CHICAGO - MOVIE REVIEWS THE INVENTION OF LYING

MOVIE REVIEWS THE INVENTION OF LYING

What would a world be like if lying did not exist? That is the question answered in The Invention of Lying , starring Rickey Gervais. For example, as Roger Ebert recounts in his review in the Chicago Sun-Times , a retirement home is called "A Sad Place Where Homeless Old People Come to Die." Pepsi ads say "For when they don't have Coke." He says that while watching the movie, a sudden truth came over him. "I thought -- oh, yeah, that's right It's October. Good movies are allowed again." But Manohla Dargis, after writing in the New York Times that the film has the "makings of a classic," then adds, "Alas, making is not doing. And while the movie is a conceptual pip filled with quotable laughs and gentle pokes at religious faith at its most literal, it also looks so shoddy that you yearn for the camerawork, lighting and polish of his shows, like the original The Office, because, really, these days TV rarely looks this bad." But Kyle Smith in the New York Post regards the whole affair as an attack on Christianity. "Let's see how long it is before Gervais, or any other Hollywood star, delivers a feature-length assault on Islam," he concludes.

02/10/2009