[IMDB link] [Netflix link] [The Comic Critic comic review]
PLOT SUMMARY: In a parallel earth where people are incapable of lying, one man invents the act, and uses it for his own personal gain.
LIMERICK REVIEW: There once was a loser named Mark,
who’s life was no amusement park.
His love life was awry
until he learned to lie–
And a bland society was imbued by his spark.
HAIKU REVIEW: The truth often hurts;
Lies make the world operate.
Ergo, religion.
UNCOMFORTABLE PLOT SUMMARY (inspired by this): [highlight for spoilers]→ To bed superficial woman, man destroys honesty of entire species.
PEOPLE: Written, directed, and starring Ricky Gervais, original creator of The Office. Also starring Jennifer Garner (Juno, Daredevil, Electra, Alias). With Jonah Hill (Funny People, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Walk Hard, Superbad, Knocked Up, Click, Grandma’s Boy, 40 Year Old Virgin, I Heart Huckabees), Louis C.K. (SNL, Role Models), Jeffrey Tambor (Hank Kingsley from Larry Sanders, Arrested Development, Max Headroom:20 Minutes Into The Future), Rob Lowe (Wayne’s World, West Wing), Tina Fey (30 Rock, Mean Girls, Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea).
And a bit part by Jason Bateman (Arrested Development, Juno, Sit Down Shut Up, Valerie, Silver Spoons, Hancock, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Extract, Dodgeball), hilarious as always.
QUIRKS: The whole movie is a huge quirk — a parallel earth where nobody lies. The way things operate in this alternate reality is nothing short of brilliantly hilarious. Not only are people incapable of lying, but they are in general incapable of making ANYTHING up. There is no fiction, no fantasy. The world goes around, but many things are worse for the fact that nobody lies.
MORALS: The moral of the story seems to be that lies help make the world go around. This is a very subversive moral!
POLITICS: Religion is what happens when people get together in groups, willing to listen to someone else’s lies. This movie is extremely subversive, religiously. Once someone develops the ability to lie — just tell people something happens when they die. They will surround you in droves, hanging off your every word. Who can resist being a Prophet?
BAD STUFF: It is based on a romance — and Jennifer Garner is a superficial bitch. Granted, she’s just being honest about the way most people work, as most people are superficial. Self included. But such brutal honestly simply can’t come off as anything but bitchy. The main conflict of the story is Ricky Gervais trying to make himself in the “same league” as Jennifer Garner, which, due to his looks, social status, and income, can only be done via attaining fantastic power. And in a world where no one lies, such power is quite easy to gain. I wish I could teleport to this alternate earth and live there instead.
CONCLUSION: An awesomely surreal alternate earth, and an incredibly subversive message, morally and politically. Lies make the world go around, the world would be worse without them, and religion is just what happens when a bunch of people who are willing to listen to liars do so. Romantic subplot aside, I thought this movie brought up singularly unique situations. Like Liar Liar if the entire planet had to act like Jim Carrey did.
RATINGS:
Clint: Netflix: 5/5 stars. IMDB: 8.4/10.
Carolyn: Netflix: 4/5 stars. IMDB: 8/10. “Deep, lighthearted, nice take on religion & the sky fairies. Wasn’t as comedic as I was expecting. There was a lot of romance to it, but it was more than a romantic comedy.” (My counterpoint is that I found the whole thing extremely comedic.)
The native public rating for this movie is: IMDB: 6.7/10, Netflix: 3.3/5 stars (Netflix‘s predicted rating for us was 4.1/5 stars).
RECOMMENDATION: A must-see comedy! It says a lot about honesty, people, relationships, and even religion. More importantly, it’s an eye-opening look at how things might operate if lying didn’t exist.
SIMILAR MOVIES: Liar Liar?
MOVIE QUOTE: “Anna McDoogles: I was just masturbating.”
Mark Bellison: “That… makes me think of your vagina.”
Music: Bunnygrunt – Silly Girl (by The Descendents)
Claire's blog 
January 21, 2010 at 11:48 AM
[…] unknown •Hangover, The (2009) •I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009) – a big surprise •Invention Of Lying, The aka This Side Of The Truth (2009) •Jackass 2: Number Two (2006) •Jackass 2.5 – epic […]
September 22, 2010 at 7:07 AM
[…] Co-Written, Co-Directed, and starring (in a lesser role) Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office, The Invention Of Lying. The other co-writer/co-director of this movie is Stephen Merchant — Ricky’s co-star in […]
May 18, 2012 at 9:24 AM
What’s up with the “I’d rather be watching TV”? That made me expect you to pan this, but it’s highly rated…
May 18, 2012 at 10:31 AM
Hah, thanks for asking. You of all people have the most right to ask, because it’s actually from my original acm.vt.edu webpage.
You can see where it’s used near the top of my 1995 page here:
http://clint.sheer.us/clint.htm
It links to my VHS catalog, which was very popular back in the day (got about 1M hits there over the years).
When I started doing movie blogposts, I didn’t want to fill my flickr account blog-clipart-images, ’cause it’s supposed to be more about memories for me. So I wanted to use something on ACM. And of course, being lazy, I didn’t want to download a new images.
So I re-used “my” original image (that I stole in 1995 hehe).
Stuck it in my blog template (text file) for movie reviews (i blog in my favorite text editor, which then runs through my linker to link 3000+ diff terms, for instance if I mention a movie, it auto-links to its blog review, even if it’s a future-dated link that hasn’t posted yet).
Of course, it’s a dead image for all the reviews I wrote before that jerk kicked everyone off acm. I never quite got around to writing something that would open up every wordpress post and regex-substitute new links for old links. [I do have something that does this to my clipboard, but still, open post, go to html, copy to clipboard, run script, re-paste modified HTML back into post, save, 2000+ times, is an O(fuck me) algorithm ;)]
And that is the longest answer I could possibly give.
May 18, 2012 at 10:37 AM
Well, if you self-hosted instead of using WordPress.com, I’d say you could whip up a quick Perl/DBI script to do this for you. But since you don’t have access to the database (I assume?) you’re kinda screwed…
I do remember your ACM site even without the flashback link. Didn’t occur to me that you would have pulled this along as nostalgia/laziness. :-P
May 18, 2012 at 10:47 AM
Very true. But them I’m stuck either:
1) directly responsible for operations (100% of my upstream bandwidth is used 24/7 here, AND the power goes out a lot, plus i’m then paying electricity)
2) paying to host on a pro service and dealing with their rules and limitations and the fact they may go away
3) i could get free hosting but then i’d permanently depend on a single individual (the “acm problem”, where a single individual, Mr. Edstrom, ruined 15 yrs of valid linkage)
So out of all that, I figured, if paying has its suckage, I’d rather just do it for free.
There actually is a wordpress API. I use it to make my posts. So it’s not impossible to write something to do this, I just have other things I tend to care about more. Most old posts on the internet suffer from link rot anyway.
I could have prevented that by paying domain registration for the last 15 yrs….then everything would just be linked to clintandcarolyn.com or something…. but yeah, again, Money. I don’t like paying it. :)
There’s also the same issue with a lot of flickr captions…