James L. Brooks has brought the movie-viewing world such hits as Jerry Maguire, As Good As It Gets, and Spanglish which moved us, made us think, and pushed our romanticized buttons. But in his latest, How Do You Know, he takes the skills and star power of Jack Nicholson, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, and Paul Rudd, blends them together into some kind of stew, and puts the pot on simmer for about a half hour too long. What's left? A bunch of scraps, a few good laughs, and a couple of stars who never quite show off their full flavor.
Anything with Witherspoon will get my wife's attention, and I've grown in admiration for Rudd and his late-breaking roles (Knocked Up, Forty-Year-Old Virgin, Role Models, etc.) so we figured it would make for a decent Christmas movie out before dinner. Within twenty minutes of the movie, I turned to her and complained that I didn't like either of the two "options" for Witherspoon's Lisa, that is George (Rudd) or Mattie (Wilson). Neither one quite matches her in charisma, and she's left playing an oaf that we didn't quite believe her to be even when her boyfriend in Legally Blonde tried to tell her she was. But the film does make you laugh out loud enough to forget that the chemistry is strained from the get-go.
George is a down-on-his-luck businessman who seems decent enough but suffers under his overbearing father (Nicholson), and remains friendless except for his father's secretary (the as-always-excellent Kathryn Hahn); Mattie is a successful closer for the Washington Nationals who has a full set of "take home" gear for each of the women he sleeps with; Lisa is a former national softball team player deemed too old for the current team (who seems based on Jenny Finch). But George's financial predicament seems too complicated, Wilson's Mattie never seems to actually have anything that would attract Lisa but she stays with him, and Lisa never finds meaning outside of what we see her slumming through her relationship with Mattie. It seems destined for greatness but it just never works.
When true "love" is found, it seems like there's nothing that could keep Lisa and her "winner" together; he's too invested in her and she hardly knows him. He makes a complete life-making decision solely based on whether or not she follows him out of a party, and there's no equality in the relationship. I think that's where I went, "Now, wait a minute." Sure, we can suspend all sort of reality and buy into cute moments, but if we're going to buy "true love," don't the people have to be in it together? What we're left with isn't real love, it's puppy love on one side and "I guess you're the best I can get" on the other.
Having seen this and The Tourist in back-to-back weeks, I'll easily encourage you to try the Depp-Jolie connection. There's more passion there, and you can actually tell what they have in common.
For a movie that almost got universally panned across the board, I thoroughly enjoyed this film. I know everyone expects a lot out of director, James L. Brooks (Spanglish, As Good As It Gets, and The Simpsons), but I think he brought exactly what I was hoping to this movie, and that was great characters.
Sure, it's predictable in a lot of ways, as far as plotlines go, but the actors he cast, their dialogue, and the way the movie was shot, was quirky, original, and a lot of fun. Not your typical chick flick by time standards (compare the standard 90 minutes to this film's 121), but it gave the audience time to enjoy the characters and really watch them unfold.
Lisa (Reese Witherspoon) is apparently too old to play competitive softball anymore, and her whole life and expectations come crashing down with the loss of her spot on the team. She knowingly enters a horrible relationship with a womanizing pro-baseballer named Matty (Owen Wilson), who is self-absorbed and has more than a few "spend the night" kits at his luxurious apartment. Then she meets George (Paul Rudd), a businessman who is under investigation by the federal government on indictment charges, and has nothing left to lose. At such a low in her own life, she is pressured into picking one of them to hold onto as a rock in her storm.
The actors are incredible. Well, I should preface that by saying that they play the exact same characters they normally do in films, but in a way that allows them to be that way, and not making it seem gimmicky, or like a shtick. Wilson is his same old zany self, spacey but lovable, with a bit too much self confidence, while Rudd is the schlub next door, who is pathetic in a puppy dog sort of way. The first has everything all together, a career and a pretty good idea of who he is, while the latter has nothing to offer, is just learning who he is, and provides the worst first date known to man.
Reese Witherspoon, in her best role in a while, is utterly perplexed at what steps should be taken next, and doesn't seem to know what she wants. Their interplay is pretty hilarious, and a lot of fun to watch. Add to that some intelligent script-writing, and some great lines that are more real than most rom-coms out there today. Also the inclusion of Jack Nicholson as George's conniving father rounds out an already great cast.
It's not a perfect movie, but it never tries to be more than it actually is, and it ends up being quite enjoyable. Not sure what the rest of the critics saw so wrong in it, but it was light and fun, and had more than a couple hilarious scenes.
The Blu-ray special features include lots of commentary tracks, a pretty funny "making of" featurette, and almost thirty extra minutes of deleted scenes. The scenes add a lot to the story, but with the length of the movie already topping the norm, I can see why they chose those to adorn the cutting room floor. I'm always a sucker for a good blooper reel as well and this one doesn't disappoint.
After being cut from the USA softball team and feeling a bit past her prime, Lisa finds herself evaluating her life and in the middle of a love triangle, as a corporate guy in crisis competes with her current, baseball-playing beau.
Storyline
Star softball player, Lisa, has just been cut from the national team; Scholarly business man, George, has just been indicted from his father's company. With everything that they know in their lives taken from them, Lisa and George attempt to find romance. Lisa's potential boyfriend, Matty, however, is as clueless and perpetually single as they come, and George's girlfriend just dumped him. A chance hook-up through mutual friends, Lisa and George may be able to form a friendship, or more, that can help them climb out of the piles of lemons that life has handed to them. Written by napierslogs
Box Office
Budget:
$120,000,000 (estimated)
Opening Weekend:
$7,484,696 (USA) (19 December 2010) (2483 Screens)
Gross:
$30,212,620 (USA) (23 January 2011)
Quotes
Lisa: OK, then this is what I need, if in the middle of the night I start crying, shaking or getting enormously upset I don't want you to ask me what's wrong, I just want you to ignore it. Is that OK with you? Matty: Actually that's my preference!
In chapter 5, we're introduced to our main character Mark as he ventures to visit his mother who has been relegated to a nursing facility. In this reality tho the nursing facility is entitled 'A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People' rather than a nursing home or assisted living facility. Unfortunately we are to believe that a world devoid of untruths leaves no room for any sense of hope.
2 Timothy 2:24-26
24And the servant of the Lord must not be quarrelsome (fighting and contending). Instead, he must be kindly to everyone and mild-tempered [preserving the bond of peace]; he must be a skilled and suitable teacher, patient and forbearing and willing to suffer wrong.
25He must correct his opponents with courtesy and gentleness, in the hope that God may grant that they will repent and come to know the Truth [that they will perceive and recognize and become accurately acquainted with and acknowledge it],
26And that they may come to their senses [and] escape out of the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him, [henceforth] to do His [God's] will.
In chapter 13 Mark is overcome by what has produced a wildfire of interest in what he had to tell his dying mother in his attempts to comfort her before she passed. Anna comes to his side and urges him to share the 'word', as the information he has will 'change mankind forever'. If Mark's lie is so desperately needed to be shared in this skewed sense of reality, just think how urgent our need for sharing absolute truth in this one is.
1 Corinthians 14:1-3
1-3Go after a life of love as if your life depended on it—because it does. Give yourselves to the gifts God gives you. Most of all, try to proclaim his truth. If you praise him in the private language of tongues, God understands you but no one else does, for you are sharing intimacies just between you and him. But when you proclaim his truth in everyday speech, you're letting others in on the truth so that they can grow and be strong and experience his presence with you.
In chapter 16 we find Mark and Anna on a park bench sharing perspectives on the people they see and each other. In a very ironic twist we see just how deep depravity runs in this reality and in many ways parallels our own in that Anna is able to see so much more in Mark, but is ultimately unable to overcome the way the world is. It is only through God's ability to regenerate us as people through the renewing of our minds that will ever lead to any sense of hope in our existence to come and His existence in the here and now.
