Aren't you relieved to know you're not a golem?

Stranger than Fiction

(2006)

Yes, it's just as I thought when I saw this seven years ago: it's a film that's smart and slapdash in equal parts but could have been pathbreakingly brilliant in the hands of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze. Or maybe Zoe Kazan and Dayton & Faris, who have since done the living fictional creation thing much better. This will always have a place in my heart, though, for giving me the happiest musical surprise of my moviegoing career in the part-of-my-early-'80s-West Virginia-life song (which I recognized the first time at the first chord change) that Harold (Will Ferrell) plays and sings for Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal).