We rented Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying from iTunes on the Apple TV last night.

What a hoot! It’s a simple plot that stretches the imagination only a bit. At one point, one viewer said, “Just because you can’t lie, doesn’t mean you have say everything out loud”. A valid point, but if we were to try and read minds, it wouldn’t have been as funny.

Ultimately, this is a fun film that puts religion in perspective and addresses the need of humankind to have some sort of belief system — no matter how inane.

There is one really great scene where the protagonist has become a shut-in for an unspecified amount of time due to the extreme pressures of having lost his true love (due to having bad genes) and of being the “creator” of this first-ever religion (and the nagging call to answer all attendant questions, set up rules, define right and wrong, etc.). I can’t say how he looked when he awoke one morning, but suffice it to say that we guffawed.

This was a funny movie with a good message. “He who has hears to hear…”