Delayed Reaction: The Invention of Lying

The Pitch: Is Ricky Gervais a bankable star? He's got two strikes (Extras, Ghost Town). Let's go for a third.

In a world where no one lies, one man discoveries lying.

Of all the movies that I go out of my way to see a second time, The Invention of Lying has to be the least well regarded. I've seen plenty of movies twice. I even saw Dorm Daze a second time. That was out of opportunity though. I made sure to give the Godfather movies another viewing simply because I appreciate movies more than I did a decade ago. I'll probably even give Network (which I really despised) another chance because it's so well regarded. It even makes sense to revisit something like Aliens, which I honestly didn't remember if I'd seen before. I saw The Invention of Lying in theaters. I have the ticket stub. By no means did I hate it, but it was a thoroughly forgettable movie. About two years ago, in the middle of a particularly deep internet rabbit hole, I stumbled on a glowing review of The Invention of Lying. For some reason, that mixed with a few other elements to make me really curious to see it again.

Look, I've been an atheist virtually my entire life. I still remember getting my First Eucharist is 2nd grade and being dumbfounded when I realized that fellow students weren't joking when they talked about thunder meaning that God is angry. I'm simply not wired for belief in god. I don't hold it against people who do (as long as they aren't hurting anyone, what do I care?). It's just different wiring. So, I like a good atheist rant as much as the next guy. Ricky Gervais (and Bill Maher) do get insufferable about it sometimes. They treat atheism like a ministry, and that gets exhausting.

I bring this up because The Invention of Lying is a religious movie. At least, it is in the way Life of Brian is. It's not subtle. Mark (Gervais) delivers his message on pizza boxes that look like the 10 Commandment tablets. He even ends up looking like Jesus at one point. If anyone comes away from this confused about what Gervais is trying to say, they aren't very observant.

I dig this kind of high concept movie. My favorite movie of all time is Stranger Than Fiction, after all. Gervais and his co-writer/director Matthew Robinson think all this through an impressive amount. They deliver a close approximation to what a world without lying would look like. This movie is undeniably clever. For an idea that has "10 minute comedy sketch" written all over it, they do an admirable job finding new slants on the idea throughout to keep it going. The smartest thing the movie does is when it has Mark accidentally creates religion out of an act of love as his mother is dying. It's a surprisingly well-acted scene and it makes perfect sense in the moment.

The cast in this movie is kind of insane. Nothing in Jennifer Garner's career would make me expect her to be in something like this. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ed Norton essentially have extended cameos. When you think about his public fallout last year, it's jarring to see Louis C.K. in a role that has him talking about wanting to touch women's boobs. It's also jarring to hear Tina Fey use the other F-word with such verve. I get that she's playing someone who is supposed to be an awful person, but still. It's like seeing Dimaggio is a Red Sox jersey.

There is something that feels cheap about the movie. Somehow, everything looks fake. Better yet, everything looks like it was made by an art department for a movie. This isn't a lived-in world. The movie has an issue similar to one most dystopias have: I can see how the world exists this way during the movie but not before or after. I can't fathom how to got to where it is or how it lasts after the movie. Gervais gets that too. The voice-over at the beginning is there entirely to say, "just go with me here". This movie is a rhetorical argument. It's a guy throwing out a hypothetical to make a point. Ultimately, the point and the comedy aren't quite enough to justify the conceit.

Here's a great example of why my One Big Leap is valuable. OK. This is a world without lying before Mark. Given that, how does the rest of the movie work? Well, the story is a pretty generic RomCom with leads who have no spark. It's more clever than funny. The production design is cheap. The performances are committed but not always great. It's an agenda movie that's afraid to move beyond its intended point. The whole "only pretty people should want to marry each other" argument of Garner's character strikes me as more of a logical thought than an honest one. The movie tends to confuse those two things. I actually liked this movie a lot more than I remembered. I could see how if the movie was even 5% different in the right ways, I could adore it. As it is, it feels more like a writing exercise than a fully formed movie.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Mid90s

Formula: Brink! * The Florida Project

I like Jonah Hill. He's the star of my second favorite movie of all time (Superbad). I'm a loyal devotee of that Judd Apatow crew that has defined a lot of the comedy scene over the last dozen or so years. He's a solid dramatic actor too, with two Oscar nominations (he definitely deserved one). He's been contributing more as a writer in his recent films. The move to directing feels pretty natural. That he chose Mid90s as his directorial debut (he also wrote the screenplay) is a little surprising.

