I saw Lie to Me at the Newport Beach Film Festival. The film was about the complicated relationships between 20-something professionals. The dialogue and situations were very true to life. Courtney Ford and Steve Sandvoss play the leads and were excellent. I had never seen Ford or Sandvoss perform before and I was quite impressed. Brandon Routh, best known for playing the lead in Superman Returns, had a slightly smaller role but was also quite good. The supporting cast, which included Nick Wechsler and Shoshana Bush, lent fine support. I would highly recommend this film firstly because it's good and second in case you're a fan of any of these up-and-coming actors.

This movie is a dispassionately appealing look at modern relationships that overcomes hackneyed direction to become worth watching.

Mason and Samantha (Steve Sandvoss and Courtney Ford) are a couple somewhere in that maturity no man's land of the mid 20s to very early 30s. They live together and love each other but have what they called back in the 1970s an "open relationship". Mason and Samantha have sex with other people and are completely honest with each other about it. In fact, the only person they lie to about their sexual freedom is Sam's sister Alison (Ellen Hollman).

At the wedding of Alison to Mason's best friend Luke (Nick Weschler),Sam boinks her old college boyfriend James (a shaggy-maned Brandon Routh) while Mason starts a flirtation with Olivia (Shoshana Bush),the 18 year old little sister of Nick. It turns out a single boink isn't enough for Sam and she pursues a romance with James, which he initially resists because he's creeped out by her arrangement with Mason. His attraction to Sam eventually overwhelms his common sense and James continues to date Sam and periodically bug her about her swinging ways. Mason initially holds off the advances of Olivia and even screws her best friend, but eventually nothing stops the two of them from making the beast with two backs. But Mason doesn't tell Nick about boffing his little sister and Olivia insists that he not tell Sam either.

So to recap - Mason and Sam say they love each other and have sex together. They also date and have sex with other people. Sam starts fornicating with James, who pressures her about her unconventional lifestyle. Mason gets romantically and sexually involved with Olivia, the teenaged sister of his best friend Nick. Mason doesn't tell either Nick or Sam about Olivia and no one says anything to Sam's sister Alison. I don't think it's giving away too much of the story to say this six-way conglomeration of love, sex, honesty and deceit proves to be unstable and collapses into a pile of tears and yelling, with a couple of ass kickings thrown in for good measure.

What makes this film interesting is that it neither condemns not justifies Mason and Sam's relationship. It doesn't make them out to be seriously damaged people who fell into a dysfunctional union. Nor does it gloss over the fact that people who live this way are probably not emotionally mature or really looking for a deep, meaningful love. It straightforwardly presents Mason and Sam as two people who were satisfied by this sort of set up for a particular time in their lives when their sexual and emotional dalliances had no consequences or ramifications. But the movie also recognizes that consequences and ramifications work their way into everyone's life at some point, and that's the point when adventuresome becomes threatening and liberation becomes chaos. It's a refreshingly adult and unpretentious take on this kind of subject matter.

This cast gives some nicely measured performances as well. Steve Sandvoss plays Mason perfectly as an overgrown adolescent who's smart enough to rationalize away his emotional underdevelopment. Even though the story doesn't spell it out until later, Sandvoss makes the audience see that Mason was the one who first proposed and wanted an open relationship with Sam. Courtney Ford, however, doesn't let her character be a weakling or a victim. She plays Sam as a woman smart enough to know what she's doing and a willing participant in a love life of libertarian anarchism. Brandon Routh also succeeds at walking a very fine line as James. He has to be just judgmental enough to resonate with the audience but can't be so intolerant that he generates sympathy for Sam or Mason. Routh does that so well I can almost overlook that he's so handsome it makes me want to grind broken glass into his face.

It doesn't take much for an entertaining little film like Fling to be undone, and director James Stewart Muller almost does it by being one of those filmmakers who believe the 11th Commandment is "Thou shalt not steady thy camera." There's some camera movement in almost every shot of this movie, there's never any purpose to it and it get distractingly bad during close ups. When Muller zooms on just one or two characters, it looks like they're in the middle of an earthquake. The shaky-cam stuff is never motion sickness-inducing. It does get more and more annoying as the film goes on.

Even with such clichéd and aggravating camera-work, this is still a good movie that tells a grown up tale about a not terribly grown up couple. Give it a try.

Mason Michael Finch (Steve Sandvoss) is a successful writer and he has an open relationship with his girlfriend Samantha Cooper (Courtney Ford). During her sister Allison's wedding, Sam reconnects with James (Brandon Routh). On the other hand, Mason has flings women and even his best friend Luke's young sister Olivia.

It's a lot of hot-people-problems. It's a relatively weak indie from John Stewart Muller. I just don't connect with these characters. Mason and Sam's relationship is superficial. I wouldn't say Sam and James' relationship is that deep either. I think the whole 'open relationship' takes away much of the tension. It's hard for me to care more about a relationship than the couple inside of the relationship. There has to be stakes but these couples aren't worth anything.