thoughts on The Invention of Lying

Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) explains to us in voiceover that in the world he lives in, no one is capable of lying.  Not only is everyone honest all the time, this also means that fiction doesn't exist, and advertisements are just straight-up descriptions of products.  Mark is fired from his job as a screenwriter (which in this world simply consists of choosing historical events and writing factual descriptions for someone to read out loud for the camera) and is about to be evicted; rent is $800, and he only has $300.  While standing in line at the bank to withdraw that last $300, however, something occurs to him: he could just TELL the teller that he has $800 in his account, she would believe him, and his problems would be solved.  He does so successfully, and he realizes that he could lie about other things, too (though they don't have a word for "lie" in their world).  At first, he uses this new power to get more money, but eventually, he uses it to comfort his mother, who is scared of dying.  Basically, he invents Heaven.  The doctors and nurses at her nursing home overhear him, and all of a sudden there are hundreds of people swarming around his apartment wanting to know more.

Though this movie had its funny and even touching moments, something didn't quite sit right with me about it.  After sleeping on it, I decided that it is this: the movie is about one thing before Mark develops the ability to lie, and another thing after.  Before he develops this ability, the movie is about what happens when people feel the need to state every thought that comes into their head.  After he develops the ability to lie, the movie is about what happens when people believe everything they're told.  There are actually problematic aspects with both scenarios.

The first part of the movie depicts a world in which people have no inner monologue.  This means that a date (Anna McDoogles, played by Jennifer Garner) tells Mark upon greeting him at the door that she is disappointed that he is early because she's not ready yet, and also she was just in the middle of masturbating.  Mark's secretary Shelley (Tina Fey) tells him that he is almost definitely getting fired that day, so she hasn't been bothering to take his phone messages, and also she plans to spend her work day looking for new jobs on Craigslist.  The receptionist at Mark's mother's nursing home (Dreama Walker) greets him by telling him that he should probably say his last goodbyes that day, because his mom (Fionnula Flanagan) is at the top of the nursing home employees' "death poll."  This is all sometimes funny, but mostly mean, unnecessary, and has little to do with the fact that these people can't lie.  Mark's secretary is just generally unpleasant and bad at her job. And while I can see where, in this universe, a nursing home employee couldn't tell Mark that his mother was going to be fine or pretend to care about her if she didn't, she has to understand most people would be upset about their own mother's death, right?  Is it not possible to express some concern or empathy about that without lying?  Not in this world, apparently, because when Mark's neighbor Frank (Jonah Hill) tells Mark that he plans to commit suicide, Mark just kind of accepts it and goes on about his day.  Again, I can see why he couldn't tell Frank that things are going to get better when he has no way of knowing that, but I don't see why he can't ask questions or offer help.

After Mark develops the ability to lie, we are confronted with the knowledge that the people in his life will believe literally anything he tells them, even if it contradicts what they absolutely know to be true.  The thing that bothered me here is this: in real life, even when people are doing their best to be honest, they sometimes misremember things.  They sometimes have a different impression of what happened at a given time than someone else did.  They sometimes are just plain wrong about something they thought was true.  This doesn't seem to happen here.  People seem to take everything at complete face value, which actually goes a long way in explaining why Anna stays so shallow for so long.  Though she admits that she likes Mark a lot and that he makes her really happy, she keeps telling him that a romantic relationship isn't possible because she doesn't want chubby snub-nosed children.  The impression we get (and that we actually see in a scene where a chubby kid is picked on) is that such children would be treated especially harshly in a world where no one lies.  However, when Mark tells Brad Kessler (Rob Lowe), the man that Anna very nearly marries instead of him, that even if Brad's kids are better-looking, that doesn't mean that they'll be better people than Mark's would be, my reaction is...duh?  How do these people not already know this?  Do they so internalize what everyone says about them that they can't imagine themselves as anything else?  The answer is clearly yes, but...I just didn't totally buy it, and it, again, didn't seem to have all that much to do with people's inability to lie.

