Monday, January 24, 2011

The Prestige

The Prestige is a bad ass movie!

I've always been a fan of magic tricks. It keeps the wonder in my world! (It doesn't win chicks though.)

So the movie outlines the parts of a great magic trick, as follows:
The Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary, but it isn't.
The Turn. The ordinary does something extraordinary.
...now you're looking for the secret, but you won't find it, and so there's a third act.
The Prestige. The part with twists and turns... something shocking that you've never seen before.

If you pay close attention to the narrative of the movie, there is a feeble old Oriental magician that makes a giant fishbowl appear out of nowhere. The younger magicians in the movie try out ways to do the trick and realize the immense amount of physical strength to pull-off the trick and at some point they observe the Oriental leaving the theatre and he is still acting the part of a feeble old man. This realization is the turning point for one of the young magicians to take information that he alone knows, and turn the ordinary into a captivating sequence of chess moves against the other magicians. He has learned that the secret to not being copied and holding the invention of his own magic trick is in the trick of making his life a trick, cunning deceit thought out thoroughly to it's ends. This is not a trick. It is THE trick.

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