Head Tale

We watched Ricky Gervais' “The Invention of Lying” tonight and it's a fairly subversive comedy in a thematic area that doesn't get a lot of attention from Hollywood. 

The film's trailer made it look like a typical Hollywood gimmicky slug line = green light production. 

You can imagine the pitch:  “It's like Jim Carrey's “Liar Liar” except nobody can tell a lie, not just the main character.” 

Except instead of sticking with that easy out and resulting cheap comedy, Gervais takes it to a pretty dangerous place – in a world where no one can lie, religion doesn't exist because that's too big of a leap of faith to be possible in an otherwise completely honest, logical world.  But when one man discovers the ability to lie, this literally leads to the creation of religion since no one has the capacity to understand that the tale he spins of a “man in the sky” could be anything but true. 

(Now if Hollywood would just make a film version of one of my all-time favourite novels which also has “the Big Lie” as its main theme, we'd really see some subversive ideas on celluloid! )