Movies are like buses. You wait for ages and then two come along at once. Take, for example, DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON (cobbled together these two would have made a decent movie, which separately, neither of them did), or ROBIN HOOD PRINCE OF THIEVES and Bergin’s ROBIN HOOD. Strangely, or perhaps magically, it’s the same with movies about late 19th century magicians. In September/October 2006, within ten days of each other, we had THE ILLUSIONIST and THE PRESTIGE (see Victoria’s review), both tales of rivalry, revenge and the quest to discover the secrets behind the magic.

Childhood sweethearts Eisenheim and Sophie, peasant’s son and aristocrat respectively, are forbidden to meet because of the class difference between them. Eisenhiem travels the world and returns to Vienna a world-renowned stage magician. Sophie by this time is betrothed to Crown Prince Leopold. Leopold is fascinated by Eisenheim’s ‘tricks’ and orders a private performance so that he might demonstrate his cleverness to his peers by exposing Eisenheim. The magician however turns the tables during this ‘demonstration’, and, having been made a fool of in front of his colleagues, and especially Sophie, Leopold enlists Inspector Uhl to discover the secrets behind Eisenheim’s magic and/or shut him down. Tragedy eventually and inevitably strikes and Eisenheim turns his skills toward the thwarting of Leopold’s political plans and his complete downfall.

The film is beautifully shot and the period is captured superbly. There were a few slow passages but the ensemble cast work well together, particularly Sewell and Giamatti. Norton does have moments of looking spaced out rather than enigmatic, but the ending was totally satisfying and, to me at any rate, completely unanticipated, which makes a pleasant change.

A superior film in my view to THE PRESTIGE, which veered into Mary Shelley/science fiction territory, whereas the magic in THE ILLUSIONIST is simply that – illusion. Like the movies themselves, all smoke and mirrors.

Recommended.

BRYAN’S ILLUSIONIST REVIEW

THE ILLUSIONIST takes place in the early 1900′s; a period in time that has always fascinated me with the public’s choices for entertainment. Adults would fill elaborate theaters that were lighted by gaslights and get so emotional from the show that they would yell-out questions, praise or insults to the performers. I was immediately reminded of my own personal favorite from this time, a French vaudevillian who performed under the stage name of Le Petomane. He performed between 1887 and 1917, which is around the time this film takes place. While classic writers who are required reading in present day college were bringing in salaries of four figures, Le Petomane was bringing in a staggering five-figure income from his nightly performances. How did Le Petomane bring in more change than Dickens and Poe put together, you may be wondering? Very easily with controlled and trained flatulence. I could go on and on about this true underrated maverick performer, but this is neither the time, nor the place. I guess I only bring him up because with my twisted mind, I can’t help but wonder… where is HIS movie? Somebody get me producer James Ivory on the phone so I can pitch this valuable film idea. It is, after all, a period piece.

Edward Norton portrays Eisenheim, a brilliant entertainer and master magician. In his youth he fell in love with a beautiful young aristocrat. The girl’s family runs him out of town because of their differences in social structure. Eisenheim masters his talents and relocates to the great city of Vienna. He opens a show at a local theater and it becomes a huge success. Among his fans is Chief Inspector Walter Uhl, (Paul Giamatti) an intelligent detective and a self-proclaimed amateur magician. He enters Eisenheim’s theater to inform him that the Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) is planning to visit one of his upcoming performances. On the night of his visit, Eisenheim chooses the Prince’s fiancé as a volunteer for one of his illusions. He is surprised to see that she is his old childhood friend Sophie (Jessica Biel), the only woman he has probably ever loved. The two attempt to rekindle their romance for one another. Unfortunately, the Crown Prince Leopold is not the type of person a woman can just leave. He has way too much power and ego to be treated in such a way. While Inspector Uhl is a great detective and may very well be ahead of his time with his crime investigation techniques, he is slightly corrupt and dedicated to the Crown Prince with promise of a promotion when the Prince becomes King. The Prince insists that Uhl tear Eisenheim apart by proving that he is a fraud, and a thrilling game begins between Eisenheim and Uhl. One trying to convince people that what you are seeing is real and the other trying to disprove everything you are seeing. Two experts at their professions constantly trying to stay one-step ahead of the other.

Director Neil Burger’s film is a unique piece of work for my tastes. It’s one of those films that attempt to pull the carpet out from under you with its surprise ending. The big problem is that the finale is not very unexpected at all. A surprise ending to me should come from out of nowhere and require a second viewing. When a failed attempt at such an ending happens, it usually makes the film as a whole unworthy of your time. However, while I figured out the conclusion, the ending wasn’t disappointing. THE ILLUSIONIST has a ton of things going right for it. The most important two things are the two leading actors, both Yale graduates and both with entirely different acting techniques. I like Edward Norton, but Paul Giamatti is one of the best, and one of my favorite, actors working today. An actor who is not a pretty-boy getting by on looks, he has massive talent and has broken out of the supporting actor role respectably. I mean this as a sincere compliment and he deserves every second of it.

While the majority of THE ILLUSIONIST is excellent fare, I found tiny little scenes staying with me and they made the film highly recommendable. The hallway to Prince Leopold’s office where every square inch is filled with antlers and taxidermy trophies and is filmed with Uhl’s strange reaction. The story of Eisenheim’s chance encounter with a traveling magician while a young boy and the legendary proportions that story has acquired, where the people retelling it can’t distinguish fact from fiction. Chief Inspector Uhl’s harmless, yet undying obsession with Eisenheim’s illusion called The Orange Tree. Eisenheim running into four poor, begging children and instead of just giving them a free hand-out, he performs a little magic show while at the same time making sure the children get to eat, at least for that night. The unmentioned respect Eisenheim and Uhl have for one another. All these small details add up and make the development of these two classic characters a joy to watch.

The cinematography by Dick Pope was nominated for an Academy Award this year and he deserved it. The film has the look of the early 1900′s. The shadowy lighting he employs gives off the feeling you are watching a performance lit with gaslights. He even pulls out the old iris fade in/out trick and conveys filmmaking at its most primitive early stages. The score by Philip Glass is excellent and memorable.

Basically, the whole cast and crew is firing on all cylinders and should be quite proud of their film. The thing is, without the characters of Eisenheim and Uhl or the actors who portrayed them, I’m not so sure I would have enjoyed the film as a whole. I would love to see the character of Chief Inspector Uhl return for another film. Perhaps he could take his debunking talents to France and prove Le Petomane’s flatulence performance is simply the old hand in the armpit gag.

MAX’S ILLUSIONIST REVIEW

Warner Bros. Pictures presents in association with Legendary Pictures a Blinding Edge Pictures production
MPAA rating: PG-13 / Running time — 110 minutes

QUOTE: It’s official now. THE SIXTH SENSE was a fluke. Shyamalan pompously gives himself the role of “The Intellectual Future Christ.”

I hated it from start to finish. Where to begin? The cinematography is just terrible. When it is not intentionally and frequently blurry, Shyamalan positions the actors with their backs to the camera. This generally means the actors cannot deliver the emotional dialogue with the proper facial expressions. The cinematography and positioning of the actors is alienating and is meant to draw attention to…the director.

There is no need for the director to remind us this movie is all about him since there he is in a supporting, rather important, role as “The Future Intellectual Christ.” Shyamalan also hates Americans. Everyone in this film is ugly except the “narf” and…Shyamalan. He works out. He has close-ups.

Starring in her second Shyamalan film after the dreadful THE VILLAGE, (Shyamalan didn’t know he was auditioning Ron Howard’s daughter since his casting director was brand new to the business. Howard was not submitted by an agent?), Bryce Dallas Howard should retire the ethereal not-of-this-world persona she is chaining herself to. It’s embarrassingly funny. In THE VILLAGE, Howard played blind-from-birth as a graceful aristocrat. Now, as a sea nymph, her wet hair and drippy vacant look of haunted mystery is laughable. Is it every man’s fantasy to rescue a non-verbal nymph with powers?

