Who dun it? Who cares?
Added 9/15/2009
The story opens in 1957, when Lenny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and Vince Collins (Colin Firth), a famous Martin and Lewis-type act, are hosting a telethon. That night, a dead woman is found in their hotel room and the team breaks up under a cloud of suspicion. Fifteen years later, a young journalist (Alison Lohman) wants to interview Collins for a book and begins to probe the mysterious death.
Bacon and Firth are both fine actors, but they are wasted in this terrible film. Alison Lohman is the main character and she's completely wrong for the part of a savvy young writer; she acts like a high school girl and looks so much like Amy Adams I was distracted and wishing Adams had done the part. She is timid and childish in all of her scenes and just isn't strong enough to carry the film. Firth tries to play against his charmer-image as a sleezy pill-popper, but I didn't believe him for a minute; he seems to be sleepwalking through the movie. Bacon is good as his slimy, heartless partner, but his character is so odious I cringed whenever he was on the screen.
The director apparently thought this was a seductive, sophisticated mystery and used lots of moody film-noir music to try to heighten the drama, but nothing works. The story uses confusing flashbacks every few minutes and I never knew what was going on until the end and then I didn't care. A surprisingly bad and unpleasant movie with unnecessarily graphic sexuality.
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Unfairly Underrated Noirish Mystery...
Added 4/12/2009
On the recommendation of a writer I know, I sat down with friends to screen the unrated theatrical cut of Atom Egoyen's 2005 film, "Where the Truth Lies" on DVD.
Shuttling back and forth between 1957 and 1972-3, "Where the Truth Lies," tells the story of an young reporter, Karen O'Connor, played by Allison Lohman, who has been contracted to "ghost write" the biography of Vince Collins (a restrained Colin Firth), a semi-retired entertainer turned talent-manager, who once was partnered up in a wildly successful night act with fellow performer, Lanny Morris (an excellent Kevin Bacon), who by the 70's has carved out a career as a producer. O'Connor's publisher, pushes Lohman to dig up the truth behind a mysterious and unsolved 1957 murder of a college student that precipitated the break up of Morris and Collins partnership (very loosely based on the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis act) fifteen years earlier.
Watching "Where the Truth Lies," (I've seen it twice) I was surprised. This is a film that had been savaged by almost all of the reviewers from the major US news outlets for being too sordid, sex-soaked, and critically hamstrung by the performance of the Lohman' point of view character. Perhaps I'm a bit jaded, but while the film is loaded with sex scenes (five by my count) and the goings on are a bit sordid (we are talking about the excesses of successful performers in the 1950's and the decadent, drug-addled, "free love" hangover era, of the pre-disco 1970's) none of the scenes are gratuitous (except possibly a quick throwaway visual gag early in the film) and serve a function in the narrative. Moreover I though Lohman was utterly believable in her role as the ambitious young reporter, who is desperately trying to break into the "big time" with a major scoop - though the show really belongs to Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth playing the performers at the height of their fame in the '50's and later on, as respectively a producer and a talent manager in the 70's. The narrative is well-shot and well-structured (long before films like "Momento" Egoyan was apioneer at the practice of using flashbacks and slightly surreal shifts between subjective experience and "objective" reality to create emotional resonance in audience, particularly in his earlier films, "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter") and features the clever use of repeating motifs, particularly visual and musical references to "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," references that are entirely appropriate to the movie's rather adult themes.
I really don't understand why this film was so throughly panned when it first came out: for what it's worth I recommend it, and it easily bears repeat viewings (i've seen it twice so far). [...] Get the unrated cut. There's no point in seeing a censored version.
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Interesting and amusing
Added 3/28/2009
'Where the truth lies' is a typical drama, its not fiction, its not your regular murder mysteries, just a film that throws light on life. A film that throws light on what goes on behind the curtains, behind the frames, behind every stage, it throws light on the fact that how famous people try to 'keep the show going on!' despite having personal issues. The film is quite unique, if you have the right perspective while watching it. Alison Lohman, Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth have an amazing chemistry with each other. Its a film to watch out for.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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where the truth lies
Added 3/11/2009
did not like the role that colin firth played i prefer him in more light
happier roles
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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What A Mess
Added 12/15/2008
I just finished reading "Where the Truth Lies" and I loved it from start to finish, so I decided to waste my money because I couldn't find it at the local video store and bought it. Now I know why no one keeps it around to rent, because it was outright awful. This is a perfect example of how an excellent book can be destroyed by a film maker.
From start to finish I barely recognized the story and the characters, not to mention some of the most memorable characters in the book not even being mentioned in this film. What was Rupert Holmes thinking when he sold the rights to this producer, or better yet, did Atom Egoyan even read the book?
