The Good Lie

It’s been I while since I saw a movie that would defend family values so cleanly, strongly and without sentiment, while at the same time confronting two diametrically different cultures in an intelligent, emotional and witty manner. The two scenes where the natives wandering in the bush stick a hollow straw into the ground to drink groundwater, and a few years later intuitively stick a plastic straw into a MacDonald’s cup to drink Coke, are top notch. The Good Lie is well written, acted and directed. I was moved. Reese Witherspoon sells the film in the posters, but appears in the film only after half an hour. The true main characters are a group of Sudanese, of which at least the woman is not even an actress (you couldn’t tell, though). Produced under the auspices of Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. [San Diego Film Festival] (01/10/2014)

You know that what makes a quality film is the issues it deals with and not the execution, right? There are a lot of clichés, just enough sentiment and the acting is great, or rather the black Sudanese faces give it a strange, raw and fresh touch of reality. Otherwise, it's a fairytale, with an expected "everything fits together beautifully" scenario, and in fact that's about the last thing that really happens in this clash of two different worlds, off-screen. (24/08/2016)

Actually, the film is quite good and it shows that even moving to America with the belief it's the promised land can be one big lie. What really bothered me though was the calculated addition of Reese's character. That character is just so incredibly clichéd - a woman who doesn't care about anything until she meets completely different people and realizes what she's been doing wrong. It's just unpleasant. (17/12/2014)