There were aspects/moments that were funny here, and Ricky Gervais is very likable as Mark.  However, a lot of it just made me furrow my brow and go "Hmm..."

thoughts on Safety Not Guaranteed (spoilers)

Aubrey Plaza stars as Darius, a magazine intern who is assigned, along with staff writer Jeff (Jake Johnson) and fellow intern Arnau (Karan Soni) to research a story about a man who has placed an ad for a time traveling companion.  Jeff is the one who suggests the story, and it seems the only reason he did so is because the story will lead them to a coastal town where he hopes to reconnect with an old summer romance.  Once there, Jeff and Darius take turns approaching the man who placed the ad (Kenneth, played by Mark Duplass) pretending to want to be his time traveling companion.  Kenneth is immediately put off by Jeff, who gives him the standard lines about wanting to go back in time because he thinks it'd be cool to see dinosaurs and gladiators and all that; Kenneth and Darius, however, get along well, and she begins preparing for the time travel adventure with him.  She at first assumes he's crazy, and at one point thinks he's just flat-out lying about some of the things he's told her, but she grows to like him and begins to think maybe he's not so crazy.  Because I feel like I can't talk about my reaction to the movie without talking about the ending, I'm just going to go ahead and give it away: the movie ends with Jeff, Darius, and Arnau discovering that Kenneth really has made a time machine, and then with Darius boarding the time machine with him and the two of them disappearing.  Seriously.  That's how it ends.

Here's why this blows my mind: I never for one second thought that Kenneth had made a time machine, or at least not a working one.  I didn't think he was lying, exactly; I thought, based on stories that he told Darius, that he dearly wished he could go back in time to stop a particular event from happening, so he'd convinced himself that it was possible.  Darius has an event that she'd like to stop, too, so I thought part of her also wanted to believe him.  Because their story is intercut with scenes of Jeff reconnecting with his old summer love (Liz, played by Jenica Bergere) only to discover that she is still viewing him as a summer fling, and therefore a temporary part of her life, I thought this was a story about wishing that you could go back and be with the people you loved at the last time your life was really good, only to realize that that's not possible.  The fact that it seems that Darius and Kenneth really do travel back in time, however, suggests that maybe it is.  We don't really know, because we don't know if Darius and Kenneth are successful on their journey.  So...I'm not really sure if I get what this movie was about.  Also-- and this is perhaps a nitpicky point-- I don't really understand what kind of a magazine would pursue this story in the first place, and I don't believe that it would pay three employees to stay in a hotel and investigate this for more than a couple of days.  I don't know.  The performances were good and I had an okay time watching this; I just don't think I get the takeaway, or even know if there is a takeaway.

thoughts on August: Osage County

Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) goes missing, and then is found dead.  The death appears to be a suicide.  His three adult daughters, Ivy, Barbara, and Karen (played by Julianne Nicholson, Julia Roberts, and Juliette Lewis, respectively) arrive home at different times and accompanied by different people.  Ivy lives nearby, is single, and is there through the whole thing.  Barbara comes as soon as she hears their father is missing with her husband, Bill (Ewan McGregor), who she is currently separated from, and her teenage daughter, Jean (Abigail Breslin).  Karen comes for the funeral with her fiancé, Steve (Dermot Mulroney).  Also in the mix are the girls' mother, Violet (Meryl Streep), who pops a wide variety of painkillers like they are candy; Violet's sister, Mattie Fay (Margo Martindale); Mattie Fay's husband, Charlie (Chris Cooper); Mattie Fay's son, Little Charlie (Benedict Cumberbatch); and Johnna (Misty Upham), who Beverly hired to take care of Violet (who has cancer) shortly before he disappeared.  It is August in Osage County, Oklahoma; the temperature on the bank clock reads 108 degrees, Violet keeps it nearly as hot in her house, and tensions are high.

It's...not fun to watch.  Violet is almost always at least slightly high on painkillers, and sometimes completely incoherent.  Everyone looks like hell: Julia Roberts has grey roots showing, and she and Ivy both dress in baggy, shapeless clothes.  You can practically feel the heat; everything is dusty, dry, and terrible.  Everyone keeps shouting at each other to reveal The Worst Secrets in the World.  Dermot Mulroney is kind of the comic relief, and he winds up giving pot to fourteen-year-old Jean and then trying to feel her up.  It's that kind of movie.  Even in the most normal of families, the heartache of losing a loved one coupled with the unbearable heat and the stress of having so many people under one roof would make tensions run high...but this is not a normal family, and their problems are too big to be relatable. Meryl Streep's character is Just Awful, and the only time you feel even a little bit of sympathy for her is when she tells a horrible, horrible story about her horrible mother doing something horrible to her on Christmas when she was a kid.  It's just...yeah.  The performances are good, but it's all incredibly uncomfortable, and I'm not sure what the takeaway was.  I can't necessarily recommend it.

