The Illusionist

Watching magic tricks’ secrets revealed is a grating experience. Watching a neatly plotted mystery based on inexplicable magic tricks revealed merely as well-crafted human doings is even more grating; to me it ruins the merit of magic itself. See, this is why I dislike The Illusionist: I may ignore its talky dialogues, but I can not accept the ending presented so efficiently and abruptly as if the past 100 minutes of wonders didn’t mean anything at all. Sure, it’s an investigative mystery, and usually a case like this requires logical thinking. But Eisenheim the Illusionist has been purely magical from the beginning, which left me no chance to wonder if his acts were really tricks or something supernatural; it had always been the latter, until the last scene robbed me of the assumption. How irritating.

Eisenheim the Illusionist (Edward Norton) is a masterful magic performer in 19th century Vienna. In his youth, he fell in love with Sophie (Jessica Biel), a girl of higher social ranking. The relationship was prevented by the Duchess’ family. Before long, the boy travels the world to learn magic and returns to Vienna to perform in front of Sophie and the Crown Prince (Rufus Sewell) who seems to take every magic trick as a challenge he can prove. Naturally, the prince doesn’t like Eisenheim, especially when he knows Eisenheim’s popularity is gaining audience and his would-be princess is running away with him. So he orders a half-corrupt Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) to do whatever it needs to shut Eisenheim down. Story goes continues from there, I wish it was more interesting.

To compare Neil Burger’s The Illusionist with Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, unquestionably my choice falls on The Prestige. The difference between the two is that while Nolan kept me at the edge of my seat wondering to no end how the tricks were made up, Burger kept me from nodding off by offering a murder case that must be solved. This is why I didn’t stop to think how the magic were done—there hasn’t been anything like it to relate it to magic anyway. Besides, Illusionist is less thrilling but more intense in its drama orientation because the underlying story is love.

2/5.

The Holiday

The Holiday is your typical chick flick: heartbroken women looking for a holiday escape, find love in a foreign place, the end. The formula is so simple that there is almost no story at all. A movie like this should have a brilliant cast to showcase its characters because they are the main attractions. The first time I heard of this movie, I thought of the unlikely idea of pairing Jude Law and Cameron Diaz together, and even more ridiculous, Jack Black and Kate Winslet. Did it work? Well, almost.

Amanda (Diaz) and Iris (Winslet), two women in two different continents, decide to swap houses via an internet site following disappointment with their love life. Amanda arrives at a humble, yet cozy little cottage in a small town of Surrey, while Iris stumbles into the luxury of Amanda’s Hollywood abode. Soon Amanda gets tangled up in a quandary of being loved by Iris’ big brother, Graham (Jude Law), who fathers two cute girls alone. While in L.A., romance doesn’t bloom as rosily as in U.K. at the beginning as Iris develops a relationship with Amanda’s neighbor, a 90-year-old screenwriter (Eli Wallach). Later in the movie, Iris meets her counterpart, Miles (Jack Black), a composer, who’s not so full of himself when concerning love.

The story progresses steadily if not interestingly, though the characters are not ones you can really relate to. I mean, what are the chance of bumping into someone as endearing as a good-looking, charming, responsible father like Graham nowadays, if you’re not really, really lucky? Amanda looks to me like one careless woman who admits she wants a man, but when she finds him, she doesn’t know what to do next. As with Iris, she’s like a mild version of Bridget Jones—weak in love, huge in heart. The only one whose performance sparks, I think, is Jack Black. Perhaps because I’m so used to seeing him as a crazy lunatic (never saw Shallow Hal) everywhere on screen, that his being a soft, funny in a natural way, and a fallible guy in this movie surprised me. I loved the scene where he took Iris to a movie rental and started a game of guessing movie scores.

Actually, the score to the movie itself was the main reason that compelled me to watch it in the first place. I listened to Hans Zimmer’s excellent score yesterday, and have been listening to it all day long since. I never heard such exquisite music for a romance/comedy genre from him since As Good As It Gets.

3/5.

The Next James Bond is… Tom Hanks

You know, there are too many blogs out there that present videos inside a post. I don’t normally do that, but for this one, I’ll make an exception, except that I have no idea how to embed an ifilm video here. Well, here is a Casino Royale mash-up trailer with Tom Hanks cast as the next 007.

I recognized scenes from Big, The Money Pit, Sleepless in Seattle, Road to Perdition, but where does the “Bond, James Bond” line originate from?