You know the story. Manager of Cove Apartments, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) has a terrible stutter, is out-of-shape and miserable. But he has a very good reason! He was once a doctor and a tragedy has made him an empty shell. Someone has been swimming in the Cove pool without permission. One night while Heep is watching the pool he falls in and is saved by a naked nymph named Story (Howard). She comes from The Blue World but speaks very good English and is a big flirt. Heep gives her a shirt to wear but not pants. He cradles her to sleep on his lap. It’s damn creepy.

Heep dopes out Story’s story but it made no sense to me. Story is a “narf.” There are monsters, “scrunts,” who want to keep her from returning to The Blue World because she is a very, very important mystical savior-being. Heep is told the bedtime story of “narfs” by an angry, suspicious Korean tenant (June Kyoko Lu)who does not speak English. Her saucy daughter,Young-Soon (Cindy Cheung), must translate the story in pieces. He doesn’t ask Young-Soon for a pair of sweatpants for his new guest. Story, for no good reason, loses her voice and also uses a translator through sign language. Heep has his own speech problems. It’s a theme.

Story needs the help of a team of people to get back to her world. While Story has absolutely no discernible weird water attributes or powers that anyone would recognize as otherworldly, somehow the Cove residents go along with thinking they are special and can help Story return to her world. Nobody asks any questions about The Blue World. They just want to know how many kids they will have.

The woe-be-gone Cove residents have a fiercely revolting new tenant, Mr. Farber (Bob Balaban), a tense ugly film critic who explains to Heep what characters to look for among the residents to fill the slots that the story requires. So, within the Cove are Story’s helpers: “The Guardian,” “The Healer,” and “The Interpreter of Signs.” Who fits the bill? Heep designates some of them, but when he fails, a kid reads cereal boxes to fix the problem. And I thought OCEANS 12 had stitched-up lazy plot holes.

LADY is pointlessly slow and, since Shyamalan created the fairy tale of narks and scrunts for his own children (I hate it when celebrities force their children’s stories on us), he has to do a lot of explaining. What and where is The Blue World, and who cares?

According to the New York Post’s Page Six, “Shyamalan was once Disney’s hottest property, churning out the 1999 smash, THE SIXTH SENSE, followed by UNBREAKABLE, SIGNS, and THE VILLAGE. But things soured last year when production president Nina Jacobson told him she and chairman Dick Cook didn’t “get” his script for LADY IN THE WATER, a SPLASH-like fantasy about a building super (Paul Giamatti) who rescues a sea nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard).

Jacobson also blasted a scene in which a movie critic is assaulted, ripped the director for giving himself a part, and criticized character names. “You said it was funny; I didn’t laugh. You’re going to let a critic get attacked? They’ll kill you for that . . . Your part’s too big, you’ll get killed again . . . What’s with the names?”
Once this story was prominently featured in ‘Entertainment Weekly,’ you just knew there would be a head rolling. The Los Angeles Times reports:

“Jacobson, 40, one of Hollywood’s most respected movie executives, was fired Monday morning by her boss, studio Chairman Dick Cook, when she called him from the hospital room where her partner was about to deliver their third child. Despite the record-breaking performance of Disney’s current release, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST, she was hearing rumors and wanted reassurance that her job was safe. It wasn’t.”

I side with Jacobson. She was right not to green-light LADY IN THE WATER for Disney, but she did not go far enough in criticizing the screenplay.

Credits:
Screenwriter-director: M. Night Shyamalan
Producers: Sam Mercer, M. Night Shyamalan
Director of photography: Christopher Doyle
Production designer: Martin Childs
Music: James Newton Howard
Creature designer: Crash McCreery
Costume designer: Betsy Heimann
Editor: Barbara Tulliver

Cast:
Cleveland Heep: Paul Giamatti
Story: Bryce Dallas Howard
Mr. Dury: Jeffrey Wright
Farber: Bob Balaban
Anna Ran: Sarita Choudhury
Young-Soon Choi: Cindy Cheung
Vick Ran: M. Night Shyamalan
Reggie: Freddy Rodriguez
Mr. Leeds: Bill Irwin
Mrs. Bell: Mary Beth Hurt
Joey: Noah Gray-Cabey

Running time — 127 minutes / MPAA rating — R

QUOTE: I didn’t like it, then I liked it.