thoughts on Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

Okay, so I almost always blog about new releases because the simple fact is, I don't really have the attention span to watch rented movies.  You all know I love going to movies at the theater, but, as I may have mentioned before, at home I tend to want to get up every five seconds to unload the dishwasher, or put away laundry, or maybe I'll be reading something at the same time or messing around on the Internet.  TV is better because commercials make it possible to do this and still (mostly) keep track of what you're watching.  However, post-Dallas Buyers Club I realized that not five years ago Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner were in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past together and that I'd never actually seen it, so I added it to my Netflix queue. 

Matthew McConaughey plays Connor Mead, a high-profile photographer who has slept with what can only be described as a comically large number of women (and by "comically large," I mean "disgusting.")  There is a scene where he has to walk past all of his past conquests, and it's RIDICULOUS, how many women there are, and how many women who seem totally happy to sleep with him even knowing what he's like.  Hey, remember the show Party of Five, and how it was so shocking when Charlie (Matthew Fox) revealed that he'd slept with something like thirty-six women?  Apparently it takes a lot more than that to be shocking these days, which is kind of sad. 

Anyway, early in the movie, Connor is reminded that he's supposed to attend his brother Paul's (Breckin Meyer's) wedding.  No one besides Paul is that happy to have him there; he's slept with most of the bridesmaids (including his first love Jenny Perotti, played by Jennifer Garner), and he keeps (mostly by accident) doing potentially-wedding-ruining stuff like knocking over the wedding cake, letting it spill that Paul once slept with one of the bridesmaids, and hitting on the bride-to-be's (Lacey Chabert's) mother.  At the rehearsal dinner, he also drunkenly goes off about how marriage is an antiquated institution and love is a myth.  That night, his dead, womanizing uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas) visits him to tell him that over the course of the night, he'll be visited by three ghosts who will show him the error of his ways.

It all sounds pretty silly, right, which is probably why I didn't want to see it when it first came out.  However, I found it to be surprisingly funny and sweet.  I enjoyed the trip through Connor and Jenny's romantic past (guided by Emma Stone in crazy '80s hair and braces as the Ghost of Girlfriends Past and the girl he lost his virginity to in high school).  Though their relationship partly failed because Connor decided to take womanizing Uncle Wayne's advice, there were also plenty of really normal missed opportunities and missteps caused by fear and pride over the years.  Jennifer Garner's Jenny is pretty cool as a love interest, as Connor himself realizes; she's the only person in his life who's ever really called him on his crap and told him how things needed to be.  It also doesn't hurt that their journey is set to a pretty cool/fun '80s soundtrack (REO Speedwagon's "Keep on Loving You" is pretty much their love theme for the movie).  Basically, Connor is reminded what he lost by looking at the past; learns how much he's hurting people in the present; and is scared by the future, which is pretty much par for the course for a play on A Christmas Carol, I guess...but the characters are pretty likeable (even when Connor is being skeezy), and it's all pretty cute and fun.  I dug it.

thoughts on Lifetime's Flowers in the Attic (spoilers)

So.  I read Flowers in the Attic when I was maybe thirteen, and I must have liked it, given that I read not only the entire series but also the Dawn series by V.C.Andrews, as well as a third V.C. Andrews series with a main character named Melody Logan.  I think around the time of the Melody Logan series, I started getting impatient and feeling like the series were all kind of the same, or had a lot of the same elements, anyway.  At any rate, I would imagine that I liked Flowers in the Attic because it had a page-turner-y, "are these kids ever going to get out of this attic?!" quality, as well as because, as a thirteen-year-old, I was mainly used to reading stuff like The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High; it probably seemed like a grown-up and somewhat naughty thing to be reading.  It was not until I went to grad school in my mid-twenties that I realized that a lot of women my age had read V.C. Andrews novels as young teens, and it became something my friends and I kind of bonded over.  "I can't believe I read that when I was thirteen," I think I've said in more than one conversation.  "That was so messed up."

