Four Christmases

Vacation plans imperceptibly tantalizing quickly approaching festive holiday breaks, time to spend relaxed and stretched out elaborately elongated upright tenements. 

Traditional visits to old school loved ones siblings and family and nieces and nephews, incrementally harmonizing habitual happenstance gregarious growth uproarious sentiments.

But some imaginative couples creatively manifest alternative arrangements, to sneakily avoid the routine remonstrance and inconsolable awkward confabulations.

To Fiji they furtively plan to gallopingly go sans limitations, to lazily bask in freeflowing sustainable enriching waters immersive acclamations. 

Yet when they reach the airport on Christmas Day in fact no less, ominous fog discourteously blankets the surrounding skies with opaque languor. 

To further frustrate their Scroogey mendacity a local news station suddenly broadcasts them live, their relatives witnessing the distressing surprising grouchy exchanges on their televisions. 

Soon it's off therefore to reminisce with emboldened blood and the next generation.

Neither member of the couple prepared. 

For what they're soon to learn about one another. 

Immaculate bliss once exceptionally adorning their perpetual ensconcement in each other's arms, far away from the orthodox torments unsettlingly facilitating unrestrained fury.

They are quite different people leading quite different lives from different points of view, but does that hardboiled multivariable eclectivity not also inspire romantic love!?

The film did seem dialectically dis/oriented to either champion or lampoon family, synthesizing the divergent concepts throughout with varying degrees of symphonic success. 

Was the spirit of Christmas beatifically bound to bring them wholesomely together, to optimistically unite, to generously generate raw animate excursions fluidly fuelled with maladroit mallow?

Offbeat ridicule flamboyant caprice rambunctious sincerity disconsolate diatribes, randomly revolving with road weary rubber gallantly peppered through a hard day's night.

Unpredictable fanciful variety.

At home for the frosty holidays.

Eggnog and shortbread and willow.

Endless timeless specials!

Menteur (Compulsive Liar)

The material fabric of ethical reality is fraught with drastic peril, its mystical binding extravagantly unravelling, as falsehood and slander tax baseless appeal.

Possessing no qualms concerning much of anything at all, Simon (Louis-José Houde) lies ad infinitum, never admitting even the most harmless of truths, deriding body and mind beyond limitations, with exasperating recall, and peerless raging bull.

Those caught up in his labyrinthine web of lies have grown accustomed to his disreputable blather, but since they're less serpentinely disposed, still slurp it up with torrential capacity.

For he's still a family member, and a high ranking valued employee, and as distraught as everyone else may be, they still rely on his frank indiscretions.

Like Loki in a way, yet less destructive, less obsessed with universal domination.

Even if that very same universe, within its terrestrial confines, authoritatively takes vengeful note, and punishment suddenly wildly decrees, that all his lies become sincerest truth.

Indubitably.

In the aftermath, he must find a way to reverse manifold adverse effects, with the aid of a suffering sibling (Antoine Bertrand as Phil), and the potential of bold shrewd romance (Catherine Chabot as Chloé).

Much like a world where fake news turns out to be real, Menteur (Compulsive Liar) waxes chaotic with rationed logic abruptly aggrieved.

As if all the tricksters out there who simply make sensational things up had to make amends for their viral charlatanism, Menteur playfully critiques the flamboyant fausses nouvelles, through recourse to cosmic justice.

Shyly merged with joyful repentance.

Publish or perish can produce its own varying degrees of irrationality, especially if struggling non-tenured journalists or academics can't come up with an appealing idea (and hate being boring), but if they transform speculation into fact or theory into reality without evidence, a competitor will most likely call them out, and most of them don't wish to have damaged reputations.

Fake news seems to be more like the spawn of malicious junior high shenanigans (école secondaire niveaux 1 et 2) expressing themselves maturely, and what used to be the respectable madcaps of Saturday Night Live or genre fiction, has become mad rational high-jinxed tabloid discourse.

When the comedy fades you are left with horror, like witch hunts and inquisitions, rumour used to be widely looked down upon.

Don't ask yourself if the rumour is true, ask yourself what whomever you're speaking with has to gain by spreading the rumour.

There's usually something in it for them. Especially if they use a malevolent or all too friendly tone.

And aren't simply hooked on gossip.

Menteur has a remarkable ending.

Could things in fact be that simple?

With mutual respect, I'd wager they can.

Flourishing with laidback synergies.

As demonstrative as they are symbolic.

As industrious as they are simply chill.

The Invention of Lying

Matthew Robinson and Ricky Gervais's The Invention of Lying introduces a simplistic plot that collapses beneath the weight of its subject matter. After having lost his job, apartment, and chance with a beautiful woman (Jennifer Garner), Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais), who inhabits a world where no one lies, discovers that if he engages in the act of lying he can do whatever he wants. No one clues into the fact that he's using his imagination to conjure fantastic stories and everyone supply acquiesces to his mischievous, modestly mendacious designs. But he has a conscience and won't lie in order to seduce his love interest, even though she consistently mentions that he isn't an adequate genetic match due to his gut and pug nose. That's about it. Apart from Gervais's characteristic dry wit, a number of entertaining cameos, and the odd hilarious bit, the film falls apart after Bellison learns to lie and would have been much funnier if it had taken place solely in the world where everyone tells the truth. Some basic plot developments are suspect as well, for instance, after having spent all of his money on rent, Bellison has money to spend at a casino, and Bellison's nemesis Brad Kessler (Rob Lowe) questions his statements even though he's supposed to believe everything everyone says. It's like Gervais's attempt to move away from sordid material into a more family friendly domain shatters his usually impeccable humour and results in a cutesy-wutsey romp, occasionally funny, but generally dismissible. Not a word of a lie.