creatives decent money for professionally-made content; any scribble or squawk will do. Case in point: at Starbucks the other day I saw a CD of "Peanuts Christmas Music" featuring all the Peanuts characters and, behind them, a tree that looked like it had been made in half a minute by someone who had never drawn or used a graphics program before that day. Why pay a graphic designer or illustrator, when the customers don't care what your product looks like?

Speaking of bad, I went and saw "Stranger Than Fiction" with the wife the other day. She liked it, I didn't. Will Farrell plays a man who finds out that he's a character in a novel. What bothered me was the fact that the novel was absolute crap. Which wouldn't have been so bad if they had treated it as crap; but no, the author, played by Emma Thompson, was supposed to be a highly-respected and beloved writer. At one point Will Ferrell's character tells Dustin Hoffman's English Lit Prof that he heard the author's voice say "little did he know". Hoffman's ears perk up immediately. I thought he would immediately explain that "little did he know" is a horribly cliche phrase that only a hack writer would use; but no, it turns out he considers it a highly significant literary device.

There is a longish scene in which Ferrell browses at a guitar shop while Thompson narrates what the guitars are "saying" to him. It's supposed to be very witty, but is actually eye-rollingly bad. Yes, the flying "V" shaped guitar is the kind played by heavy metal guys who wear lycra pants. Yes, the acoustic dreadnought is played by guys who don't really know how to play, but hope to impress girls. Those aren't interesting, original or funny observations, they're obvious. Having a good actress recite the lines with a classy English accent only underscores how bad they are.

The pity of it is, it could have worked if the badness of the book-within-the-movie had been made part of the plot. A man who finds out he's a character in a novel is funny; a man who finds out he's a character in a really BAD novel is funnier. He could have been smarter than the writer and her ensuing efforts to kill him off could have become a pretext for a battle of wits between them.

Or did Woody Allen already make that movie?