The Little Prince (2015)

I used to work at Wolf Camera years ago.  One thing I remember was the mantra “Give yourself a raise.”  It meant that you could always be selling more of the things that got you sales incentives or commissions.  You could always sell more extended warranties or loyalty cards.  You could always sell more accessories.  Basically, it felt like I would always have the carrot of better numbers in front of me.  There had to be a point where it stopped.  (If I sold everything in the store with the maximum warranty, would they have me special order stuff?)

Such is the world of The Mother and The Daughter.  The Mother is anxious to see her daughter get into a good school.  They even have an answer for their expected Big Question.  However, when she’s asked a different question, The Daughter gives her rehearsed answer anyway, oblivious to the fact that it doesn’t make sense.  This necessitates a move to the same neighborhood as the school.  The cheapest house happens to be next door to The Aviator, a man that the neighbors (and police) seem to avoid whenever possible.

The Daughter and The Aviator become fast friends, as The Daughter tries to avoid her rigorous schedule.  You see, The Daughter has a lot of studying to do if she wants to do well and eventually get a good job.  The Aviator is an adult, but hasn’t grown up yet.  He sees in The Daughter someone he can tell his story to.  That story is the story of The Little Prince.

Never having read the book, I’m not sure how well the movie stays faithful to its source material.  In the movie, The Aviator tells of meeting The Little Prince, who claimed to be from an asteroid.  The Little Prince tells of his life and some of the people he’s met, like a businessman.  While on Earth, he meets a fox and a snake.  He has a good time, but eventually has to go home, which saddens the Aviator.  However, The Little Prince tells The Aviator to simply look up at the stars to remind him of their time together.

In the present timeframe, The Aviator tells The Daughter that he’s happy that they met, as he now has someone to pass along the story.  The Daughter infers that he may be leaving or even dying, which The Aviator denies.  She even gets upset with him for having such a sad ending.  When The Aviator is taken away in an ambulance, The Daughter takes it upon herself to find The Little Prince so that The Prince might help The Aviator.

The tale of The Mother, the Daughter and  the older Aviator seems to have been made for the movie.  From what I can tell, the book was meant as a children’s book for adults, warning of forgetting how to be a child.  The Mother and the other adults seem to have forgotten this, but The Aviator hasn’t.  He sees in The Daughter the opportunity to let her be a little girl for a few minutes.  The Mother means well, but she doesn’t seem to see that her daughter might want an hour or two to play.  (Isn’t hard work what being an adult is all about, though?)

It’s appropriate that the film uses CGI and stop motion.  Animation is typically seen as being for children.  Many adults seem to have forgotten how to enjoy an animated movie.  For years, I’ve been trying to get my parents to watch movies like Up and Zootopia to no effect.  I don’t know that they’ll ever take the recommendations seriously.

IMDb Page

The Invention of Lying (2009)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

Could you imagine a world with no lying?  This would be a world  where no one would know how to say something that wasn’t true.  Words like ‘true’ and ‘lie’ wouldn’t even exist.  Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson imagined such a world.  They wrote The Invention of Lying, in which Gervais plays Mark Bellison.

In Mark’s world, things are basically the same.  They still have movies, corrupt police officers and attractive women.  It’s just that since there is no lying, there’s no fiction.  Since there’s no fiction, all movies are documentaries.  When I say documentary, I mean some guy sitting in front of a camera telling the audience what happened.  Police officers will still take an occasional bribe, but are totally honest about their motives.

Things aren’t going so well for Mark.  He’s attracted to a woman, Anna, who doesn’t reciprocate.  He has a job writing movies about a century no one cares about, leading to his termination.  His termination leads to his being evicted.  His being evicted leads to an epiphany.  When he goes to close out his bank account, the system is down.  He has to give the teller a dollar amount, which Mark realizes can be any dollar amount. It doesn’t have to be the actual dollar amount, so he chooses the amount he owes his landlord.  When the system comes back up and the teller sees the correct amount, the teller thinks it’s a computer mistake.

