Look Ma, I Just Invented Something

Abs and I watched The Invention of Lying over the weekend. For the uninitiated, this is a Ricky Gervais film about a world in which everyone is only capable of telling the truth--they can't even lie by omission, spurting out any abrasive thought that comes to mind. Suddenly, our hero Mark (played by Gervais) develops the ability to tell a lie.

Invention flits between absurd humor and bizarre social commentary, but the bit of the film that makes it controversial is that Mark invents religion. That's right, according the film, religion is, in no uncertain terms, a lie. And while controversy is fun, far more interesting is the way it comes about. Mark is trying to comfort his dying mother, so he tells her she's going to a better place where you get a mansion after you die. This is overheard by hospital staff, and suddenly throngs gather around Mark's doorstep to hear more about what happens after they die.

So the life-cycle goes like this: religion is created to comfort the dying but it becomes an obsession of the living. Mark finds himself having to make up all these rules for people. He tries to get them to live good lives and be happier, but in the end, no one really changes--the angry or depressed are still angry and depressed. Only the context is different. At the end, Mark realizes it was a horrible mistake, but since people literally can't conceive of the idea that he would have said something that wasn't true, it's a mistake that he's ultimately saddled with.

Watching people's reactions to "the big man in the sky" are pretty amusing too. Once the masses find out that the man in the sky is responsible for all the bad things that have happened to them, they get angry, call him a prick, and decide that something needs to be done about that bastard in the sky. That is, until they find out that the man in the sky is responsible for good things too.

So, I enjoyed it. It's smart, absurd, and potently anti-theistic. And it has some brilliant cameos. Tina Fey, Christopher Guest, Edward Norton, and Jason Bateman all show up for short, memorable bits.

On a side note, I have to vent about the rental. The movie has been available in stores for a month now, but we had to wait four weeks before renting it because... I don't know, that's just what WB has decided to do. Then we get a disc full of irrelevant previews and absolutely zero special features. I was a bit underwhelming. But seriously, what did they think was going to happen? Did they think that I would go ahead and buy it since it wasn't available to rent? No, it means I'll rent it when it's available and if I do decide to buy it, I'll buy it later, and I'll probably buy it used instead of new.

Morons.

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