I'm a big fan of Kevin Bacon and a bigger fan of Colin Firth, but what were they thinking when they signed on to do this bomb? As Vince Collins (Colin Firth) said several times in both the movie and the book "I'm doing this because I need the money" and I truly wonder if that was the real reason. I felt real compassion and really liked the Vince Collins character in the book, what happened to him in this movie? And Kevin Bacon even fell short and lacked the fire that made his character, Lanny Morris, what he truly was in the book.
And who's brillant idea was it to cast Allison Lohman in this stinker? She was to young for this role and I just didn't buy any of her performance.
It would have been nice to see what a director like Clint Eastwood, Ron Howard or Martin Scorsese could have done with this material. What a shame to take a great novel and destroy it like this.
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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Who dun it? Who cares?
Added 9/15/2009
The story opens in 1957, when Lenny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and Vince Collins (Colin Firth), a famous Martin and Lewis-type act, are hosting a telethon. That night, a dead woman is found in their hotel room and the team breaks up under a cloud of suspicion. Fifteen years later, a young journalist (Alison Lohman) wants to interview Collins for a book and begins to probe the mysterious death.
Bacon and Firth are both fine actors, but they are wasted in this terrible film. Alison Lohman is the main character and she's completely wrong for the part of a savvy young writer; she acts like a high school girl and looks so much like Amy Adams I was distracted and wishing Adams had done the part. She is timid and childish in all of her scenes and just isn't strong enough to carry the film. Firth tries to play against his charmer-image as a sleezy pill-popper, but I didn't believe him for a minute; he seems to be sleepwalking through the movie. Bacon is good as his slimy, heartless partner, but his character is so odious I cringed whenever he was on the screen.
The director apparently thought this was a seductive, sophisticated mystery and used lots of moody film-noir music to try to heighten the drama, but nothing works. The story uses confusing flashbacks every few minutes and I never knew what was going on until the end and then I didn't care. A surprisingly bad and unpleasant movie with unnecessarily graphic sexuality.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Unfairly Underrated Noirish Mystery...
Added 4/12/2009
On the recommendation of a writer I know, I sat down with friends to screen the unrated theatrical cut of Atom Egoyen's 2005 film, "Where the Truth Lies" on DVD.
Shuttling back and forth between 1957 and 1972-3, "Where the Truth Lies," tells the story of an young reporter, Karen O'Connor, played by Allison Lohman, who has been contracted to "ghost write" the biography of Vince Collins (a restrained Colin Firth), a semi-retired entertainer turned talent-manager, who once was partnered up in a wildly successful night act with fellow performer, Lanny Morris (an excellent Kevin Bacon), who by the 70's has carved out a career as a producer. O'Connor's publisher, pushes Lohman to dig up the truth behind a mysterious and unsolved 1957 murder of a college student that precipitated the break up of Morris and Collins partnership (very loosely based on the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis act) fifteen years earlier.
Watching "Where the Truth Lies," (I've seen it twice) I was surprised. This is a film that had been savaged by almost all of the reviewers from the major US news outlets for being too sordid, sex-soaked, and critically hamstrung by the performance of the Lohman' point of view character. Perhaps I'm a bit jaded, but while the film is loaded with sex scenes (five by my count) and the goings on are a bit sordid (we are talking about the excesses of successful performers in the 1950's and the decadent, drug-addled, "free love" hangover era, of the pre-disco 1970's) none of the scenes are gratuitous (except possibly a quick throwaway visual gag early in the film) and serve a function in the narrative. Moreover I though Lohman was utterly believable in her role as the ambitious young reporter, who is desperately trying to break into the "big time" with a major scoop - though the show really belongs to Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth playing the performers at the height of their fame in the '50's and later on, as respectively a producer and a talent manager in the 70's. The narrative is well-shot and well-structured (long before films like "Momento" Egoyan was apioneer at the practice of using flashbacks and slightly surreal shifts between subjective experience and "objective" reality to create emotional resonance in audience, particularly in his earlier films, "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter") and features the clever use of repeating motifs, particularly visual and musical references to "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," references that are entirely appropriate to the movie's rather adult themes.
I really don't understand why this film was so throughly panned when it first came out: for what it's worth I recommend it, and it easily bears repeat viewings (i've seen it twice so far). [...] Get the unrated cut. There's no point in seeing a censored version.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Interesting and amusing
Added 3/28/2009
'Where the truth lies' is a typical drama, its not fiction, its not your regular murder mysteries, just a film that throws light on life. A film that throws light on what goes on behind the curtains, behind the frames, behind every stage, it throws light on the fact that how famous people try to 'keep the show going on!' despite having personal issues. The film is quite unique, if you have the right perspective while watching it. Alison Lohman, Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth have an amazing chemistry with each other. Its a film to watch out for.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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