Word: truthfully
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Tracking the LaughsThe truth is, comedy didn't go away when sitcoms did; it just moved. Even as TV dramas became more complicated and dark, many of them, like Lost, Rescue Me and The Sopranos, also provided some of the funniest moments on television. (Think Christopher and Paulie Walnuts stuck in the Pine Barrens.) And one reason audiences flock to reality shows is that they are often funny - be it because of Tim Gunn's witticisms or Donald Trump's hair...
...shared writing and directing chores with Matthew Robinson, Gervais is at it again. His character, Mark Bellison, describes himself as a "chubby little loser." Mind you, that's what everyone else calls him too; for the movie posits a world in which people are compelled to speak the truth, however harsh it sounds, because they haven't recognized either the social utility of telling folks what they want to hear or the potential for career advancement--not to mention bank-robbing--in bending the facts. So Mark's colleagues at the film studio where he's a writer feel obliged...
...film's solid three-act structure, Act 1 gets good mileage from the bitter-truth premise. In this world, a retirement home is called "A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People"; a motel is "A Cheap Place to Have Intercourse with a Near Stranger." There's even truth in advertising, as indicated by the slogans for Coke ("It's very famous") and Pepsi ("When they don't have Coke...
Mark, of course, must somehow invent lying--in Act II--which in the land of blind truth tellers makes him king. He takes his friend Greg (Louis C.K.) to a casino, moves the chips on the roulette table after the ball has landed and pockets a bundle. Then, to soothe his dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan), he concocts his biggest whopper yet: Heaven. Word gets around about this great news, life after death, and in a fairly bold Act III Mark reveals to his swelling flock of acolytes the truth, or the inspired lie, of the "big man who lives...
...truth is that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I, when Hitler was just another corporal in the Kaiser's army. By World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge that the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million...