Liar Liar

Nitcentral's Bulletin Brash Reflections: Movies: Comedy: Liar Liar
By Luigi Novi (Luigi_novi) on Friday, February 05, 2010 - 10:35 pm:

Finding the instances in this movie in which Fletcher actually lied during the curse is fun, even moreso than watching Star Trek films and episodes with Vulcans in the plot, since the curse appears to be an absolute, whereas Trek has offered justifications for Vulcan lies. Two I noticed:

After Fletcher convinces Greta about the curse, she quits, and when he tries to convince her not to leave, she relates the story of a friend who was sued by a burglar because he broke into her home and injured himself while doing so, winning $6,000. When she asks if this was justice, Fletcher says no, because he would've gotten $10,000. When Greta turns to walk away in disgust, Fletcher pleads with her, saying that he didn't understand the question. Isn't this a lie?

When his case is going badly, Fletcher asks Judge Stevens for a bathroom break, arguing that he has heard that holding it in can damage the prostrate gland. When Judge Stevens asks him if that's actually true, Fletcher says that it must be. So in other words, he's personally speculating that it's true. Which means that he didn't actually it hear it, so when he said he "heard" it, he was lying.
---One may argue that this may not be a nit if he actually did hear it, but from a less-than-credible source (folk wisdom, urban legend, water cooler talk, gossip), and when he says it must be true, he is giving a personal assessment on its confidence. But would the curse allow him to do this? Just three scenes later, when he tries to mock question Kenneth Falk, he realizes he can't ask him a question if he merely knows that the answer the person is going to give is a lie. Because this would constitute encouraging perjury, it would seem to indicate that the curse disallows Fletcher from not only expressing a lie personally or verbally, but engaging in any activity with the intent of deliberately perpetrating a falsehood. So when he tried to get a bathroom break in order to stall for time, and not because he had any genuine fear about his prostrate, wasn't he engaging in dishonesty when he employed the danger of prostrate damage as a cover to do this?

After Fletcher beats himself up in the bathroom in the hopes of stalling the proceedings, a courthouse officer drags him into the courtroom to report this to Judge Stevens. Shouldn't he have immediately called for an ambulance and the police? If Fletcher was still semi-conscious, and the officer had to prop him up by putting Fletcher's arm around him, should he really have hauled him to the courtroom? Wouldn't merely reporting the situation to Judge Stevens have been more appropriate?


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