The Illusionist

[Mikey B]

It's really well done and the twist was very well executed. I watched it on a flight back from Spain in between two germans and I was slightly drunk so the movie could be crap and I just thought it was good because of the alcohol. Need to see it again.

[socketlevel]

then you can both be wrong together. 

and The Prestige did not play for months.

agreed, i didn't like this movie (the illusionist) at all, funny how the response to the prestige was saying that it was predictable.  i couldn't agree more with any similar sentiment made toward the illusionist.  i was bored with it, from beginning to end.

and the commentary track is laughable as the director sucks his own dick over and over.

-sl-

[grand theft sparrow]

Yeah, between this and Crash, Bob Yari Productions seems to be making a name by cornering the market on films that, if you're not paying close attention, might be enjoyable but if you're actually thinking while you watch, you'll realize it's frustratingly half-assed.  But at least this one didn't half-ass the treatment of an important social issue.  The only praise-worthy elements in The Illusionist are the set design, cinematography, Giamatti and Philip Glass, and if you're comparing it to The Prestige, it loses on all points except maybe the score.

The illusions in The Prestige (except for the big one, of course) could be performed as you see them in public, under the circumstances in which they were performed in the film, and would still be impressive; the ingenuity made them so.  The use of CGI for the illusions in The Illusionist reminded me constantly that it was a movie and so there's no way they could possibly be impressive to a discriminating viewer.  But that's the least of the problems of the film.

As I felt with The Devil Wears Prada, writers are getting lazy by already assuming that, because we know that two people have a certain kind of relationship, they leave us to imagine everything we don't see of that relationship, presumably based on similar relationships we've seen in other films.  Just because we know that Norton and Biel were childhood sweethearts (and truly in love, I guess), we're supposed to accept that 15 years later, they're still pining for each other?  Nope.  Sorry.  I saw and felt nothing between their characters (as children or adults) to make me buy that.  In fact, there's no depth to any of the characters in the film.  How are we supposed to care about anyone's motives if we can't understand why they're doing what they're doing?

As good as Giamatti was in the film, he ultimately served little purpose except as a plot device, much like Emily Watson in The Proposition.  He was basically Chazz Palminteri in Usual Suspects, but with the misfortune of having to take part in the story as opposed to having it told to him.  And his reaction to the twist at the end was really bizarre, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that, apart from wanting to do his job well, we know nothing about him.  His relationship with Rufus Sewell (halfway between Billy Zane in Titanic and Prince Humperdinck in Princess Bride) isn't well-defined, nor is Sewell's character, who is little more than a brat.  We know Sewell promises Giamatti a big-time political position but beyond that, we don't know what his personal feelings are on anything that's going on.  He is only there to be the proxy by which Sewell fights with Norton.  The Bale/Jackman conflict was much more satisfying if for no other reason than it wasn't so passive-aggressive.

And anyone who's seen Ocean's 11 or 12 can figure out the ending, not to put too fine a point on it.  There's no room left for discussion at the end either.  Very little ambiguity, something that The Prestige (the ending of which didn't entirely satisfy me) was good enough to give us a fair amount of.

MAJOR MAJOR SPOILER: Norton and Biel are also irredeemable in a way, as Sewell wasn't really bad enough of a bad guy to warrant him dying.  Yes, he slapped Biel and presumably killed a woman, and intends to overthrow his own father to be emperor.  But he just wasn't so irretrievably evil that he deserved his death.  The fact that they set him up to appear guilty kind of makes me lose any kind of compassion for them.  Maybe their intent wasn't for him to die but it certainly was for him to take the fall for her faked death, and we're never given enough of a sense that he's anything more dangerous than a spoiled brat next in line for the throne.  For such an over the top demise, he needed to be an over the top villain and he just wasn't.  END SPOILER

Maybe I'm more critical of Illusionist because I liked what Nolan did with Prestige but that doesn't change the fact that it's just not that good.