[Breakfast: pumpkin pie]

I was excited to see director Atom Egoyan in the flesh Monday night. But first I had to sit through his latest film, "Where the Truth Lies". This wouldn’t have been so bad if Alison Lohman hadn’t starred in the leading role. I forgot who she was until that night or else I wouldn’t have wasted another 2 hours sitting through one of her bland performances. Ms. Lohman has speaking issues that should’ve been corrected by a good voice coach by now. She speaks in a halting manner and has a weird intonation. Worse than that are her lack of acting skills. I know a few journalists and none of them would be caught dead with Ms. Lohman’s interview skills in the role of "Karen O'Connor ". Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth were good as usual. Unfortunately, I wasn’t drawn into the movie, which resulted in me feeling quite restless at points.

The Q&A wasn’t what I had expected, because there was a moderator, Arianna Huffington. I had assumed that audience members would be asking all the questions. I am a fan of Arianna in the political realm, but was frankly disappointed in her questions. To be fair, she could have been asked last minute to moderate, because she even admitted that she had just watched the film for the first time earlier that day. I got the feeling that she wasn’t all that prepared and had not seen many of Atom Egoyan’s films. Since the event was put on by AFI, it would’ve been nice if they’d gotten one of their film teachers or grad students who were familiar with the body of Egoyan’s work to moderate the event.

Besides Egoyan, producer Robert Lantos and actress Rachel Blanchard were present. Colin Firth and Alison Lohman were no-shows. Kevin Bacon was there too, but I didn’t even recognize him at first because he was slouching so much in his chair. I didn’t know a non-teenager was able to slouch that much—that was obviously the last place that Bacon wanted to be. I was happy that Egoyan talked about a point that had bothered me. The film was supposed to take place in the ‘70s but didn’t seem to have a specific time period. Egoyan explained that he wanted the film to have a contemporary feeling. The period in the film was ambivalent to me and the few ‘70s songs in it seemed out of place, so I don’t think that he was successful.

Rachel explained to Huffington that she could relate to her character being stereotyped as the sweet girl with blonde hair and blue eyes when that’s not the case—ohhh. Kevin Bacon referred Huffington to the director when she asked him what "the message" of the film was. For those actors out there, Kev said that he prepares for a role by first using and then losing himself. Lantos took the 5th on answering the question about why the film got an NC-17 rating. Surely the 5 seconds of implied man-on-man sex (between Colin and Kevin) wasn't it...there was no penis shot. I told DK that I thought that showing a vagina in a sexual context = NC-17. The only movie that I can think of that recently got an R rating after showing vagina (albeit in a non-sexual manner) was "A History Of Violence". However, I don’t think that the degree of sexuality was enough to get "Where the Truth Lies" an NC-17 rating. If you are expecting to see some sexy bodies and erotic sex, catch another flick. DK explained to me that Lantos didn’t answer the ratings question because they wanted the rating for the publicity--we will see if it works. Personally, DK and I wished that we’d stayed home and watched "How Do I Look?"