Mid90s is about Stevie (Sunny Suljic) a - I don't know - 12-year-old living in California with his young, single mother (Katherine Waterston) and meat head brother (Lucas Hedges). Stevie starts hanging out at a local skate shop and makes friends with the guys who work or chill there. That crew represents all the kind of guys you'd expect to be skateboarders in the 90s. There's Ray (Na-kel Smith), who is by far the best skater and most responsible person in the group. He wants to be a professional skater as a way to get out of his meager circumstances. Fuckshit (Olan Prenatt) uses skating as a way to avoid all responsibly, drink, and party. Ruben (Gio Galicia) is an angry kid who mostly just needs somewhere to go to get away from his rough home life. Fourth Grade (Ryder McLauighlin) is the aspiring filmmaker of the group, because every skate crew in the 90s had to have one of those. Most of the movie is spent developing all the characters and explaining their relationships. Ray and Fuckshit are best friends going in different directions with their lives. Ruben is a jerk and jealous of Stevie. Stevie's mom had kids way too young, but she's making the best of it now. Stevie and his brother fight a lot and fight rough. You'll recognize a lot of the characters if you've ever seen a coming-of-age or "family of misfits" movie.

In fact, Mid90s is a checklist movie. There aren't any beats that feel particularly new or unexpected. The rise and fall structure follows pretty predictably. There's the moment of discovery, learning about the sub-culture, the big moment of acceptance, the good times, the excess, and the comeuppance. Oddly, I kept thinking about how this movie felt like a music biopic in the way the beats played out. Predictability isn't necessarily bad. I love a good hang-out movie. And the skate crew is entertaining enough to follow for 90 minutes. I especially loved Na-kel Smith's Ray. Most directors would feel pressured to expose more of his flaws, but Hill lets Ray just be a good dude. He's a reminder that Stevie becoming part of this world doesn't have to end with him being a burnout.

Ultimately, Mid90s doesn't amount to all that much. Where it ends left me really underwhelmed. There's a whole self-harm plot line with Stevie that goes nowhere by the end. His relationship with his brother and mother have no real resolution. His mother makes a decision at the end that rings entirely false, given what has happened and who is responsible. The stories of all his skate friends are similarly unresolved. I guess the idea is that life keeps going on and things rarely come together with a Hollywood ending. I'm not even sure what the arc of the story is though. It's just "here's this world, here's the problems in it, and bye".

Mid90s is imperfect, but very watchable. Jonah Hill assembled a great young cast of mostly unknowns. I wouldn't be surprised to see Sunny Suljic, Na-kel Smith, or Olan Prenatt start showing up in a lot more movies after this. I think Hill tries a little too hard though to hide the fact that this isn't an indie movie coming from someone on the outside looking in. I was bothered by the 4:3 ratio the whole movie is in. I understand that it's meant to evoke all the skate movies that were circulated in the 90s, but it looks like he's trying to ugly the movie up. I keep comparing how this movie looks to how something like The Florida Project looks. The Florida Project is much more authentically messy. The music is almost too good in Mid90s, like Hill was able to get his first choice for everything. Part of what's fun with indie movies is that they often have to be inventive with limited resources. Mid90s comes off like they tried to make it as an indie, but they always had the ability to make things easier if needed. There's enough that I liked to make me curious about Hill's next project as a director. Mid90s is more of a noble miss though.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Lady Macbeth

The Pitch: What happens if a neglected housewife in 19th century England does something about her situation?