Titus 3:4-6
4But when the goodness and loving-kindness of God our Savior to man [as man] appeared,
5He saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but because of His own pity and mercy, by [the] cleansing [bath] of the new birth (regeneration) and renewing of the Holy Spirit,
6Which He poured out [so] richly upon us through Jesus Christ our Savior.
Truth be told, The Invention of Lying, the recently released-on-DVD film starring Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner, caught me off-guard. I knew the basic premise, that no one ever lies, or even knows how to, but one man, our protagonist Mark Bellison, learns to lie. I assumed the movie would be funny because of Gervais' leading role. Some parts were funny, in that cringe-inducing way that Gervais seems to have perfected. Some parts were more crass, or even mean, in a darkly comic way. I did not, however, expect an overtly spiritual bent to the last half of the film. If you have yet to see the movie, I recommend that you buy it, rent it, or stream it, watch it, then come back to this article. Especially since I'm going to spoil stuff.
It's not quite what one would expect from the previews now is it? (For the record, that's something I love, when previews don't adequately prepare me for a movie-watching experience. For me, the surprise is more than half the fun and creates twice the interest when watching a film for the first time). Additionally, to see that Gervais himself was responsible for half of the writing credit is intriguing, given his self-assessed deconversion from Christianity to atheism "in one afternoon."
In this world, Mark's words become instant gospel, truth that is taken at face value, even if it flies in the face of common sense. Mark, like most any human, uses this for his own gain, until he sees how this newly found "power" can be put to better use. The pivotal scene, where the film flips the script and a morality play breaks out, occurs, as it should, in the middle. Mark Bellison's mother is on her deathbed, her face flushed with fear over her rapidly impending demise to "an eternity of nothingness." In a tearful mess, Mark tells his mother that she's wrong about the afterlife: "When you die you’re going to go to your favorite place in the whole world. And you’re going to be with all of the people you’ve ever loved and who have ever loved you. And you’re going to be young again, and you’ll be able to run through the fields and dance and jump, and there will be no sadness, no pain, just love and laughing and happiness. There will be ponies made of gold, and everyone will live in giant mansions, and everything will smell like cookies. And it will last for an eternity, Grandma. An eternity."
It's a powerful scene.
As his mother's face visibly beams, the camera cuts to the nurses and the Doctor in the room, all of them leaning in with an intensity borne of hopelessness. The Doctor ardently asks, "What else happens?"
Eventually, word about these new details of the afterlife spread and Mark becomes a celebrity, the only man who hears the voice of "The Man in the Sky." He comes up with commandments (of his own making) written on stone-tablet like pizza boxes. The visions he puts forth of the afterlife and how people should treat others ("You get three chances. If you do three bad things you're out!" "Like baseball?" "Kind of, yes.") are far too reminiscent of what Christianity is perceived to be.
Yet what strikes me as the most intriguing aspect of this film is that a Jesus-less gospel is presented as the biggest lie told to mankind (a question worth pondering on its own merit). I wasn't sure if Gervais and his writing partner were trying to make fun of Christians, or trying to say something much deeper about faith and belief and honesty, or if they were just trying to make a funny movie. Gervais even takes on the appearance of a stereotypical image of Christ towards the end of the film: bearded, long-haired, sandaled, and robed in white.
But if Gervais has issues with the non-sensical world of Christianity, as evidenced by the article referenced above, why the scene with the dying mother? Why the stark realization that belief in an unrelentingly blissful afterlife is one of the antidotes to the oft-described meaninglessness and harsh reality of our present existence? Why is it made so abundantly clear that people need that kind of hope, that people crave it like water in a desert?
The answer to those questions are: Because it's the truth. There is an other-worldly afterlife that is far beyond our imagination. Babes in the womb cannot conceive of this massive thing we call life, in all its splendor and variation and color and delight and richness and vibrancy. So too our present conceptions of what is to come after we die.
And the thing is is that everything promised to us, whether or not our version of Heaven is even remotely close to reality or includes ponies made of gold, pales in comparison to the One promised to us, the One who constantly flips scripts, showing the world's truths to be lies.
There's one thing I can tell you though; He won't look like Ricky Gervais.
Blake Atwood is a one-time English major still trying to figure out the plotline of his life. He lives and drums and has his being in Texas.
Ricky Gervais drives this satirical look at the world as Mark Bellison, a screenwriter in an alternate universe where no one has ever lied before. In a moment of desperation, Bellison invents or "discovers" the ability to lie, and it completely changes his worldview, and his awareness of his own world. He tells other people lies to make them feel better about themselves, he finds financial security with his newfound "creativity," and pursues his dream love, Anna (Jennifer Garner). Along the way, Gervais encounters characters skillfully played by Rob Lowe, Tina Fey, Edward Norton,Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jonah Hill, Jeffrey Tambor, and Christopher Guest.
For the most part, I would've found this movie hilarious. What do people really want, Gervais asks? Sex, money, respect. All of those get clever spins throughout the flick. But the real crux, which maybe you have heard about, is that Gervais invents heaven to provide his mother with peace and happiness as she dies. And the thing is, other people overhear their conversation, and begin to internalize his "lies" about heaven being a happy place, about God's provident care, and about love overcoming all, even death. So, Bellison then invents religion, eternity, and God.
Bellison's new religion is a Gospel of Prosperity meets Opiate of the Masses mixture. It includes the prospect of everyone getting a mansion, and an eternity-long supply of ice cream. It's met with questions from the hordes, and Bellison's "theology" requires that he continue to develop a more and more complicated lie to cover over all the questions that they can initially come up with. It's like a Gervais-inflected, twenty-first century Sermon on the Mount that has a completely reverse effect than Bellison intends because he's painted the "man who lives in the sky" who controls everything as being pretty wrathful (causing death, destruction, and natural disaster). So, asks one of those gathered there, "he's kind of a good guy, but he's kind of a prick, too?" And Bellison ends up leaving his gospel-according-to-the-pizza box, like Moses' bringing down of the two stone tablets.
Of course, because Gervais is an atheist, his satirical look at religion is caustic underneath all the humor. The Invention of Lying sets up like it's a romantic comedy where he's trying to win Anna's heart, and winds up being a lesson on religion, thinly veiled as a lesson on lying. Bellison tries to get people to look beyond appearances but his whole status ends up being built artificially. His love isn't exactly a catch, besides her looks, because she's completely shallow, mean, and she can't learn anything about this new religion that he's spreading.
So what would Gervais have you learn? Well, religion is just there to make you feel good; people don't really think kind thoughts, but instead are ruthless and mean; money can buy you everything but love and happiness; people would rather be lied to than told the truth; people are sheep. I'd say that about sums it up. I saw that lying is harder than telling the truth, and that image, appearances, and power are abundantly important to our society today.
But a deeper portion of what I learned comes from the perspective I took when watching Saved!and its ilk. Outsiders don't understand portions of my faith, and rather than just throwing it out there and saying "it is so," explanation is in order. The Church should be careful not to make pronouncements that are just self-serving, instead of theological. Our interpretation of Scripture should be educated and meaningful, again, not manipulative and self-serving. These are all (as Bellison points out to his archnemesis [Lowe]) "opinions" and understandings of faith that Christians and other people of faith should consider when reaching out to the unchurched and (religiously) uneducated. Rather than brushing off Gervais' take, I learned from it and I'll move on.
It's a world where everyone tells the truth - and just about anything they're thinking. Mark Bellison is a screenwriter, about to be fired. He's short and chunky with a flat nose - a genetic pool that means he won't get to first base with Anna, the woman he loves. At a bank, on the spur of the moment he blurts out a fib, with eye-popping results. Then, when his mother's on her deathbed, frightened of the eternal void awaiting her, Mark invents fiction. The hospital staff overhear his description of Heaven, believe every word, and tell others. Soon Mark is a prophet, his first inventive screenplay makes him rich, and he's basically a good guy. But will that be enough for Anna?Written by
Taglines:
In a world where everyone can only tell the truth... ...this guy can lie.
Box Office
Budget:
$18,500,000 (estimated)
Opening Weekend:
$7,027,472 (USA) (4 October 2009) (1707 Screens)
Gross:
$18,439,082 (USA) (13 December 2009)
Did You Know?
Trivia
The wedding chapel at the end of the movie is located in Sudbury, Massachusetts, west of the Wayside Inn. The Martha-Mary Chapel was built by Henry Ford in 1938-9, also visible outside the chapel is the red schoolhouse made famous by Mary Sawyer, who had a lamb follow her to school.
Goofs
Incorrectly regarded as goofs: When the policeman pulls Greg out of the car, you can see that the car is equipped with automatic seat belts, and at no point can you see that the lap belt is buckled. Therefore Greg could be easily pulled out of the car as the shoulder belt retracts, which is shown when the door opens.
I'm not sure whats up with people's comments on this movie. I honestly enjoyed myself. This is a very British style humor, wonderfully executed by Gervais. The concept had a different potential then people are expecting. This is not Carry/Liar, Liar humor. You have to be a bit more witty and insightful then that to enjoy this movie. The casting was great on this film. I'm glad Hill took on a serious role and did it well. I really liked Garner in this film. She was fantastic and played off of Gervais very well. I also liked the way they portrayed a world without lie; very well thought out. Overall, good concept put on screen and wonderfully played. Great job.
In scene 1 we're introduced to our protagonist Rango and his search for identity through definition when happened upon by conflict. Unlike Rango who sees himself as a hero, we are more readily defined by who we are and whose we are. Within these parameters the believer should be confidently set free in His creation to accomplish a variety of things with the motivation to bring Him glory (1), for our joy (2) and for the good of other people (3).
John 15:9-15
9-10"I've loved you the way my Father has loved me. Make yourselves at home in my love. If you keep my commands, you'll remain intimately at home in my love. That's what I've done—kept my Father's commands and made myself at home in his love.
11-15"I've told you these things for a purpose: that my joy might be your joy, and your joy wholly mature. This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you. This is the very best way to love. Put your life on the line for your friends. You are my friends when you do the things I command you. I'm no longer calling you servants because servants don't understand what their master is thinking and planning. No, I've named you friends because I've let you in on everything I've heard from the Father.
In scene 8 we find Rango meeting with Mayor Marion "Tortoise John" Lynch, the mayor of Dirt. During their discussion Mayor Lynch appropriately states that people have to believe in something and claims that the people of Dirt now believe in Rango and makes him sheriff. Much like the people of Dirt we readily place our faith in a person, but very unlike them our person of hope is life's true protagonist and hero Jesus Christ the very Son of God.
Titus 3:2-4
3-8It wasn't so long ago that we ourselves were stupid and stubborn, dupes of sin, ordered every which way by our glands, going around with a chip on our shoulder, hated and hating back. But when God, our kind and loving Savior God, stepped in, he saved us from all that. It was all his doing; we had nothing to do with it. He gave us a good bath, and we came out of it new people, washed inside and out by the Holy Spirit. Our Savior Jesus poured out new life so generously. God's gift has restored our relationship with him and given us back our lives. And there's more life to come—an eternity of life! You can count on this.
In scene 16 Rango meets with the Spirit of the West after being run out of town by Rattlesnake Jake. He's clearly lost his way and no longer 'knows who he is' after Jake outs him as a fraud. Rango finds the strength to go back and be who he needs to be for his friends and is told that he cannot walk out on his own story. While we likewise have obligations to the story that He has placed us in, it isn't solely to those around us but to primarily bring Him glory.
Acts 17:25-27
25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.
