12:20pm Friday 5th February 2010
By Charles Hutchinson
The latest Ricky Gervais movie, Invention Of Lying (12), is released this week on DVD and Blu-Ray by Universal Pictures.
Co-written and co-directed by Gervais and Matthew Robinson, this comedy takes place in an alternative reality in which lying does not exist.
Everyone, even politicians and advertisers, speaks the truth, so when blustering loser Mark Bellison (Gervais) discovers the art of lying, he finds that dishonesty has its rewards. Nothing could be timelier for lowly screenwriter Mark, who is about to be fired by his boss, Anthony (Jeffrey Tambor), and has a landlord demanding rent money he doesn’t have.
Mark succeeds in lying his way to fame and fortune, exploiting deceit for personal gain with best friend Greg (Louis CK) and impressing Anthony with a madcap screenplay about a spaceship during the time of the Black Plague.
Matters soon spiral out of control, as people start to treat his lies as gospel. With the entire world hanging on his every word, can he win the heart of the lovely if acid-tongued Anna McDoogles (Jennifer Garner)?
Gradually, Mark realises there are grave consequences for leading people astray, in a truthful comedy that subverts polite social mores, provides a new 21st century set of Ten Commandments and revels in cameos by Stephen Merchant, Christopher Guest and Edward Norton.
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