Contradicting Popular Opinion:
An Enquiry Concerning Why Your Favorite Movie Sucks
Intro
We’re going to take a quick and dirty look at two very different films this week. As always there are a ton of spoilers.
Consider yourself warned.
The Illusionist
Vague accents and washed out colors reign supreme when Ed Norton stars as Eisenheim the illusionist who must outwit Detective Paul Giamatti in order to win the affections of aristocrat and childhood friend Jessica Biel from the Crown Prince, Rufus Sewell. To accomplish his goals, Norton and a host of others conspire to fake Biel’s death, set up the prince, and defraud the local police. After the frame job is successful enough to reach the King and ruin Sewell’s career as a sovereign, the prince commits suicide and all live happily ever after. Well, all except the prince, his family, and pretty much everybody save Biel and Norton.
Their little plot is troubling in a number of ways. First, it relies on nobody examining Biel’s “corpse” save Norton’s fake coroner. There is little to no mention of a funeral, which is odd. If a future princess/queen dies, I would think that a lot of interest would be generated. Plus, was their end suicide? Were Norton and Biel aiming for the prince to off himself? That just seems cruel to me. It should also be noted that we are never given a compelling reason to like Biel or Eisenheim. In my mind they are ultimately the villains of this piece, with our sole protagonist being the duped and semi-competent Paul Giamatti.
This whole scenario raises one troubling question to me: Why do Norton and Biel stick around after they fake her death? Wouldn’t it just be easier to skip town right away? They flee town eventually anyway. Why needlessly torture the prince until his only option is regi-suicide?
Of course, the most vexing part of the conspiracy is the fake ghosts created by Eisenheim. Sure, he is an illusionist, but the film takes place around 1900. That is to say, how did he have access to things like color film? (The police seem to have color film as well. As the kids say, WTF?) Most of his “illusions” seem to rely on computer generated special effects. It seems to me that if you can’t do the tricks practically with modern technology, what chance does a magician have to create the same effects 100 years ago.
If your answer is “virtually none” then you win a virtual cookie.
It is a noisome little problem. (The women in the film should be riding sidesaddle as well, but that is another thing altogether.)
I would like to note that The Illusionist is not a bad film. Things like these do make it a frustrating film.
Brick
Brick, on the other hand, is a bad film. Brick tells the story of Tommy from 3rd Rock, a rogue hall monitor who for some reason is still in highschool despite being well into his twenties. His ex-girlfriend disappears and/or dies or something, forcing him to sucker punch wiggers and greasers, all the while mumbling his way through a bad Humphrey Bogart impersonation. The world of Brick is littered with characters who go by short verb names like “Tug” and “Pin” and who speak in ridiculously mixed metaphors and expressions that were dated in the 1930s.
The obvious aspiration here is to be Film Noir with the big twist being that the characters are teens (or at the very least twentysomethings pretending to be teens). In theory, this is a noble ambition, but perhaps better suited towards a 3 minute improv bit. In practice, this film is excruciating. Just how jaded and world-weary can a 17 year old possibly be? The fast-paced, flatly-delivered, poorly written lines pile on top of each other and the scenes are randomly jumbled leaving the viewer with a disorienting sense of indifference. While the cinematography is often interesting, it lacks the expressionistic flair of a true (Black and White) noir.
It also does not help matters that Brick is scored with heavy reliance on cow bell.
I would say more about this film, but I was forced to throw the disc out of my DVD player when a character said some horrific line about a vampire bat and a bleeding horse. Goddamn.