Miles (Paul Giamatti) is miserable and he should be. He is hunched over, depressed, angry, vengeful, and an unattractive little man. He is a schoolteacher who cannot get his novel published. He is also a big wine snob resentful over his failed marriage. His best friend since college is Jack (Thomas Haden Church), an actor who does voice-overs for commercials. Jack has not been very lucky as an actor, though he has the astonishing good luck to land a well-bred, beautiful woman as a fiancée.

Instead of being gloriously happy and involved with his upcoming nuptials, Jack agrees to spend a week with miserable Miles driving through Southern California wine country. Jack wants to get laid; Miles wants to drink Pinot Noir.

These two men are over 40! Jack needs a wild last week of sexual adventure? Who is he going to find to have casual sex with him? Miles steals money from his mother to pay for his share of the wine, restaurants, and rooms. You love these guys already, right?

I don’t like them. I don’t care about them.

Miles takes Jack to all his wine haunts along the lovely Santa Ynez region. They meet Miles’ friend, lonely waitress Maya (Virginia Madsen) and wine salesperson Stephanie (Sandra Oh). Jack immediately connects with single-mom Stephanie but doesn’t bother telling her he is getting married in a week. He quickly starts romancing her and lifting her hopes for a future together. He’s using her but lets her think he will move to the valley and open up a winery with Miles. While they make love, Miles and Maya talk about their passion for wine. It’s a poetic metaphor for their current state of sexless lives. Miles needs to be nurtured like the Pinot grape; Maya sees the evolution of the grape to wine as the secret twists and turns of love.

How many of us can enjoy watching other people drink wine?

I’m now insisting on tipping my wine glass to note color density and musing to friends about how the Mediterranean Sea affects the grapes as they hang perilously on the vine, leaning over the branches nearly brushing the rich, dark earth. (While I never toured the Santa Ynez Valley, I did spend a week wine tasting in Bordeaux, France but I never brag about it.)

Jack suddenly decides he’s in love with Stephanie, even though he crudely keeps eyeing the sexiness of other women. Miles flips out when Jack mentions his ex-wife is coming to the wedding with her new husband. Jack lets us in on another reason to dislike Miles – he cheated on his wife.

Then the story takes a wild turn and redeems itself. It becomes funny in an unexpected way. Jack might be a fool, but he is honest about it. And Church, heretofore unrecognized as such a skillful actor, makes us like Jack. He is so disarmingly funny that you excuse his behavior – he’s just a self-involved actor. I would invite him to dinner for his company, but that’s about all. Miles is someone to avoid at all costs.

As the movie nears its end, Miles has one brief scene with his ex-wife. Giamatti – in this moment – gives a performance worthy of note. It’s this scene that demands attention and gives SIDEWAYS the kind of acclaim it deserves.

Director and co-writer (with Jim Taylor) Alexander Payne has a cruel, but observant eye. Payne knows how to expose a character’s weaknesses without totally alienating the audience. We understand his character’s flaws. He has shown this brilliance in ELECTION and ABOUT SCHMIDT. He has the ability to make very ordinary people interesting – in spite of themselves.

Credits:
Director: Alexander Payne
Writers: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor
Based on a novel by: Rex Pickett
Producer: Michael London
Director of photography: Phedon Papamichael
Production designer: Jane Ann Stewart
Costumes: Wendy Chuck
Music: Rolfe Kent
Editor: Kevin Tent

Cast:
Miles: Paul Giamatti
Jack: Thomas Haden Church
Maya: Virginia Madsen
Stephanie: Sandra Oh
Phyllis: Marylouise Burke