Thursday, July 02, 2009

The Illusionist

(Movie Reviews

"Zodiac", flawed thought it was, whetted my appetite for an intelligent mystery, suspense movie. So I remembered this one. 


I had promised to look up "The Illusionist" when it came out in Japan, and then sort of just forgot about it. 

Not all American films get a big release in Japan, and "The Illusionist" never hit my local video store. 

Now that I was in the mood to watch it, however, I decided just to watch an illegal version off the Internet. I'm not proud. 

(Someday, I'll write a post about how I think illegal pirating of material on the internet would almost completely disappear if people had more access to stuff legally. Because I totally would have paid the 150 yen to rent this movie if only that had been an option for me. But that's another subject for another post.) 

This movie is...well, it's nothing special, but it's pretty OK. 

The plot keeps you guessing right till the end. The pacing is a little bit too slow and the story gets a little bit too drawn out. (Really what we have here is a 30 minute story stretched out into a feature length movie). But although I got a little restless at times, on the whole the movie kept my attention.

Ed Norton is one of my favorite actors, and as always he does a bang-up job in this. Paul Giamatti isn't quite in the same league, but he always does a nice job. 

The ending I found slightly anti-climatic, and once the film was done I felt like it didn't make a great impression on me one way or the other. But it held my attention while I was watching it. Sometimes that's all you can ask from a film. 


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