8 Great Movies Told By Liars
No-one can be trusted.
People know not to put their faith movies nowadays. With genre classics like Fight Club and Memento luring us in only to turn around and out themselves as liars, it's true that the film industry often takes our trust for granted and leaves us broken hearted in the aftermath. Whether it's unreliable narrators, carefully implemented flashbacks, or just whacking out the plain old 'it was all a dream' trope, we've been hurt one too many times to be able to take films for their word.
But let's be real, that's exactly what makes them so exciting.
We keep coming back for more like responding to a damn 2am "You up?" text as deep down, we don't care about the deceiving: we just want the sweet satisfaction of a well made movie at the end of it. Sometimes we can see it coming a mile off, and sometimes it takes a bit of digging to see film perspectives for what they really are - but its almost always at the hand of a lying narrator attempting to muddy the waters.
As it turns out, some of the greatest movies out there are told by dirty fibbers.
8. (500) Days Of Summer
(500) Days of Summer toys with the often skewed depiction of romance in its narrative, playing out as a young man named Tom works his way through a relationship with the effervescent Summer - thinking he's found his soul mate in the woman that loves the same music as him. The film plays out seemingly as his devotion and love to a woman that treats his coldly and unfairly, but looking deeper reveals another narrative that the film's star himself has often pointed out as being overlooked.
(500) Days of Summer isn't so much an unrequited love story as it is the tale of a selfish man attempting to get what he wants, despite the people around Tom telling him the things he's doing wrong. He's belligerent and infatuated, pasting the image of what he wants Summer to be over who she actually is in a remarkable break down of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope that Zooey Deschanel always seems to find herself in.
Since the film is told from his perspective, we're inclined to sympathise with Tom's desperation - but underneath the tale of love and rejection that he romanticises for the benefit of a visual story, there's a man looking for purpose that won't find it in another person. He lies to himself as much as he does to us through his film.