Mark then realizes that he can do this as much as he wants.  The best part is that no one will suspect anything.  Since he’s the only one that knows what a lie is, people should act like the teller.  Mark goes into a casino and lies about winning.  He can claim to win the jackpot on every machine and the casino will never think to ask Mark any questions.  He can also go up to random women and tell them that the fate of the world depends on them having sex right now.  (This does lead to some sense of guilt, especially where Anna is concerned.)

Things get complicated when his mother is dying.  She’s scared, which is natural.  Mark doesn’t want this, so he invents a story about going to a great place in the sky where she’ll be loved.  He doesn’t think much of it, but an employee of the nursing home overhears him.  She passes the story along and before long, Mark has a following.  Mark doesn’t really want the attention.  The story was only for his mother’s benefit.  The rest of the movie deals with the snowball effect that results.  People want to know more about this Great Man in the Sky, so Mark has to make stuff up on the fly.

There’s something interesting about a world without lying.  As I said, there’s not so much as fiction or even lying in advertising.  Mark’s mother isn’t at a nursing home.  She’s in A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People.  Could you imagine what it would be like to be able to lie?  Even when Mark explains lying, people still can’t wrap their heads around it.  (That was the one thing I wondered about.  There should at least be terms for accurate and inaccurate, so a lie could be described as knowingly saying something inaccurate.)

The movie is safe for teenagers and up.  There are a few sexual jokes, some involving masturbation.  Mar’s Man in the Sky parallels religion.  The humor really isn’t meant to poke fun at religion.  Instead, it says more about how things get out of hand quickly.  Something that starts with the best of intentions becomes a major organization similar to what we would call a church.  Some of the things seem absurd, like Mark’s story where everything came from.  Then again, who is anyone to question Mark?  It would never enter their minds to think that he’s lying or might be crazy, as far out as it seems.

That was the one thing that I found odd.  I would think that in thousands of years of recorded history, someone would make a mistake or would be mentally unbalanced and say something that wasn’t true.  Is everyone totally accurate in this world?  One inaccuracy would present the opportunity to realize that you can deliberately make a mistake.  It wasn’t a big deal, overall.  It was a funny movie.  I’d recommend renting it. 

IMDb page

The Unbelievers (2013)

Some movies are so great, you could spend hours extolling their virtues.  There are some so bad, you could spend days picking them apart and still not be satisfied that you found everything wrong with it.  Then, there are some that are neutral.  Somehow, you manage to watch the whole thing, but you’re left wondering why.  I came into The Unbelievers thinking it would be some sort of documentary or something on Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss.

Instead, it came across like Chariots of the Gods in that it was just a bunch of random footage strung together.  We get to see one of them talking on a radio show.  Next, we have someone giving a telephone interview.  (We only get to see their side of it.)  We get to see Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame and Penn Jillette, among others, speaking at a rally that Dawkins and Krauss also spoke at.  It’s almost like someone had a bunch of really great footage from other projects, but they didn’t know what to do with it.  Instead of throwing it all out, they gave it to someone to edit together.

This is where it’s going to be difficult to recommend watching this.  There’s no real plot and there isn’t enough of anything for it to be interesting.  I’m not even sure what the context was for each situation.  It’s almost like a best-of album or highlight reel.  It would have been nice if we had been able to see maybe one or two full interviews or lectures.  Instead, we’re off to the next engagement before we can form any interest in what’s going on.

I found this movie on Netflix through their streaming service.  I’m not sure if the DVD comes with any special features, but it would have been interesting to watch the movie with some sort of commentary track from either Dawkins or Krauss (or, preferably, both) explaining what was going on.  There’s so much potential here.  I thought this was going to be something about the advantage of science, as both men are advocates of reason.

This is something you’d probably watch out of desperation after you’ve gone through most of your other streaming options.  In this regard, I’m not entirely upset that I watched it.  At least I didn’t have to wait for it to be mailed to me.  As for my recommendation, It’s kind of like what the police might say in a move crime scene.  Move along.  Nothing to see here.

Official Web Site

THE UNBELIEVERS (2013) - Official Movie Trailer (Richard Dawkins & Lawrence Krauss)