Looking for Kitty

If you love New York as much as I do, or rather, slightly obsessed without ever being there in person, there’s a chance you’re going to like Ed Burns‘ take at NYC life from the perspective of a New Yorker. He wrote, directed, and starred in this tale of searching for a missing person who is not really missing.

It starts with the arrival of Abe Fiannico (David Krumholtz), a Midwestern baseball coach, in Manhattan. There he makes contact with a mediocre private investigator, Jack Stanton (Ed Burns) to look for his wife who’s left home for six months. They both know whom the wife left for, so it seems trivial to focus the story on the investigation. Rather, the two build a connection based on a similarity in both lives: loneliness. Abe is optimistic that his wife will return to him, while Jack still can’t let go of the memory of his deceased wife.

Looking for Kitty is a story about moving on as much as it is about New York. As the two unlikely pair of detectives take on roles of spying and tailing on their clues, they hit on the streets of New York and provide us with rich visual of NYC life. It shows that Ed Burns does indeed love the city he was born in from his direction and script. A New Yorker himself, he casually explains how typical view of any part of NYC buildings look like in a way everyone talks about weather. In other occasion, he shows how normal it is to buy foods from a diner or restaurant and eat it outside while standing on sidewalk, as if doing an act of watching the world gone by but nobody would look at him funny. There is no shot of Central Park, but references of Times Square and Broadway and Empire State Building are there.

Though not offering a lot in both stories or acting, Looking for Kitty is, to me, a must-see solely because it prominently showcases NYC at its best: from the viewpoint of a New Yorker leading an average, normal NYC life. That’s enough for me.

3/5.

Pathfinder

Having watched Pathfinder before the movie is released in U.S. or previewed before critics, I must say I took it as a dare. I believe about 70% of critics’ general consensus over any particular movie, so when there’s no guidance left but a trailer and a synopsis, venturing into a movie theater to watch a flick like Pathfinder may or may not bring good results.

Set in around 800~ BC, 600 years before Christopher Columbus discovered America, the Vikings set foot in what is now New York City (according to the director), then a Native American village, and brutally massacred every Indian they met, pillaged their villages with intention to conquer the new land. Incidentally, they left behind a boy who would be taken into care by an Indian woman who found her in one of the Vikings’ wrecked ships. The blond boy grew up to become a clean-shaved brunette version of Icelandic Norseman (Karl Urban) who later was described to almost single-handedly save the Indians from Vikings invasion.

Needless to say, a story like this should get historical approval before being made into a movie, because commonly accepted knowledge prescribes that Columbus was the first European who discovered America. The Vikings are also depicted as no less than Barbarians here, so some people might want to get it straight before anyone is offended. Once again, according to the movie makers, they seemed to get the historical facts straight from Smithsonian Institute. As for the barbaric image, they want the Vikings to be seen from the point of view of Urban’s character. How insightful.

How do I begin with the awfulness of this movie? First of all, the story’s pretty familiar. Remember Tarzan? Karl Urban didn’t look like a Viking to me; he looked like he had a Gillette hidden somewhere in his stash of personal belongings to keep him primped to avoid other Indians giving him the cold shoulder. Ah, I forgot, people in this movie do not call each other’s names, though they call him Ghost. But Ghost is not a typical Indian name, no? Because I suppose it’d be quite weird to hear the English translation of genuine Indian name being passed around conversationally throughout the movie. It appears inapt to me that the Vikings speak their own language (Icelandic), while the Indians converse in perfect English (but chant in Indian). But anyway, perhaps it’d be much better if Marcus Nispel, the director, had stuck to the original idea of no dialogue, because by and large, the dialogues were cheesy. Then again, without dialogue, the magnificent scene of avalanche at the end might be possible to create. No voice, no loud sound to crack the ice foundation, no avalanche, get it? Speaking of avalanche, I wonder if skimpy technology budget has something to do with the effects. Not only was the scene involved utterly unoriginal, but it also reminded me of movies made in the 90s. Even Scrat’s chain of acorn effect in Ice Age 2 looked far more real than this. What else? Oh, did I mention how barbaric the Vikings were? There were plenty of blood-spurting instances to feast on. My problem with it is that to stereotype a certain line of historical figures is unwisely misleading, to say the least. Even if Vikings really were barbaric, should they at least get a part of their own in the story? It’s not as if the point of the whole movie, a quest to the answer of “who am I?”, asked by our hero was really that interesting to follow anyway. It’s shallow and pointless, just like the love story.

I actually have more to say, but I just lost interest.

A waste of time and excitement. 1/5.