Word: lightman
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...first few minutes of the new FOX series, “Lie to Me,” shows a stubbly Tim Roth peering into the face of a suspected church bomber. As an expert in deception detection, Roth’s character, Dr. Cal Lightman, closely examines the suspect’s bobbing Adam’s apple, twitching moustache, and fidgeting fingers. When the suspect’s attorney impatiently states that he has instructed his client not to say anything, Lightman nonchalantly waves his hand, saying, “I don’t have...
Just as Zeitgeisty but less uplifting is Fox's Lie to Me (Wednesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.), which may be the most cynical TV drama ever made. That's not an insult; it's a tribute to how well the show executes its purpose. It follows Cal Lightman, an expert on "microexpressions" who reads blinks and grimaces to catch deceptions and solve crimes. Lightman is played pugnaciously by Tim Roth, who expands on the successful Fox philosophy, embodied by Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsay, that Americans long to be judged by crabby Brits...
...premise is timely and depressing: everybody lies. (The pilot face-analyzes Dick Cheney, Eliot Spitzer and various notorious celebs to drive home the point; expect a Bernard Madoff reference any episode now.) "The average person tells three lies in 10 minutes of conversation," Lightman crisply informs us, and while Lie to Me balances him with a partner (Kelli Williams) so earnest and sweet that she eats pudding for breakfast, his jaded worldview is borne out. The characters lie for reasons good, evil and poignant; they lie in guilt and in innocence--but in the end, they lie and they...
...this has nothing to do with relativity, but it had much to do with Einstein's contemplation of relativity. Einstein became the emblem not only of the desire to know the truth but also of the capacity to know the truth. In his 1993 novel, Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman writes, "In this world time is a visible dimension. Just as one may look off in the distance and see houses, trees, mountain peaks that are landmarks in space, so one may look out in another direction and see births, marriages, deaths that are signposts in time, stretching off dimly...
...Maybe Lightman will write such a novel, one that conveys, in the enchanting prose of Einstein's Dreams, the strange culture of all-too-human physicists--a difficult task, since Lightman's style has so far shown itself much better suited to fanciful speculation than to plot and character. But the seeds are there; they just don't bear fruit in Good Benito...