A young woman, ignored by her husband begins having an affair and arranges to make her home life more bearable.

I can't remember why I was so excited to get to Lady Macbeth, because I was quite excited. It was already at the top of my Netflix DVD queue before I saw it was on HBOGo, at which point, I watched it immediately. The trailer for it certainly looked eerie, similar to The Witch but not a horror movie. A big part of my excitement, no doubt, was Florence Pugh in the lead role. It doesn't take much to make me watch something with a young, dark haired British actress in the lead role. It helps that I heard raves about her performance from assorted reviewers. Maybe I still needed something to scratch the itch that Tulip Fever failed to. Much of Lady Macbeth is a stripped down, less ambitious version of Tulip Fever. It's better than that movie though. It pretty much has to be due to law of averages and what not.

Any fan of Shakespeare should be able to guess a lot about this movie by the title alone. Perhaps the title of the short story its based on, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk Distric, says a bit more. Pugh plays a newlywed woman, Katherine, who marries a man half her age who has no interest in her. Her husband is a jerk. Her father in law, who lives with them, is possibly even worse. Both father and son leave for a while (days if not weeks). Even more bored than before, Katherine begins an affair with one of the men who works the land. As word gets out about this affair, Katherine decides to do something about it. This movie is still new and unheard of enough that I'd rather not spoil things, but again, the title is very appropriate.

Pugh is very good. She pulls off a wide range of traits. I sympathized with her for longer than she deserved. I feel like she loses or gains 10 years on a whim. Sometimes she's a bored little girl playing house, and other times she's a calculating, authoritarian housewife. She's comfortably out of place in this time period. She's strategically too modern in a way that fits. I'll be curious to see her in something more modern now, so I can figure out if she's just inherently anachronistic or if that's something she brings specifically to this role. And before you ask: No. I'm not sure what I mean by all that either. It makes sense in my head, not necessarily in my words.

The scope of the movie is pretty limited. It only leaves her house and the surrounding property a couple times. There are few characters. I didn't notice this as a detriment though. It fits her boredom and confinement. The story doesn't hold your hand through everything. Certain story beats aren't explained right away or made clear at all. Once or twice I looked up the Wikipedia summary because I thought I missed something, only to discover that my question was answered a scene or two later. It does have one of those "OK, and?" endings though. The kind that's intentionally a little unsatisfying. I appreciate it more with a little distance. At the time, it was a little deflating.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Trip

The Pitch: As fictionalized versions of themselves, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon bicker over delicious food.

Coogan and Brydon go on a food tour of Northern England.

To my knowledge, this is a first. The Trip is TV Series in England. The first series is six episodes. In the states, the episodes were edited down and released as a feature film by the same name. I'm sure this has been done before. I know failed TV pilots used to be released as TV movies a lot back in the day. I can't remember another case of this getting a theatrical release. I've heard about the Trip movies for years (each of the three seasons has been turned into a film), but it wasn't until I looked this movie up after watching it that I realized it began as a TV show. That explains a lot, actually. There wasn't anything cinematic about the film. It was roughly edited, which I assumed was the result of it being heavily improvised. I assume that's still true of the show. I almost feel like I should track down the series instead of writing about the movie.

However, the movie was a delight that I'd like to write about. There really isn't much to it. Coogan and Brydon play fictionalized and exaggerated versions of themselves. They've done this before for director Michael Winterbottom. Coogan is arrogant and petty. Brydon is needy and insecure. OK, all those descriptions apply to both men but in different measures. They are the kind of friends who are only friends because they've known each other long enough and seen enough of each other to have familiarity that is generally called friendship. That's a strained description, because everything about their interactions is strained. Their competitiveness is what's most enjoyable for me as a viewer. The movie is filled with scenes of one doing an impression of someone while the other insults it. The highlight is their battling Michael Caines.

The food looks pretty good too.

I'm looking forward to getting to the next two movies. I enjoying hanging out with these two insufferable friends.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend