More Invention Required.

Something funny happened to Ricky Gervais on his way to becoming a film star: something funny stopped happening.

THE INVENTION OF LYING starts as a fantastic original idea, fleshed into hilarious absurdity by Gervais, then slips in the puddle of Romantic Comedy – and you know what happens when you hit your brain on that pavement.

In a parallel world that doesn’t know how to lie (so has no words for “lie” or “truth”), people say exactly what they mean; therefore, when Mark Bellison (Gervais) is on a blind date with Anna (Jennifer Garner, who still looks like reconstruction surgery gone awry), she informs him immediately that she is horny, has masturbated while getting ready, yet is not attracted to him romantically and probably won’t even give him a goodnight kiss.

One day, in desperation to pay his rent, Mark discovers he can lie. And the world becomes his oyster. In his ongoing quest to make Anna his squeeze, the movie just starts smelling like one.

On the truth gags, thematic possibilities are endless and writers-directors Gervais and Matthew Robinson, keep the early punches snappy, eventually escalating the film into a raunchy dig at organized religion. Then it just stops being funny – in direct correlation to Mark and Anna’s growing romance.

Tina Fey is Mark’s hateful secretary, Rob Lowe is the prettyboy competitor for Anna’s affection; riotous cameos by Christopher Guest, Jason Bateman, and A-List rockstars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Edward Norton.

Man-eyebrowed Garner plays Anna as a shallow retard and it is perplexing as to why Mark would profess love for such a moron. Is that a worthwhile message? Love someone cos they’re hot? (The number of times weird-lipped Garner is told she’s pretty, I’m sure she’s starting to believe it.) Her recalcitrance in bedding him revolves around a very real genetic concern of not wanting short pudgy kids.

Mark tells her, “You’re the sweetest, most caring person I know.” He must not know too many people (with such annoying cheekbones). This sweet caring person just said she loved him but didn’t want to have sex with him for his physical appearance (she’s one to talk! And how exactly is that “beautiful on the inside”?). She had to dig in the deepest recesses of her malfunctioning brain just to find favorable adjectives for him, “the most interesting person I know, and fun to be with.” Wow, almost as intelligent as a goldfish. Really wanna spend your life with this muntoid? Tap her if you think she’s “pretty” but how could any self-respecting male marry a woman who regards him so menially? There is nothing that makes a man look like less of a sex candidate than to pursue a woman who thinks so lowly of him in the first place.

It becomes even more perplexing when Mark becomes rich and famous and still pines for the imbecilic bad-hair-day Anna, who relegates him to Just Friend.

Gervais shows us how deceit and lying must necessarily find their way into class-based society. In desperation, Mark lies to his bank that he has $800 in his account (when the computer shows $300). In this world devoid of lies, the teller apologizes for the computer error and gives him $800. Effectively turning the Orwell quote on its head, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Gervais shows us the sociological imbalance that motivated his character. That imbalance is behind every crime committed – in a society that aggressively keeps its haves and have-nots separated.

I find it odd that the film is allowed to portray Mark using his talent to get rich by stealing from casinos, yet the one instance he uses his talent to get it on with a stray chick, he finds it morally reprehensible and doesn’t go through with it. Why? Romantic Movie Protocol: he can’t be seen banging his days away while simultaneously courting the ugly chick.

Mark realizes that a little deceit helps people get through their day, from the insecure lady outside her office, to the arguing couple, to the old folks at his mother’s retirement home.

In a society with no lies, there would obviously be no religion. So when his dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan) laments she is headed for an eternity of nothingness, Mark lies that she is going to a place with mansions and no pain, to meet all her friends and be young again (while doing some excellent full crying, I might add). His untruth is taken as “gospel” and soon Mark is sought after as a messenger of The Man In The Sky. He ends up writing ten rules on two pizzabox cartons and delivering them in a “sermon” where the crowd corner him into explaining subclauses of the rules. These are the most funny and inventive segments of INVENTION.

The allegory is easy to see – for a sensible person – but since this movie’s audience seems as incognizant as the audience in the movie, I’ll spell it out: a person relaying a message from a Man In The Sky is a liar and all those who would listen to him are idiots.

Through his lying ability, Mark is soon regarded as a messiah, yet the ugly chick stays at arm’s length. When her feelings do change towards him, it’s because his social status has risen – but his status was achieved through deceit! There is literally no end to the paradox and hypocrisy. Like every romantic comedy.

Movie ends with an altar scene where Mark gives an 11th hour speech that makes your flesh crawl with its disinformation and 14-year-old conception of love. I mean, do you really want to marry a girl who is in the process of marrying another man right in front of you?

No surprise that he gets the girl in the end – but now he’s saddled with an idiot, an imbecile that he has to put up with for the rest of his life – and she can’t even cook! All for a little panty, which he could’ve used his talent to score left and right like Gene Simmons.

The real life irony behind THE INVENTION OF LYING is Ricky Gervais himself. In GHOST TOWN (2008) he was paired with stunning Tea Leoni; in INVENTION, with the widely-regarded-as-pretty Garner. Never mind the fact that these movie situations are as far removed from real life as Jennifer Garner is from pretty; these implausible fantasies have earned him actual power and status and driven Gervais’s real life allure… Bet there are at least two hundred chicks from Ricky’s home town who turned down the chubby wannabe comedian back before THE OFFICE broke like a tsunami – now he’s making them all regret their inborn gold digging animalism…

Power is SO sexy. Revenge is SO sweet.

And that’s no lie.

END

Black Lung Satire.

Aaron Eckhart has always deserved to play a role as ferociously incisive as this. THANK YOU FOR SMOKING fleshes his latent silver-tongued devil in the form of Nick Naylor, a spokesman for Big Tobacco; the type of guy who could sell ice to Eskimos in winter.

Cucumberlung

Movie opens with Nick on one of those daytime talk shows responsible for the redneckification of America, guesting alongside lobbyists against the tobacco industry and – purely as emotive stab against tobacco – Cancer Boy. (As hilariously direct as this epithet is – correct me if I’m wrong – wasn’t Cancer Boy, as a proper noun, invented by The Kids in the Hall?) Using his gifted gab, Nick skillfully turns the audience aggression aimed at Big Tobacco against the anti-smoking lobbyists, using the head-shaved, irradiated Cancer Boy as prime example of Tobacco’s good intent, “Though these lobbyists would like to see Cancer Boy die to prove their point, it is in Tobacco’s best interests that he LIVES, to continue using our product.”

Later, giving a speech at his son’s school, he tears a new hole for a ten-year-old girl when she offers her mother’s opinion that smoking is unhealthy, “Oh, is your mommy a doctor?”

From Christopher Buckley’s novel, directing and writing his first feature film, Jason Reitman (son of Ghostbuster Ivan) creates a character we rarely see in Hollywood movies: a hero quite aware of, and at peace with, his moral flexibility.

Zealously embracing his job as Sultan of Spin, Nick is a mixture of forest fire (machine-gunning his dialog in short, sharp bursts, savagely taking down all comers), and innocence (Eckhart retaining that disarming demeanor he displayed in YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, 1998). We “don’t see him coming” – unlike the Cruise of MAGNOLIA or the Martin of LEAP OF FAITH – slamming home runs with every fallacious, roundabout rebuttal.

Robert Duvall is the industry’s Puff Daddy – some mighty level of Big Tobacco CEO; William H. Macy now officially owns the character he plays here – Senator Ortolan Finistirre, yet another perplexed dexter, trying not to stumble under the pressure of Nick’s smooth operator; Sam Elliott could not be better cast as an ex-Marlboro Man (we cannot even imagine sullying his deep-voiced masculinity with BROKEBACK sniggers), and J.K. Simmons has been honing this gruff boss routine since SPIDER-MAN.

The unconvincing Katie Holmes plays a reporter who sexually squeezes incriminating info from Nick, precipitating the loss of his job. Her vapid acting skills bear out the theory that she should still be plying her trade in teen romantic comedies. Or amateur porn.

Nick’s lunchtime buddies, lobbyists for alcohol (Maria Bello) and guns (David Koechner), who take a perverse pleasure in terming themselves the MOD Squad (“Merchants Of Death”), bond over wicked lobbying anecdotes and their respective industry’s death tolls. Bello would have indisputably made a more ravishing and convincing underhanded reporter than Holmes. (I’m not advocating they swap roles. I’m advocating that Holmes should find employment more suited to her unique talents – maybe a toilet cleaner at Wal-Mart.)

The thin plot finds Nick commissioning a super-agent (Rob Lowe, a biting composite of Hollywood Cliché, from his smarmy assistant to his kimono) to get cigarettes back into the lips of A-List stars in A-List movies – like smoking’s glory days with Bogey and Bacall; when men were men and women were not she-males.

This simple story only exists to give Nick something to do while the movie studies his incorrigible character. His suave amorality is tempered when dealing with son Joey (Cameron Bright). To be a good part-time father, Nick must use his rationalization skills to educate Joey about a world unable to see its own contradictions.

To prime Joey for a school debate, Nick espouses: “If you argue correctly, you’re never wrong” – which, being true, is an indictment not just against lobbyists (on any side) and their unholy string-pulling in congress, but also against the current legal system, the entertainment industry and any forum where the slickest LIE will triumph over a mundane Truth.

Deeper than the father-son relationship, the movie’s ultimate purpose:  a quick-witted satire on how Spin has crept into every aspect of our modern lives. Smoking lobbyists are the subject here but their deceitful nature has only been nurtured by society itself: fat chicks call themselves “thick”; we tell prospective buyers that our car with the massive oil leak “runs well”; 19 months into a stalemated war, a Mission Accomplished sign flies high at a Presidential address; and a drug which causes irregular heartbeat, dizziness, high blood pressure, nausea, diarrhea, impotence, dry mouth, headaches and blurred vision is marketed as an “Anti-Depressant”… to make you more sociable! (Either way you end up staying home – from imagined anxiety, or real anxiety that you may crap your pants and have a heart attack while trying to get it up. More dangerous than heroin, they call it Zoloft.)

In a plot development which would have sent most screenwriters squealing for their generic PG-13 character arcs, Nick is kidnapped by anti-smoking fanatics, forced to overdose on nicotine patches and, in a tableau reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pietà, left to die in the lap of Daniel French’s Lincoln statue. The imagery is portentous because Nick effects a resurrection of sorts: his tolerance to nicotine, through smoking, kept him alive – and is woven into the fabric of his spin thereafter: “Smoking saved my life!”

In a refreshing denouement, Nick experiences no epiphanies on morality or political correctness. When he wins a showdown with Senator Finisterre, he refuses an offer of his old job back – not because he has recanted on his stance, but because he refuses to sell his exemplary services back to the company that fired him. Movie ends with Nick continuing as a devilish apologist for maligned causes, taking his talents and amorality elsewhere.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING is a biting rejoinder to all things politically correct. It reminds us to educate ourselves in the face of staggering obstacles. And it illustrates that the obstacles to truth are sometimes the very people exhorting you to seek it.

Someone had the audacity to label their anti-smoking campaign “truth” and no one questioned this lie. I am not even a smoker, yet I find those insufferable neo-hippies an insult and abomination to humanity; themselves, spin doctors of the highest order. Everyone knows smoking is harmful to your health – even Nick Naylor admits this – so placing ever more warnings in the public eye is simply “busywork”; given the choice, those who choose to smoke – will smoke. As those who choose to pig on chocolate, McDonalds or Zoloft will do so no matter how many times their shit turns green.

If the movie is sending a message about Choice, isn’t it intriguing that no one is actually seen smoking in the movie? Even the mighty John Wayne (seen in a snippet from SANDS OF IWO JIMA, 1949) is shot down as he prepares to light up. Relating back to this film’s plot – getting an A-List Hero to smoke onscreen – was this non-smoking decision true irony on the film-makers’ part, or simply the MPAA enforcing their non-smoking edicts on this major release film, making it a victim of the very condition it rails against?

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

END

My Favorite Martian versus Garth Brooks.

This story should have stayed in our heads. Reading Stephen King‘s daunting 1000+ page The Stand (restored version, of course), nothing “visual” could intercept our imagination driving onto the wastelands of a dead earth, seeing an unseeable being (Flagg) in our mind’s eye, envisioning the disturbing horrors of the Lincoln Tunnel gridlock, the appendix operation, the suicides and rapes and mean killings.

The Green Miles

To the chagrin of a billion readers, director Mick Garris and the tome’s author himself, King (as executive producer, screenwriter, and actor), offer us a vapid TV visualization of the book, diminishing all its epic impact.

A super-flu has decimated the bulk of humanity and two camps (one Good, led by Mother Abigail in Colorado, one Eeevil, led by Randall Flagg in – where else? – Vegas) amass devotees to stage a Final Battle.

This six-hour mini-series, a direly obvious television production, gives us an intelligent A-Lister as Stu Redman, the tacit leader of the group (Gary Sinise, working his Mini-Eastwood Method), Ray Walston (who still can’t shake that MY FAVORITE MARTIAN Method), Miguel Ferrer (great in anything, here Flagg’s right-hand man), two Brat Packers right at home in TV Land (Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald’s Lips), and Stephen King himself (playing against type, as a character with an IQ greater than his shoe size, doing a very passable imitation of an actor). Though Ed Harris and Kathy Bates phone in cameos, the production is hobbled by a clutch of talent-challenged aspirin ad veterans that round out the cast.

And the bad guy? The incarnation of hell-on-earth whose visage people could not cast their gaze upon? – a country singer with a mullet! Maybe King made a mistake in naming his menace “Randall Flagg.” Who could tremble before a villain who answers to “Randy”? If Jeff Goldblum (as rumored) had accepted the role of Flagg, we might have had a respectable screen-demon on our hands – instead, the movie miscasts Jamey Sheridan as the Dark Man of our nightmares: a toe-tappin’ redneck with a Def-Leppard-roadie hairdo. The only thing more sinful than Sheridan’s Huey Lewis mullet-palooza was his 80s fashion sense.

Leaning heavily on the delusional proselytizing of their matriarch, Mother Abigail (Ruby Dee), no one seemed to notice that the “epic quest” she entreats four characters to undertake “to make a Stand!” against Flagg’s evil achieves nothing that wasn’t going to transpire anyway. Flagg’s downfall was precipitated by inefficient management, insubordination and bad judgment in recruiting a loose cannon like Trashcan Man (a compulsive arsonist, played with lunatic scene-chewing by Matt Frewer), who delivers a nuclear weapon into the heart of Flagg’s congregation, only to have it set off by none other than the Hand Of God (whadaya know – a deus ex machina as a deus ex machina!). All these events had nothing to do with our rose-mouthed do-gooders and their half-assed jibes at Flagg, ultimately getting crucified for their troubles… Well, trusting to the wigged-out soothsaying of a raving old woman hallucinating from her mixture of Demerol, Cyclizine and down-home moonshine and traveling to The Dark Man’s lair with no plan, no resources, nothing but “the shirts on their backs” was bound to lead to the business end of a crucifix.

Even in the book, simply laughing in the face of the Bad Guy in order to cause empire-crumbling dissension was an obtuse disconnect; a tale so wonderfully kinetic and operatic – brick-walled when one realizes that the author himself had no clear notion on how to wrap that beargarden with any serious impact.

Ultimately, the actual “Stand” spoken of so reverently comprised of interminable walking scenes which amounted to padding, with Stu breaking his leg and sitting out the key plot scenes in a ditch. No one was allowed to drive, with no rational reasons given, other than “Mother Abigail said so.” And after all that meaningless walking – once the Old Testament God of Wrath goes Gomorrah on Vegas with His old-fashioned tabula rasa idealism – Stu boosts a car and drives back to Colorado!

Mother Abigail’s wholly erroneous precognition is surprisingly not even questioned by now and we surmise the townsfolk just want to cut their losses and move on, whilst retiring the old bat to a sanitarium. With her amorphous auguring and everyone else in the cast displaying bursts of psychic linkage whenever required to enhance the plot, the actual “boundaries” of these psychic powers is never delineated.

For example, Stu can “sense” when a character fatally crashes his bike, yet he couldn’t sense that same character building a bomb, premeditating destroying their community. In another case, after two of Flagg’s henchmen kill a Judge whom Flagg wanted alive, Flagg himself suddenly appears and flogs them to death – why didn’t he simply appear two minutes earlier and acquire the Judge himself?

King is justifiably proud of this work; what were once simply motes of his imagination, transferred to typewriter keys, now walking, breathing townsfolk. In a late scene, his joy at seeing “Stu!” and “Tom Cullen!” was heartfelt as their Creator, as well as his character happy for their safe return.

The book is more forgiving in its plot holes and inconsistencies, but that is more telling on the genius of the writer than the content of the tale itself.

END