It is with all of this in mind that I looked forward to Lifetime's adaptation of Flowers in the Attic starring Heather Graham as the mother, Ellen Burstyn as the grandmother, and Kiernan Shipka as Cathy.  For those unfamiliar, the plot is this: Cathy, who is maybe twelve or thirteen at the beginning of the story, has an older brother named Christopher, a younger brother named Cory, and a younger sister named Carrie.  Cory and Carrie are twins.  Their father is often away on business, and their mom (Corrine) is a housewife whose defining quality is being beautiful and who basically lives for the days that her husband returns home.  One day, he doesn't; he's killed in a car accident.  It turns out they're in a ton of debt and Corrine has never had a job, so she writes to the wealthy family that disowned her years ago (because she married her half-uncle, which I had forgotten until I watched this movie) and asks if they will take her family in.  They agree, but she can't tell her father right away that she has children, so she arranges with her mother to keep them in a room that leads to the attic; they are allowed to play in the attic, and this winds up being their refuge, because their grandma is claustrophobic and doesn't like to climb the narrow stairs. 

Anyway, at first the mother says that they will only be up there until she wins her father over, then until he dies (which will supposedly be soon); eventually, she gets married to someone she has never even told she has children, so it's fairly clear the kids are never, ever going to get out of the attic.  The grandmother is in charge of bringing them food; the mother comes around less and less frequently to give the kids presents and to lie to them that they're all going to be super rich someday.  The grandmother is scary and sometimes physically abusive.  An incestuous relationship develops between Christopher and Cathy.  The twins, deprived of fresh air and sunlight, don't grow as they should and become sickly; Cory eventually dies, at which point the other children, who have already been plotting their escape from the attic, realize that they all need to leave sooner rather than later.

Isn't that an awful, awful story?  My memories of the book were that it was both a page-turner and over-the-top, so I think I expected the movie to have a "naughty fun" quality to it; instead, all of this is played completely straight, so that you're just faced with how terrible all of these events are.  Also, perhaps because I already knew what was going to happen, I grew very impatient with all of this very early on; the early scenes depicting the family's pre-attic life are interesting, but once they go to live with Corrine's parents, I was just like, "All right, kids.  You're never getting out of this attic.  Start plotting your escape."  There are reasons they don't do this immediately-- they love their mother and at first believe what she tells them; they are scared of their grandmother; Chris and Cathy are worried about the younger kids-- but partly because I already knew how the plot unfolded, partly because Heather Graham does not act for one second like she gives a damn about those kids, and partly because pretty much everything that happens in that attic is Just Awful, I just wanted them to leave and be done with it.  Mostly, I wanted to not be watching it anymore, and I probably should have just turned it off.  When it ended, my main thought was, "That movie was terrible and the book probably was, too."

Kiernan Shipka was smart, determined, and sassy as Cathy.  Ellen Burstyn was sufficiently scary as the grandma.  I also enjoyed Cathy's closing voiceover as they escape, which basically boils down to, "We made our escape, but we WOULD see our mother again someday, and she WOULD feel shame for what she did for us."  I'm pretty sure the plot of the second or third Flowers book is Cathy returning all grown-up to seduce her mother's husband and otherwise ruin her mother's life, and I remember it being pretty awesome.  The movie as a whole, though, was not good or even particularly entertaining.

thoughts on American Hustle

Christian Bale and Amy Adams star as Irving Rosenfeld and Sydney Prosser (though she goes by Edith Greenlee for most of the movie), a couple of con artists who (among other things) get people to put $5,000 down to apply for $50,000 loans, and then never give anyone any money.  An FBI agent named Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) is on to them, and cuts a deal with them to go in on some big scheme to try to take down the mayor (Jeremy Renner) and a couple of congressmen.  The people Richie is trying to take down are too big, and Irving, Sydney, and Richie's boss, Stoddard Thorsen (Louis C.K.), all keep telling Richie that this is all stupid and unnecessary and is going to end badly.  Also, though Irving and Sydney are kind of a couple, he has a wife, Rosalind (Jennifer Lawrence), who he doesn't get along with but who won't divorce him and keeps threatening to take his son away and expose his illegal activities (which she only partly knows about) if he leaves her.

