I watched Big Fish today. It's a nice, sweet show which could have expounded more on the overarching theme of the movie - that of a son trying to know and understand his father. But still, it was a nice, quirky movie.

In a nutshell, the show starts out with the son (played by Billy Crudup), William Bloom, disgusted by his father's (Albert Finney and Ewan McGregor as the old and young Edmund Bloom respectively) tendencies to tell tall tales, argues with him, and then doesn't talk to him for the next three years until Edmund is dying. We get to see Edmund's life story as told via flashblacks, and these involve him meeting a giant, working in a circus, working hard to win the woman of his dreams, serving in Korea and so on. All of the stories that Ed tells are indeed fantastical and truly hard to swallow. Yet, William and we both find that there is an element of truth to all the stories... that perhaps Ed isn't such a liar as William condemns him to be, but that these stories, in some strange way, did indeed happen.

I don't have any comments on the acting. All of the actors, including Jessica Lange and Alison Lohman as the old and young Sandra Templeton, Ed's wife, do a decent job, but none of them was on the screen long enough for them to make an impact on me as to whether they were doing a superb acting job. Steve Buscemi, as always, gave a great performance as a truly horrible poet (e.g. "Roses are red / Violets are Blue / I love Spectre"), then a bank robber and subsequently, a Wall St banker.

The ending... is very sweet and fulfills Ed's claim that how he's going to go will be a surprise.

And yes, I cried. I proceeded to buy myself a yoghurt and returned home to drink beer and watch television... and tried not to cry some more.

Memorable Quotes:

Senior Ed Bloom: Most men, they'll tell you a story straight true. It won't be complicated, but it won't be interesting either.

Will Bloom: A man tells so many stories, that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.