Beyond Lies

This was a pretty good turn for Franco, one of his best attempts at drama in indi cinema.

Franco is the protagonist, a writer who wrote a great book about his broken childhood, and the relationship with his abusive father, but it comes to life that what he's passing off as truth may not be all that, and he tries to redeem his career with a new book about a True Crime, evolving a father (played by Christian Slater, who I have not scene in forever) whose on trail for the murder of his wife.

It's an Intriguing story about how sometimes we remember things differently than they actually happen. James Franco played this role well. It was not a matter of weather he was right or wrong, but just a matter of how he saw things that was not entirely accurate.

Ed Harris and Franco had some really good scenes together as well. Harris played the abusive father who, like his son, remembers events differently. The father son connection felt very realistic.

This is not the first time Franco has done a film on Child abuse (also not the fist time Amber Heard played an ex-punk rock bases with a few issues, she also did it in the recent but horrible film One More Time). Franco also tackled the trouble youth Topic in the film Yosemite, but that movie was a little more serious while this one is definitely better done.

I can recommend.

Based on the book by Stephen Elliot by the same name, now although I haven't read it I assume that that did better at putting all the material together than the movie did.

There are some standalone scenes that are pretty solid but there's also some questionable ones that feels a bit random.

It's listed here as a crime/drama/thriller, but the crime elements is very limited and thriller even more so There is a subplot about a random murder-case involving a character played by Christian Slater but it doesn't have that big of importance in the long scheme of things, at least the movie didn't manage to convey it as it did.

The movie is about memories and perceptions of reality and how that can change in time.

The message and idea behind the movie is pretty clever and the acting is pretty good (save for maybe Amber Heard who feels a bit empty) and it's decent enough visually but for some reason it just doesn't quiet work as a whole.

Great cast! Story was uneven and quite frankly boring at times. I'll watch Ed Harris in anything.

After hearing about (but not reading) the book I was a little excited for this film. Terrible let down. There is no real plot or even a narrative and I can't for the life of me understand why this gets placed under the Thriller genre. It is little more than a plodding collection of vignettes strung together with an inordinate number of slow-motion flashbacks. Seriously if just the flashbacks and montages were shown in realtime it would cut the runtime of this movie by half. Want to convey a memory of a happy family? Slow motion flashback of them kicking a ball in the yard. Angry family? Slow motion flashback of them yelling and punching. Repeat this over and over to fill the space where plot and character development would go.

The "trial" component feels forced as an unnecessary element (maybe to convince us it's a thriller?). There isn't one relationship in this movie we ever actually care about and, as if to add insult to injury, the star seems to magically reconcile a lifetime of bad choices in the last ten minutes! Too bad this was a really bad vehicle for some otherwise good talent.

Books on fiction and even more so autobiographical memoirs are always edited, self edited if you prefer. Even the most brutally frank of memoirs there is always a part so painful we don't want to tell the world and we hope that no one else is keeping track to tell it differently. That's what happens to James Franco on another of his quirky projects playing a writer who does his Adderall like peppermint candy.

Franco is covering the trial of wife killer Christian Slater and as the testimony rolls he sees some of his own life especially in his relationship with his estranged father Ed Harris who sees the same incidents and others he prefers to remember a bit differently. Franco and Harris have some great scenes together they are the heart of the film.

Editing our memories is the phenomenon this film chose to explore. If not the best of explanations it's a valiant attempt.