A few weeks ago I watched the first episode of “Lie to Me” and then came in here and trashed it. After that, I decided to watch the next episode and force myself to concentrate on the positive instead of the negative. I’m still watching, only now I’m glued to the TV. Either the series got better or I got in the habit of focusing on the positive.
Whichever it is, this show has now replaced “House” in my heart. Tim Roth is easily as sexy as Hugh Laurie, and I don’t have to put up with the rest of the “House” melodrama and misogyny.
When “Lie to Me” gets canceled, I’m going to buy the DVD.
The thing that bugs me, to the points of such extreme annoyance I’m having trouble watching the show, is the facial expressions they have the “subject” actors use to demonstrate emotion. They are so rediculously exaggerated I find it impossible to believe it takes a specially-trained consultant to detect them. At first I thought it was just me, because I’ve studied facial expressions quite a bit as an animator and artist, but now my wife is starting to laugh at the subtleness of faces looking like this.
They use the same amount of exagerration for “tells” on lies.
It’s often hard to judge a series by its pilot. The writers want to emphasize the character traits and quirks so that they can be very annoying.
I’m seeing this in Castle. The first episode had Castle so over the top in his bad boy character that it grew wearing. Monday’s toned it down a little and made it much better.
I’m looking forward to the influx of truth “experts” this show is going to groom. I’m just waiting for the time when I’m sitting around the bar talking with friends and someone says, “You’re lying; I saw your eye twitch.”
Sorry, I can’t watch “Lie to Me” because it reminds me of my mother.
“I can tell you’re lying because you can’t look me in the eye.”
No, Mom, actually I have intermittent exotropia, thanks.
In ads I’ve seen, he says someone must be lying because, for example, he shrugs with one shoulder instead of two. Maybe he has a sore shoulder, you ass.
I think it’s less exaggeration than it is emphasis. Of course you’re really going to notice a mouth twitch if there’s a quick cut to a super-close-up of the mouth. The quick cut is there to point it out, after all. They’d risk losing the audience if they never did this, and instead had most people thinking the show was crap because they totally didn’t see that twitch that Lightman claimed was there.
They also constantly freeze-frame the video while one of them points to what we’re supposed to be looking at. The facial expressions themselves don’t look exaggerated when viewed in real time playback.
This is what I was going to say. If you pause a movie at any random point, just as often as not, the face of whoever the camera is on looks gruesomely distorted in the oddest of expressions. And yet played in real time it looks normal. The facial expressions we use are part of a dance of movement, each piece of which only lasts for a split second. It’s all happening so rapidly and so extremely that we end up averaging it all together into normalcy.