Rosalind is actually a really interesting character; at first you think she's just an annoyance, and she's not really a big part of things, and you don't really know why they cast Jennifer Lawrence or why she's been nominated for so many awards. The thing is, though, that even though she's an annoyance and not directly involved in things, she is loud and talks too much and simply by virtue of her annoying qualities has the potential to ruin everything for everyone.  It's pretty fascinating, and you start to look forward to her appearances onscreen.  She also gets some pretty funny lines/moments.  For example, the mayor, Carmine, gives Irving a microwave (which is a new invention at the time, and which everyone keeps referring to as "the science oven") as a gift, warning him not to put anything metal in it.  Irving passes the warning along to Rosalind, but she ignores this in a pretty funny "I'll put metal in the science oven if I want to put metal in the science oven" kind of way.  Naturally, as anyone who was put metal in their own "science oven" knows, this starts a fire.  Irving, of course, is upset, both because she ignored his directions and because the "science oven" was a gift (I know I'm overusing "science oven" here, but I seriously cracked up any time anyone said the words).  Rosalind turns it around on him, all, "Well, I read an article that it sucks all the nutrients out of your food!  See!  I have the article right here!  What do you think you're doing, bringing in something that sucks the nutrients out of our food and starts fires?  Thank God for me!"  She is A RIDICULOUS PERSON.  I've always thought Jennifer Lawrence was okay before this-- I like the Hunger Games movies but usually find myself talking more about one or more of the supporting characters/actors afterward; I liked The Silver Linings Playbook more than I thought I would but didn't love it-- but she really seems to be having fun here, and I enjoyed her performance.

Bradley Cooper's character, Richie, is also a fairly ridiculous person, and I spent a lot of the movie trying to figure him out, though I don't think his character actually went that deep: he's trying to pull off something way over his head because he wants to be important/escape from his regular life, in which he lives with his mother and has a fiancee he doesn't seem to care about.  He has sort of a "thing" with Amy Adams's character, and at one point he's all, "I love you!  Did you hear that? Yeah, I said that!"  I'm sitting there all, "What? Seriously?  Why?  When did this happen?"  I think it's mainly that he views her has an escape route, which she actually accuses Irving of but is actually true of both men.

Christian Bale and Amy Adams probably give the most consistent performances of the film, but I don't think there's a lot to "get" with either of them, either.  They're con artists.  Irving is conflicted about his family, Sydney/Edith, and the scheme he's gotten wrapped up in.  He doesn't like Richie.  He likes Carmine.  There's...not much beyond that, as far as I can see.  Sydney/Edith loves Irving, pretends to love Richie (and she tells us from the beginning that she's just pretending, so there's not much of a question about that), and you can tell the difference between Sydney and Edith because Edith speaks with a British accent.  I guess my overall assessment of the characters, then (with the exception of Rosalind, who really is kind of a wild card), is that sometimes the nature of their jobs/what they're trying to pull off makes it seem as if they're something they're not, but I don't think any of them really have a lot going on below the surface. 

I don't know.  They're all just kind of a bunch of bad, not-that-interesting people trying to pull off a scheme that almost everyone involved knows is ill-advised.  Like, I generally really like spy/heist TV shows and movies (which I know this is not, but stay with me for a minute) because they are generally about really cool, smart people trying to pull off something complicated and fun-to-watch.  This is just a bunch of seedy people trying to pull something stupid off to improve their own situations.  Did I find parts of it entertaining?  Sure.  Did I care that much about it or get much out of it?  Not really.

On a side note...the sets, costumes, and music are all such that I thought to myself more than once, "The '70s must have been an ugly, horrible time."  I don't think it's fair for me to say that about an entire decade, or anything, especially since I wasn't born until the tail end of it, but I think it's an accurate assessment of the world these characters live in.

thoughts on The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Ben Stiller stars as Walter Mitty, a mild-mannered employee of Life magazine, which is about to publish its last print issue.  He has recently set up an eHarmony profile for the sole purpose of contacting a coworker, Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig); however, he has filled very little of the profile out.  He can't, because he's never really done anything or been anywhere, though he daydreams about doing all sorts of things.  When he has to go off in search of a missing film negative, however, he finally finds himself embarking on adventures he's only dreamed of.

I thought it was just okay.  Walter and Cheryl are likable enough characters, and it's kind of fun to follow him on his journey.  However, I just didn't find myself caring that much about what was happening-- that Life was publishing its last print issue, whether or not Walter found the negative, what might or might not happen between Walter and Cheryl.  This might have been a pacing issue; there are fairly long stretches where I really wasn't sure where things were going, or where I was supposed to want them to go.  This might have been okay if I had enjoyed the journey more, but I just found myself fairly indifferent to everything that was going on.

So, mildly entertaining, but didn't really move me.