The Smarmy Carny

Ferrell as Harold Crick

Stranger Than Fiction looks to be a crisp comedy with roles well-suited for Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, and Dustin Hoffman. It's due out November 10, in time for the Thanksgiving Hollywood push. Based on the trailer and other media I have seen thus far, I have placed it on my List of Movies to See (until I see it, of course).

Karen "Kay" Eiffel (Emma Thompson) is a depressive author who is suffering from writers block because she can't figure out how to kill off her main character, Harold Crick (Will Ferrell). Harold Crick is an IRS agent with OCD who lives alone, eats alone, and sleeps alone. Unbeknownst to Key, Harold is a real person, and he begins to hear Kay narrating his life as she writes it.

Harold visits a professor of English literature, Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), who gives him advice about how to interact and react with the narration and developing storyline.

Finally, Key has a breakthrough and figures out how to kill him. As she foreshadows the events in her book, Harold is alerted to his imminent death. After hearing Kay on a talk show, he sets out to find the author narrating (and controlling?) his life.

Also in the movie are Maggie Gyllenhaal as Ana, the love interest and Queen Latifah as Penny, Kay's assistant.

See the trailer for Stranger Than Fiction. Be sure to visit Sony's Stranger Than Fiction site (and click on "Enter the Site") to experience this well-developed site. (Kay narrates your cursor's movements as you navigate the site.)

Click to view

Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie have this great song truthfully titled "Every OS Sucks." It's funny because it's true.

There is a fairly lengthy introduction, but it's worth the wait if you're a computer geek. The song reminisces about the good ol' days when our computers never crashed. It's truly geeky snark at its best.

Be sure to check out the Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie site for more!

Ever wonder what happens when you cross a marionette with one of those giant parade balloons? Royal de Luxe is a European street theatre company that is best known for its mechanical marionettes. This video is from a show called The Sultan's Elephant:

For more videos of varying quality, search YouTube for Royal de Luxe.

If you like marionettes, you can also watch a really cool video of a much smaller scale skeleton marionette singing and dancing in a busking performance.

Even though it was just a click away, I finally discovered Lists of Bests, which is part of the 43 Things family. Read more about my 43 Things at Random Fodder.

Lists of Bests allows you to create and find lists of products, places, goals and people. From the Pulitzer Prize to the Oscars and beyond; you can start the list yourself or find existing lists. For example, I have already added myself to several lists, such as:

• Academy Award's "Best Picture"
• Roger Ebert's "The Great Movies"
• 50 States of the USA

You can also start your own personal lists like "My Top 10 Favorite Books," "My Films for Computer Geeks," etc. There are three types of lists: award lists (lists of particular award winners), definitive lists (lists from other publications that are set in stone), and personal lists (created and edited only by you).

The most fun part about Lists of Bests is that when you add or create a list to your profile, you can easily check off your progress item by item. Especially useful is that, when I checked all of the Academy Award Best Picture winners that I had seen, those movies were already checked off in the "Roger Ebert's 'The Great Movies'" list when I visited it.

Here are the lists I have completed:

Here are the 5 lists I am still working on, but closest to completing:

What are you waiting for? Go get started today!

Here's a pretty cool video by a band named OK Go. The song is "Here It Goes," and the theme is treadmills.

Keep in mind that the video is by the band and is not a fan movie. At first, I was worried that four guys working in a fitness club or fitness equipment store had way too much time on their hands. As it turns out, it's four guys working in a band that have way too much time on their hands.

The video's online popularity is booming as the YouTube video has been viewed over 1.8M times thus far. It's now on VH1's Top 20 Countdown, too.

Two thoughts going through my mind throughout the video are:

• Who ever thought about choreographing a treadmill dance?
• How many injuries and face plants occurred during the practices for this video?

Nonetheless, this music video uses up less money and personal time than most of the videos you see on MTV and VH1.

Thanks to BBC America, I'm now watching the British series Life on Mars.

The first season consists of eight episodes, though BBCA has only shown three thus far. The first three episodes are engaging, and the plot is interesting:

Sam Tyler, a cool, sharp young detective, is working hard to keep the streets of 21st century Manchester safe from crime. But his world is turned upside down when the hunt for a serial killer becomes a personal vendetta after Maya, his girlfriend and colleague, goes missing. Desperately afraid she has been kidnapped by the killer, he sets out to find her, only to become involved in a near-fatal car accident. When he wakes, he finds himself in a different era — 1973. Is this reality, madness or a dream? Sam struggles to understand what is happening to him.

Disoriented and traumatized, 21st century Sam is completely bewildered by his new environment. As all attempts to return to his own time fail, Sam falls back on what he knows best — his job. Each episode features a different case, some of the toughest Sam has ever tried to solve — partly because of what seems like archaic police procedure. This is a world without cell phones, where cops rely on paperwork and memory instead of computers, there's no DNA profiling and what forensics do exist take two weeks to process.

Furthermore, his 1973 colleagues are insensitive, unreconstructed cops who regularly intimidate witnesses and are happy to nail suspects irrespective of whether they have evidence. Sam's new boss is hard-nosed Gene Hunt, the antithesis of everything Sam believes in. He gets results by trusting his gut instinct and, all too often, sheer brute force.

In the first episode, it becomes clear to Sam that the killer who is holding Maya in 2006 started his killing spree here and now in the early '70s. Could catching the perpetrator be Sam's key to returning to the future?

Get a quick glimpse of Life on Mars over at BBCA's website.

David E. Kelley is working on an American version of the series, set to premiere in fall of 2007. This has me almost as nervous as when I first heard about the American version of The Office, but that series turned out fine. I'm quite certain that the British version wouldn't do too well in the American mainstream, but I trust David E. Kelley to write it well for the American audience. Still, an American version will have to take care to recreate the not-so-nostalgic nostalgia of the 70s like the original series. Hopefully it won't be full of kitschy That 70s Show moments.

The Spider-Man 3 teaser is out now, and it's clear that the third installment will deal with the Venom plot line. I highly doubt they'll get into the Secret Wars plot simply to introduce Venom, so that development will be interesting to watch. My guess is that they'll stick with yet another lab experiment gone awry. Expect to see SM3 in May 2007.

Topher Grace is slated to play Eddie Brock, which should be fun. You may or may not have noticed the Eddie Brock reference in the original Spider-Man: J. J. Jameson mentions that Eddie couldn't get a decent photo of Spider-Man.

In the comics, Venom knows Spider-Man's secret identity, but since Spider-Man 2 seemed to be titled "Hey everyone, I'm Peter Parker!", the Venom plot line will hopefully be a good distraction from that mess.

If you're not a fan of Spider-Man, however, you can always watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles teaser. Based solely on the teaser, the movie looks pretty good. At first, I was worried that they might have dropped the lighter side of TMNT, but you'll notice that's not the case. One thing, though: I can't yet verify that Corey Feldman is not slated to voice Donatello. Once I can confirm that, I will be much more excited about the movie. TNMT is slated to be released on March 30, 2007.